I stared at her, trying to work out what she was saying. She stroked the vertical line up her throat.

She said, “I was sure glad when I noticed that it was a deer’s head in my arms and not his. Ha!” She patted my arm. Her hand was warm as usual but now I felt her milkmaid strength.

I remembered her hauling away the heron. I wanted her to say, I never confuse animals and people anymore, or Dice taught me nonviolence, or You and I are very different, Harmony, and you don’t have to worry about killing a person instead of an animal, but instead she just said, “There’s no such thing as the definite self.”

CHAPTER 10

March was the month of mud. The ocean reached out a giant widespread hand, clutched our hillside all winter, and then, in springtime, released its grip, dragging our earth back to the ocean. The streams flooded and turned lowlands into swamps. I could hear the rivers rushing all night. The mud in the courtyard in front of the barn sucked my boots off. The mud in the woods by the stream knocked me over.

The earth looked like chocolate cake, black and spongy. With frozen-cold hands and tough gray gloves covered in heavy earth, we raised hoop houses for our seedlings. We hoisted translucent plastic sheets over half-circle hoops, then tucked an insulating blanket over our seedlings, knowing, without really feeling, that spring would come, and then summer. We walked the line of the electric fence and threw away the branches that grounded the current. Then we turned the line on so hot it sparked, and let the cows out.

I didn’t have to sit around wondering what I was feeling: everything hurt so much. I worked harder than I ever had, driving myself on, like Dice drove his Suffolk mares to plow the field—on and on all day. The horses became docile when they were tired, and I did, too; by dinner my mind was white with the pleasure of sitting still. I swore I would never again be told I was half-assing. My hands got hard. My shoulders and arms got bulkier. My skin got blotchy from the sun. By March I hadn’t seen my own face in a mirror for six months. So I squatted by a puddle, my face dark and waving against the light sky, to see how strange I looked. I looked like a mountain person. I was a mountain person.

But sometimes the whoosh of breath in the long house reminded me of the sound of the freeway by my mother’s house. In heavy post-labor sleep I’d find myself back home again, crawling over the kitchen floor’s sandy linoleum—my earliest memory. In the mintlike tingling of the springtime backwoods dawn, I’d think of my old popcorn ceiling, the drywall that couldn’t even hold a nail.