It was not all good. In the car, a Suburban they’d borrowed from Vinnie so that they could fit everyone at the same time, everyone was irritable. Helen drew on Sam’s leg with a purple pen, and Polly climbed into the way back to divide them. They bumped on, Maude and Jane still squabbling about the party, Maude pointing out markers: the lane where a beau had lived, the house that served as a sick ward during the flu epidemic. They passed the ranch on Ferry Creek where Papa and Dee had hidden a still with some friends, as a hobby and a way of using Dee’s grapes and plums and apples. Mostly, Maude said, people would make a run up to the Canadian border for whiskey; she showed them a ravine that had been a drop point.

As they neared the site, they could see Harry’s skinny frame. Ned was fifty yards downhill, holding a survey line, while Drake dug farther up the slope near the flagged road, the flags vibrating in forty-mile-an-hour gusts. This was what people meant when they said “high plains,” and Harry did seem to be starring in his own Sergio Leone movie.

“Well, this is lovely,” said Maude, who was one of the few people who could remember the ruins of the first poorhouse, lost to a lightning fire in 1916, and the life of the second, abandoned in the fifties and gone to arson in the early sixties. “I distinctly recall Mother dropping a drunk off here in 1926 or so. And food, surplus apples and potatoes and beef for the inmates. Some of the wardens were criminal.”

“Not very birdy,” said Merle.

“It’s about poor Harry and the tour, dear,” said Maude, as Sam pointed to a bird, at least trying. “Only a crow,” she said, the huge papery eyes turning to him. “You know they have funerals, don’t you?”

Sam shook his head. Papa told us, thought Polly, head swimming. But of course it wasn’t this “us.” She slapped herself on the top of her head and Jane stared at her. “Bug,” said Polly.

“You’d do well to be as smart as a crow,” said Maude to Sam.

They spilled out toward Harry’s field of stakes.

“I don’t believe her,” whispered Sam, struggling with Maude’s tripod, her binoculars, her five-liter purse. Helen carried the cane.

“It’s true,” said Polly. “Or at least I heard the same thing when I was your age, and I did see some crows standing in a circle around a dead magpie, once.”