One morning in early August, two months after the bull was dead, my grandfather maneuvered himself downstairs. Sarah and the older children were out in the fields; he sat in the parlor where Hope was playing with a piece of toweling. Hope was three years old, a pretty child with her mother’s red-blond hair.

‘Speak to me, Hope,’ he said.

She got to her feet, picked up the hem of her dress, spun around once, skirt billowing, and fell back down again.

He watched her a moment, then said, ‘Hasn’t Hope anything to say to me?’

She slapped at the toweling but said nothing.

There are times when you know something’s askew in a person, but nobody ever knows quite what to do about it. Jonathan made an abrupt move toward the little girl, to touch, to reassure. Such movements are ill-advised with broken ribs; his recoil was just as abrupt. She caught the abruptness – or so he thought – but not the concern behind it. She began to beat the towel into the floor with her fists. It occurred to him, as he battled the pain in his chest, that he hadn’t heard her voice among the others for some time, and there were still no words – no crying – not even grunts. Her frenzy increased: she tore at the piece of cloth with her teeth. He watched helplessly. When Sarah came in from the fields a few minutes later, Hope was flailing the towel against the edge of the table with such violence that the table rocked back and forth and her own small frame shuddered.

Sarah dropped to her knees beside the child. She spat on her hands and rubbed saliva on the child’s skin, much as a stable lad might rub liniment into the joints of a horse after a race. ‘She started crying one night,’ Sarah said while she stroked, ‘not long after you – it was just a couple of days after we killed the bull. She cried and cried. All night long. Perhaps you didn’t hear – no, how could you? You weren’t hearing much of anything.’

‘What does Burgess say? What can he say? Is this permanent?’

‘He doesn’t know. A fever maybe. Maybe some kind of infection. He doesn’t know.’

Jonathan dragged himself into the kitchen for lunch. Sarah had burned the potatoes just as Wify had so often burned them before her. There was no meat. Nobody spoke. Across the table Hope tore at her food just as she’d torn at the piece of toweling. She prodded potatoes into her mouth with her fingers, eyes scanning right to left and back again as though on the lookout for predators. The kitchen with its dirty stove and morning’s porridge still aboil was more or less the kitchen of the Stokes’ wooden house. Sarah hoisted herself up from her chair; she wasn’t as heavy as Wify but she was getting there.

Jonathan grappled his way to his feet and left the kitchen, his chair falling over in his wake.