“What happened, Pop?” Lew said.

“Caught it greasing the gears of that old combine.”

She could see Lew was scared. He knew they were one bad injury away from being unable to support themselves. Picking up a bucket, Lew went out to get water.

Annie couldn’t help staring at Mr. Tivot, whose bib overalls hung loose on his skinny body. She loved his face, his pale brown hair shaved close around the ears, but left so long on top it often fell into those crystal-blue eyes of his—strange vanity in a man who kept completely to himself. His mouth looked as if he had tasted something he wasn’t sure about but had to swallow anyway, and he often covered it, as if in shame, with one of his massive scarred hands. He fascinated her. Was he a fugitive, like everyone said? From what, no one knew, but it sure was duck soup for the town gossips. Mrs. Yost said he had most likely murdered his previous wives and did the same to Bella. But she was just mad at him because he was too proud to take the peach pie she brought around after his wife’s passing. Queer, though, that he wouldn’t leave this farm and get a job someplace. It was like he couldn’t imagine anything else.

“Annie,” he said, “you don’t want to be riding home in the dark.”

Lew came back in with a full bucket.

“Lew, where’s my bike?”

“Where you left it, I guess.”

She widened her eyes and he understood.

“I’ll show you.”

Outside, she pulled her bike off the ground, leaned it against what remained of a patched-together fence, and put her arms around his neck. “So we’ll get married,” she said. Lew nodded, but she could see his papa’s doubt and shame had started to infect him and he glanced away. She pushed her lips against his, but it wasn’t like it said in that book: no fire, no quenching. She felt like her soil had gone soft in the rains, even deeply rooted things liable to be torn out with just a breath of wind—sadness—and there was nothing she could do.

Lew woke in the middle of the night, his heart pounding. Shannon Kitchens was in his dream. Putting his hand between his legs, he pressed and rubbed. A strange feeling, like things were heavy down there and he wanted to go to the toilet. He had seen Shannon today, gathering pumpkins from the patch behind her house, when he was coming home from school. She had to be twenty-five, now, or thirty. Old, anyways. She could look real pretty like a fairy or something, with that long red hair of hers, in her green dress, and she would sing to herself all the time. Then she would grin at you, with half her teeth missing on one side and those heavy eyes, and she would look strange like an animal. Some said Otto had beaten her simple; or she had always been simple like Roh. Some said she had been like Otto’s wife, not his daughter, ever since Mrs. Kitchens left him and went back to her folks in Montana. She wasn’t his real kin anyway, but off the orphan train, like his own mom. And some said she had just never been the same after the rape. And the man that done it, the boogerman, gotten off by that smart city lawyer. And everyone knew what happened to her, with the sack tied around her head and all. And Seamus said last week she let him look at her parts and touch her, but he was a fat liar.