Our hands sweated together. The machine had finished. Silent now. Carlotta’s eyes were dull and she continued to cry.

“What about the dog and the goat?”

“What about them? That was nothing. It should have been Han Shan and Lichtenstein. But I didn’t have the guts. Even then.”

I slid my hand wetly from Carlotta’s. My legs were stiff. My back was cramped. I opened the machine and hauled out twisted clothes, piled them on my arm and moved carefully toward the dryer so they didn’t fall to the filthy floor. Dimes in the slot, slammed the door. Air blew, the drum turned, and the little pile of clothes tossed roughly behind the glass window.

“Did this cabin have a dirt floor?”

“Wood.”

Carlotta was hunched on the bench. Behind her on the wall there was a faded old mural. A big cartoon sombrero with the regulation legs and feet coming out from underneath. An imaginary cactus on a wavy blue horizon line. Maybe the owner’s wife painted it. Or his oldest daughter who would have liked to go to art school, but then she got married. One day twenty years ago, slapping paint on the new green plaster wall and laughing at the trademark of what was supposed to be the first in a long chain of Siesta Times.

“The sheriff’s wife. I should have killed her, too. She kept saying, ‘Let me put him out in the hall. Was it a boy?’ ‘Put him on the sofa. There’s no reason to hold him now.’ And then she kept pouring tea and eating this meat. She was fat. Flaps hanging. All these doilies on the arms of the chairs. She kept saying, ‘Drink your tea, dear. You must keep up your strength.’ And she said, ‘I know it’s always terrible when it’s your firstborn. We lost three of our seven, but the first boy was strong, thank God.’”

Carlotta snickered. It sounded dangerous somehow. The scratches on her cheeks twitched, then her face was expressionless again. Her eyes held mine, watching me. Triumphant Madonna sorrow. My hands were clammy and shook at my sides.

“What did you do with the shitty diapers? Did you have a diaper pail or something?”

She frowned. “I rinsed them in the stream. Why?”

“I don’t know. I’m just trying to figure out what it was all like. Did he dirty a lot of them?”

“Yellow. He shat yellow. Three or four times a day, but never much at a time.”

Her brows lifted, and for a moment she looked bewildered. She started to cry again. Some lost question in the angle of her eyebrows. When she spoke, her voice was low and broken, clogged with mucus.

“I loved his shit.”