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By Root 1008 0

complained that their husbands hardly talked to them. There are always lots of clubs in farm towns, where the wives are ostensibly doing good works, but the good works are afloat in a river of talk, and that’s the real point, I always thought. Ty told me everything, though, all about his days with my father and Pete, all about the livestock and the crops and what he saw in the fields and who he saw in town. Conversation came so easily to him that other people seemed somehow choked by comparison. And his conversation was hopeful and good-humored. Even when Pete and my father were threatening to kill one another, which happened about once every two years, Ty would say, “Oh, they talk big. But your dad’s got to have Pete irritating him so he can stay young. He knows that.” When I had my miscarriages, Ty always talked me through it, certain there’d be a way to carry the next one to term, certain that this one just wasn’t meant to be, certain that I would be all right, certain that he loved me anyway, no matter what.

I covered him with an old quilt, and he turned under it, nestling into the pillow, murmuring a half-waking thank-you. Ty thought we’d had three miscarriages. Everyone thought we had stopped trying. Actually, I had had five, the most recent one at Thanksgiving. After the third one, in the summer of ’76, Ty said he couldn’t bring himself to sleep with me unless we were using birth control. He didn’t tell me why, but I knew it was because he couldn’t take another miscarriage. For a year I dutifully resigned myself to not even trying, and then it occurred to me one night in the bathroom that all I had to do was pretend to put the diaphragm in, that pregnancy could become my private project. I imagined how I would carry it to term without a word, waiting to see when Ty or Rose began to stare at me, hesitating to ask if I was putting on too much weight. If I kept the secret, I thought, I could sustain the pregnancy. Except that when I did get pregnant I was so excited that I told Rose, and so when I lost the baby, one day when Ty and my father had gone to the State Fair for the weekend, I had to tell Rose, too. Then she made me promise not to try any more. She said I was getting obsessed and crazy. So I didn’t tell her about the next one and when I lost it the day after Thanksgiving, no one knew. I was lucky again—Ty had gotten up early to help Pete with some late bean harvesting—and I just wadded the nightgown and the sheets and the bed pad into a paper bag and took them out and buried them under the dirt floor of the old dairy barn, where the ground wasn’t frozen yet. I thought I would dig them up sometime and carry them to the dump, but I hadn’t yet. Digging them up would make me want to try again, and I wasn’t quite ready. I also wasn’t ready to give up. At thirty-six, I had five years left, maybe two or three more chances to come out of my bedroom one morning and say, “Here, Ty, here’s our baby.”

One of the many benefits of this private project, I thought at the time, was that it showed me a whole secret world, a way to have two lives, to be two selves. I felt larger and more various than I had in years, full of unknowns, and also of untapped possibilities. In fact, I was more hopeful after the two last miscarriages than I had been after the first.

Beyond Rose’s house, my father’s windows, too, were dark. I realized that I hadn’t thought to ask if I needed to go over and get his breakfast in the morning. That was something Rose and I generally agreed upon each night. When Caroline was staying, she liked to do it, but she had gone home with Rose after my father left the party. I opened the window and squinted through the screen. I was sure I could see his truck parked by the barn, Pete’s truck parked next to their porch, the roof of our truck, below, glinting in pearly peace. The summer sounds of bullfrogs and cicadas hadn’t begun yet, but a breeze was soughing through the pines north of the house, the hogs were clanking their feeders in the barn. It was the same calm and safe vista that was mine every night—the