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By Root 564 0

She pulled weeds out of the garden, she collected the eggs, at first with her grandmother and then by herself. She dried the dishes, she fed the dogs. But while her grandmother slept she didn’t even go outside, because she didn’t want to get too far away. She stayed in the kitchen. Sometimes she looked at the old newspapers. She would search for the weekend comic pages and study them: if you put your eye up close to the page, the faces dissolved into tiny coloured dots. Or she would sit at the kitchen table, drawing with the stub of a pencil on pieces of scrap paper. At first she tried to write letters to her mother. She knew how to print, she had learned at school. Dear Mother, How are you, Love, Karen. She would walk down to the mailbox beside the road and put the letter in, and lift the red metal flag. But no letters came in return.

So instead she would sit there drawing with the pencil stub; or else not drawing. Listening. Her grandmother snored, and mumbled in her sleep sometimes. There were flies buzzing, distant cows, chuckling of geese, a car going by, way down on the gravel road at the front of the property. Other sounds. The tap dripping into the sink, in the pantry. Footsteps in the front parlour, a creaking, what was it? The rocker in there, the hard sofa? She sat very still, chilled in the afternoon heat, with the small hairs on her arms lifting, waiting to see if the footsteps would come closer.

On Sundays her grandmother would put on a dress, but she didn’t go to church – not like Aunt Vi, who went twice a day on Sundays. Instead she would take the huge family Bible out of the front parlour and stand it up on the kitchen table. She would close her eyes and poke between the pages with a pin, and then open to the page that the pin had chosen. “Now you,” she would say to Karen, and Karen would take the pin and close her own eyes, and let her hand hover over the page until she felt it pulled down. Then her grandmother would read the part where the pin had stuck in.

“ ‘If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise,’ ” she read. “ ‘For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.’ Well now, I know who that must mean.” And she would nod her head.

Sometimes though she would be puzzled. “ ‘The dogs shall eat Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel,’ ” she read. “Now I don’t know at all who that could be. Must be too far ahead.” She only read one verse a Sunday. After that she would close up the Bible and put it back in the front parlour, and change into her overalls and go outside to do the chores.

Karen kneels in the garden. She’s picking beans into a six-quart basket, yellow beans. She picks slowly, one bean at a time. Her grandmother can pick with both hands at once, not even looking, the same way she knits, but Karen has to look, to find the bean first and then pick it. The sun is white-hot; she’s wearing her shorts and a sleeveless blouse, and the straw sunhat her grandmother makes her wear so she won’t get sunstroke. Crouched down like that she’s almost hidden, because the bean plants are so big. The sunflowers watch her with their huge brown eyes, their yellow petals like spikes of dry fire.

The air shimmers like cellophane, a clear sheet of it shaken over the flat fields; it crackles with grasshopper static. Good haying weather. From two fields over comes the drone of Ron Sloane’s tractor, the clack and thump of the baler. Then it stops. Karen reaches the end of the bean row. She pulls a carrot up for herself, wipes off the dirt with her fingers, then rubs the carrot on her leg, then bites into it. She knows she’s supposed to wash it first but she likes the earth taste.

There’s a motor noise. A dark green pickup truck is coming up the drive. It comes fast, skewing from side to side on the gravel. Karen knows the truck: it’s Ron Sloane’s truck.

Why isn’t he in the field, why is he coming here? Mostly nobody visits. Her grandmother has no opinion of the neighbours. She says they think stupid things and they gossip, and they stare at her when they pass