“Can’t.” He shook his head. “Too much…noise. Don’t teach you nothing.”

“What do you mean?”

He seemed pained. Looking back over the field, he raised his hand a couple of times toward his neck but managed to control himself.

He spoke falteringly, without looking at her. “Doing what I done…to Wah’Kon-Tah’s son I have to hide. Crow is in the tree I am. Makes the tree an eye by being a speck in the eye. And as long as Crow don’t know he makes me the eye of Wah’Kon-Tah, who’s trying to find me, I’m safe. Safe from being forgiven. If he forgives me I don’t know any of this. He can’t see me, because Crow is in my branches. Crow makes me the eye that looks for me. I have to—”

Annie reached up to his face. He flinched, but she drew him close and kissed him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I’ve got to do my interview. I’ll meet you out by Tanner’s farrowing shed tomorrow at seven.” Annie walked quickly away. She felt as if something had struck her chest, that blow spreading insidiously inside her, like a blood drop in a glass of water.

Lew called her name softly, so softly she might have pretended she hadn’t heard him, which she wanted to do but couldn’t, so she turned around.

“I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s hard not to tell you. It’s hard to know so much and not say anything.”

She nodded and watched him return across the field to the Deere, walking in that way that was like a chant or ritual or mime of motion. “Lew,” she whispered, too softly for him to hear. “Lew, Lew, Lew,” over and over, until it was like the last snubs of sobbing, when the child has long since forgotten the source of her tears.

Ruth and Raj were listening to Ricky Harris’s laugh-in. Annie joined them, in that strange atmosphere of being absorbed in listening and imagining, made stranger because she couldn’t stop thinking about Lew, how close she had just been to the edge of his aloneness, which had filled her with vertigo. She tried to laugh with them but felt like a baby with a heavy loose head, making random expressions. In what kind of world do you go from the worst secret you could imagine—madness—to this puppet laughter?

When the show was over, Ruth went into the kitchen.

“I’m going to see Casablanca tonight with Evy,” Annie said to Raj. “Do you want to come?”

“Can’t tonight. Going over to Nora’s. Got our presentation tomorrow.”

“I never see you anymore.”

“Saw you yesterday.”

“Since then, I mean.”

“Well, that’s true.” He checked his watch. “In fact we’re thirty-five minutes from our twenty-four-hour reunion.”