SHENINJEE took care that both his feet were flat on the ground and that his weight was evenly distributed. In the time that this took he was able to compose himself, so that he said steadily, “The child came early. As you know. And,” he said, “I think that the custom in this case offends against the Great Spirit.” Then he bent to touch his wife.

She was asleep and listening to her dead child: “Now am I justified, now am I released. I will never have to suffer the scourge of your stained earth. Mother, I will see you one day. Rend your heart, wipe your eyes, put off grieving, and keep this simple resolve: that my father should never enter your body again.”

I was thin with fever and always chilled, and Sheninjee kept me warm with his body in the cool of the night. He mashed my food and repeatedly gave me to drink. He studied me as he might have studied a book were he able to read. He made me ill at ease, as if he feared that I might die before my time.

And later, when I could walk again, we moved through the village, and when we sat in the sun to rest, a thin dog licked salt from my ankles.

When we sat to fish, I watched my husband cut into the speckled trout he had separated from the creek; with one quick turn of the wrist he could slit the fish and free and lift out the blood-black line which lay along the fish-spine.

Who would wish for some other world?

Then I laughed at the thought that I, of all women, had just had. I laughed so loud and so heartily that my husband jumped back a little from me just as he would jump back if one of his trout opened its mouth, spit out a coin, and began to speak to him.

HER STRENGTH had clearly returned by the time the corn began to ripen, and one day when they were out walking her husband turned from studying the horizon to find that his wife had disappeared into the cornfield.

“Two? Where are you?”

But there was no answer.

“Mary!” He called her Mary when he was worried.

From a little distance, he heard her: “Sheninjee?”

“What are you doing?”

“Come and see.”

He found her in the thickest part of the cornfield: she had taken off her outer garments and placed them on the ground. Now she wore only her loose brown undergarment. She held her arms up toward the warmth of the sun; she was stretching. And then she lowered her arms slightly, turned, and held them out to him.

When he stepped over to her, she held up her index finger and placed it on the bridge of his nose. She drew a light line downward until she reached his lips. There her finger rested as if to hush him. Sheninjee breathed, finally, and his lips parted. Then she lowered her finger and brought her own lips close to his. He raised his eyebrows.