He ignored her when she told him to keep Frieda away from that crow, she remembers, hastily stepping back from the visible edge of the churchyard, turning and squelching through the green mire toward the church. She trudges through a mist, her breath and the damp heat of her body steaming a trail behind her. Squatting in the nascent, crumbled-earth garden, holding Frieda still and quiet between his knees, Ted coaxed the crow over; Sylvia watched him, puffing in two layers of jackets over the tennis court, mowing the new lawn in the tensing weather yesterday, the skin of her knuckles cracking in the cold. A morning between rains, and three acres of grass to her knees. She should have stayed at her desk! Her latest batch of pink paper from Smith had just arrived, wheedled from a former colleague with an office next door to the English Department’s supply closet. But the monotonous weather had become unbearable to her, the black downpours relentless since November, the frigid east wind blowing straight through the heatless house; she couldn’t help herself. To spite her, the momentarily clear sky was loading itself with leaden clouds—predictably—the wind whipping up like a spell. Ted was coaxing the crow, a fledgling baby, sleek feathered, glistening blue-black, hopping on horny twig legs over the red dirt, hesitant. Ted hunched, whispering, encouraging Frieda. “Don’t do it; it might bite,” Sylvia called across the yard, low and again, not so loud as to scare the crow away, a perverse desire to see herself proven right. The crow hopped forward, puzzling, the tips of its wings tucked back over its blunt tail, formal in its cutaway. Frieda’s small, creamy hand was held out flat, leftover toast on her palm, Ted supporting her elbow and nodding. The crow stabbed its sickled beak, snapping, and Frieda shrieked.

Sylvia passes the yew tree, its black branches held vertically in surrender, raindrops sheering off as the tree sways in the wind. Her father had held her steady, her eye at the door of the hive. She breathed in the sweet honeyed musk of beeswax. He brooked no mistakes, no opposition; he was an authority. He handed down judgment in red pencil by lamplight each evening, rigid in his leather chair, correcting papers, threatening distress at the lectern next day in his sharp, Germanic baritone. Was this a man, then? Inviting chance, or refusing insurrection? He studied bees because he was poor and had a sweet tooth, he announced. It was no whim. His every action showed strategic ambition. Refusing a bird for the pure serendipity, the curiosity, of a bird? There was only a small, neat drop of blood. Frieda was happy with the novelty of the bandage. Her initial whimpering and panic at the sight of her own blood had transfigured into a grave, third-person recitation about the crow, as if it had happened only remotely to her.