After a little while longer at the branch, Annie led them through the woods to Mrs. Barnacle’s house. Annie had money to give her. For years she had been part of a masquerade set up by Mr. Burger. Annie would pretend she was bringing Mrs. Barnacle payment for the sale of her knitted goods and eggs in her papa’s store; in fact, the money was the rent the old lady had just paid Mr. B, as well as some extra put in from the church collection. Everyone knew she couldn’t bear to be a charity case.

Mrs. Barnacle fascinated Annie. She had been on the wagon trains all the way from east to west as a girl. Her family had settled in Washington State until they had been ruined by a cattle-killing winter, from which she remembered only that they had to suckle her baby brother on a rag soaked in cow’s blood. The man she married moved her halfway back across the country, settling her in the house she lived in now. She had a number of miscarriages, and the two children she did birth died in infancy. Her husband was always away, looking for places to homestead, he said, or gold mining. His absences stretched into years, though he would write letters. She got a job as the first female mail carrier in the state. Finally his letters stopped. She heard nothing more from him for thirty years until a young man, his image, appeared at her door. Refusing to come in, he handed her three hundred dollars, said only that he was deeply ashamed, and hoped she would find it in her heart to forgive his father. As he rode off, something struck her about the way he had said this. She rode after him and demanded, “How many?” He held out five fingers of his right hand, and one of his left. Annie would imagine Mrs. Barnacle, thrashing that old roan pony she had used for the mail until she caught up with him, but thought more about that young man and his decision not to send the money anonymously, but to travel the whole country, meeting face-to-face with each of the six abandoned wives and families listed in his father’s will. A number of times Annie had tried to get old Mrs. Barnacle, born in the last century, to talk about her life, but she seemed to remember nothing. Just a few details here and there: eating a rattlesnake once, seeing General Custer, the strong smell of the bodies of the natives, and a man hanged. It seemed amazing to Annie that Mrs. Barnacle’s whole life—a century of change, wars and plagues, the death of her own children, abandonment and betrayal—had shrunk to nothing, to concerns about her chickens and catching good yeast for her bread. Annie hadn’t lost hope, though. She just needed the right question, one that would hit a rich and pressured seam.

They all followed Annie into the yard and up to the front door of the little cabin, wary of the fierce red rooster. They wanted to see Mrs. Barnacle’s new puppy hound, which Goldwin the barber had brought around for her a few days ago, after the death of her old dog, Betty. The hungry chickens surrounded them immediately. Annie knocked, but there was no reply. The rooster began to get threateningly close. Cracking the door, she called for Mrs. Barnacle.