“Mr. Travers?” Casting a discreet glance at Raj, he shook Haig’s hand and then pulled a small towel from under his hat and wiped his neck. “Sigmund Judd, county sheriff. There’s been an accident. Ruth’s at the—uh—with your…. Difficult time. I’ll take you down there.”

“Down where?” Haig said. “Is it Oliver?”

The sheriff nodded. “Took him down to Jackson.”

Haig and Raj got into the cruiser and were dropped off a half hour later outside a hospital. The sheriff said he didn’t know any details and seemed anxious to leave. He told them to tell the receptionist that Ruth and “the other fella” were downstairs.

Haig gave his brother’s name to the receptionist.

“I just love your accent,” she said. “My friend Nedra told me you call a hood a bonnet and a trunk is a boot and a sweater is a jumper. Is that right?”

“Yes. Oliver Travers, please,” Haig repeated anxiously.

“Can’t see his name listed.”

He went to speak, but she lifted her finger as the phone rang. It rang again as soon as she put it down; she seemed to know everyone personally, melting into singsong conversations about their near and distant relatives, and whether they had heard about that case of swine fever in Cooke County, and how the flooding had already begun upriver and they were saying this year was going to be worse than ’43. Finally Haig interrupted, telling her that the sheriff had told him his brother was downstairs. She replaced the phone.

“Downstairs?” She looked confused. “That’s the morgue.”

“He’s not dead,” Haig said. “The policeman would have told me if he were dead.”

“Oh, lordy. Well, that’s all that’s down there, honey.”

She checked another list and then placed her hand very gently and protectively over the front of her neck. “Heavens,” she said. “Oh, heavens, I am sorry.”

Haig and Raj took the stairs. They pushed through some heavy swing doors into what looked like a railway station waiting room. A woman was sitting on a long wooden bench filling out a form; she looked up at them, and then stood. She had a dab of flour on her cheek and was wearing a red-and-white checked apron over her teal tea-party dress. She was slender, in her early forties, and her long hair, which was the color of tarnished brass, had been hastily bundled back and secured with two knitting needles. Her face was attractive, finely cut, but austere and distrustful, even her sympathy defended, as if she feared it might be taken advantage of. She shook their hands and told Haig carefully and bravely that his brother had killed himself by drinking an insecticide called Paris Green and was in the next room if he wished to see him.

Some hours later this woman drove them back to the farm, past Dutch gabled barns, foot-high corn, and fields of wheat still green against the brown soil, her lovingly preserved Model A shaking their bones over the rough roads. She showed Haig to the spare bedroom. Raj was to sleep on the couch in the living room beside the stove. She told them to help themselves to food and went out to see to the cow, whose moans now sounded unbearable.