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By Root 981 0

and a cardboard carton to set it upon, a hot-water kettle, a box of teabags in the refrigerator, two bath towels from a J. C. Penney white sale, a box of bath-oil beads. Pajamas. My uniforms from work gave every workday a sameness that felt like perpetuity. When I wasn’t working I stayed in my sofa bed or my bathtub, reading books from the library, one author at a time, every book in the collection. I preferred them to have been productive, but now to be dead, like Daphne du Maurier or Charles Dickens, so that their books formed a kind of afterlife for them and seemed as distant and self-contained, for me, as Heaven or Hell. News was what I didn’t want. I didn’t own a television or a radio. It didn’t occur to me to buy a newspaper.

It took me until Christmas to address a note to Rose revealing where I was. When I got her note in return, the sight of her handwriting was so surprising that I didn’t recognize it at first. I had expected, even more than I consciously realized, that she would have eaten the sausages and died. But she didn’t mention the sausages. She wrote that five days after the trial, Daddy, who wouldn’t let Caroline out of his sight although he still seemed to feel that she had been killed, went along to Dahl’s, in Des Moines, for the week’s shopping. He was pushing the cart; she was guiding it down the aisles. He had a heart attack in the cereal aisle. I imagined him falling into the boxes of cornflakes. The funeral had been a small one. Rose had not gone.

Rose and Ty had decided to split the farm down the road, the eastern section going to Rose (she and the girls had moved into the big house after Thanksgiving) and the western section going to Ty. She and Jess planned to farm the whole section organically, with green manures and oats and South American cover crops interplanted with the corn.

I sent the girls each a Christmas present, a polka-dot beach towel for Pammy and a stuffed cat for Linda. I didn’t write back to Rose, because there was nothing to tell. Everything between us, more, it turned out, than we could stand, was known. Rose, Daddy, Ty, Jess, Caroline, Pete, Pammy, and Linda, so thoroughly and continuously in me, were too present for letters or phone calls.

In February she wrote again, only a note to say that Jess had gone back to the West Coast, and she had rented most of her land back to Ty until she understood more about organic farming. She wrote, “The girls and I have decided to stay vegetarians, though. And there are some papers coming for you to sign. P.S. I can’t say I’m surprised about Jess.”

They came, and I signed them. Ty now had three hundred eighty acres, all his own, and Rose, six hundred forty. I had a garden apartment, two bedrooms up and a living room and kitchen down, with a little deck overlooking the highway in the back and a little concrete stoop and my parking place out front. The rent was $235 a month plus electricity, but the heat was included. Behind a fence at the other end of the building was a small, kidney-shaped swimming pool, about twenty-five feet by twelve feet, nowhere deeper than four feet.

That Jess had left her didn’t seem to make a difference in my vengeful wishes. If anything, the friendly, informative tone of her notes made them burn a little hotter. Didn’t she realize how far I was from her? Now, as always, wasn’t she relying on some changeless loyalty in me, ignoring my angers and complaints as if they were meaningless in comparison with her plans?

The day I received this news, the transmission went out on my car, so I traded it for an eight-year-old Toyota with eighty thousand miles on the odometer. I liked the way it looked in front of my apartment, unassuming and anonymous.

Otherwise, my life passed in a blur, that blessing of urban routine. The sense of distinct events that is so inescapable on a farm, where every rainstorm is thick with odor and color, and usefulness and timing, where omens of prosperity or ruin to come are sought in every change, where any of the world’s details may contain the one thing that above all else you will regret