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I moved, always moving, forcing my hands and feet to their accustomed tasks. There is an old saying most people probably know: Live as if you’re going to die tomorrow and farm as if you’re going to live forever. I guess through the good and the bad times I tried to follow that saying. Take deep breaths, savor the moment, appreciate what you have. Build up the soil, mend your fences, put your money into good breeding stock. I spent my time during those weeks mulching potatoes and the garden, pulling thistles, and clearing a field of its stones. In one flowering thistle there are twenty thousand seeds. With my leather gloves on my hands and a heavy shirt on my back I walked the farm, pulling up the thorny plants by their roots, tossing them into piles, and putting the flowers in my bag. At night I burned the blossoms. All across the farm there were the piles I’d made of uprooted thistle plants. They turned white in the sun. The weeds were enemies and even in death they did not look completely vanquished. I must have pulled thousands of thistles in those weeks. I must have picked up thousands of stones. I had already lost the spring wheat, and the stunted corn was nearly dead. It was reasonable to clear the lowest field on the farm. There might be some moisture left in the subsoil, and if it did rain the field might hold the water. It might be a good place to try for some winter wheat. I could think of enough reasons to spend the day clearing the field. The truth is I didn’t know what else to do except pull thistles or walk along the furrows I’d made, picking up stones.

There is never an end to stones in a field. You can clear the five acres one summer and come spring there will be a new crop. With each freeze and thaw stones are pushed up through to the light of day, as if they have the sense of a seed. And if a field is plowed, there the stones are, sitting like old potatoes, brought to the surface by one’s own hand. So I walked and stooped and carried stones, some the size of my fist, others the size of a melon, to piles I’d made, or I’d heap them on the hay wagon. I wore nothing but my drawers underneath a pair of filthy denim coveralls. I’m sure I smelled. There was plenty to worry about and I sometimes had to stop to organize the fears. There didn’t seem much point in trying to understand why such a thing had happened to Alice. I tried not to think about the reason. I attempted, as I moved, not to worry about the girls. I couldn’t consider their looming appointment without feeling as if my chest was going to cave in. In retrospect I’m not sure I had one clear thought as I worked. It was hot and I kept going. I also wondered how I was going to feed the cows for the winter. The girls were safe up with Theresa, that was the thing to remember. I carried stones trying to keep my focus. Think, I told myself, about how to set Alice free. Think how to hold the family together, to keep it from scattering like the thistle seeds I was keeping in my sack, tight in the blossom. There were afternoons when setting the jail on fire seemed an adequate solution. Think how to keep the girls protected from the system that would pull them in, hold them, change them. Once I set myself the assignment, I pictured a faceless child welfare worker and Susan Dirks and Rafferty, all of them floating down the river toward a steep drop off. They looked around in discomfiture when they found themselves going over the falls, toward the sharp rocks. Susan, Paul, are you comfy? Alice came unbidden behind them, flailing and screeching as she fell.

While I walked I also did my level best not to think about Robbie. I tried to imagine the doll stripped of its power. There had to be something a person could do to change the doll so that it wouldn’t cause Robbie to look so injured. I had been brought up to think step by step, from A to B and so on. My father believed that outside of the IRS the world was a logical place. For three days I made a stone wall along the slope of the driveway.