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By Root 1017 0

furious. Said my father had engineered it all, to get a whole farm for the taxes and something over, a fee, you might call it, for the disposal of the encumbering family. It was a transaction my father never spoke of, knowledge that came to me through gossip thirty years later. When I used to sift through it, I didn’t see how it especially redounded to my father’s or grandfather’s discredit. A land deal was a land deal, and few were neighborly. But I now wonder if there was an element of shame to Daddy’s refusal ever to speak of it. I wonder if it had really landed in his lap, or if there were moments of planning, of manipulation and using a man’s incompetence and poverty against him that soured the whole transaction. On the other hand, one of my father’s favorite remarks about things in general was, “Less said about that, the better.”

The death of my mother coincided with the departure of the Ericson family, and our purchase of that farm. In fact, I remember that after my mother’s funeral, after the service and the burial and the buffet that Mary Livingstone and Elizabeth Ericson served at our house for the mourners, I followed Mrs. Ericson across the road, carrying some empty serving dishes, and after I put them beside the sink, I walked into the living room. The parrot cage was covered, and the dogs were outside. The rest of the family was still at my house, and the Ericson house, the house I later came to call my own, was the one that was still as death. I pushed aside some books and newspapers, and sat on the sofa. The parrot wasn’t entirely silent beneath his covering. I could hear him scrape the perch with his talons and mutter to himself. A cat walked through the room and marked two chairs by rubbing his arched back against them. I liked the silence and the sense of companionship I felt from the animals, and I experienced, for the first conscious time, the peaceful self-regard of early grief, when the fact that you are still alive and functioning is so strangely similar to your previous life that you think you are okay. It is in that state of mind that people answer when you see them at funerals, and ask how they are doing. They say, “I’m fine. I’m okay, really,” and they really mean, I’m not unrecognizable to myself. Anyway. In the midst of this familiar silence and comfort, Mrs. Ericson came into the room, surveyed me from the doorway, then sat down beside me. She was wearing an apron with a red and white checked dish towel sewn to it, and she wiped her hands on the towel as she sat down. She was not one to mince words, and she said, “Ginny, sweetheart, I have some more bad news for you. Cal and I have sold the farm to your father, and we’re moving back to Chicago. We just can’t make it here. We don’t know enough about farming.”

I looked at her looking at me, and in retrospect, I think that I did feel everything gentle and fun and happy draining away around me. I think that though I was only fourteen and not accustomed to judging my life or my father, or demanding more of our world than it offered of itself, I knew exactly what was to come, how unrelenting it would be, the working round of the seasons, the isolation, the responsibility for Caroline, who was only six. I didn’t cry then. I had been crying all morning and I was at the end of tears. I said, “I wish you would take me with you,” and Mrs. Ericson said, “I wish we could,” and then she cried, and then some people came in the back door with more plates, and she got up from the couch. I said, “Can you uncover the parrot’s cage?” She nodded. When she left the room, I sat staring at the green back of the parrot and his preternaturally limber neck. His head worked up and down and swiveled around like an oiled machine, then, finally, carefully, using his beak, he rotated on his perch and cocked his head to eyeball me. I said, “Hi, Magellan.” He said, “Sit up! Reach for it!” And I laughed.

Three weeks later, the Ericsons were gone, and my father carefully boarded the farmhouse against the wind and dust. Five years later, when he took off the boards and Ty and