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“Oh,” she said again. There was the glimmer of blond hair, pale skin.

“Come on,” Mama said, snatching my hand. “Let’s go.”

There was a feeling in her grip of something broken, or lost. I knew she thought Papa was out there, though you couldn’t see for sure. Mama swung Heidi onto her hip, and the flashlight zigzagged across the woods until she found the path. Dark columns of trunks took us in, the wind calm down low on the path but whistling high up in the branches like something trying to escape. Distant laughter echoed behind us as we hurried too quickly to ask questions, my breathing coming in gasps.

We all pretended to be asleep when Papa came home. His footsteps creaked across the floor into the addition.

“You took the flashlight,” he said to Mama. “We nearly got lost in the woods.”

“Well,” Mama began, but that was all she said. Her uncertain fears had no words.

I lay in my bunk staring into the humid night air of the farmhouse. When I closed my eyes, the darkness was broken by a beam of light catching bare skin. A leg, an arm, a breast. The pieces fell apart and came together and fell apart again to the lapping of the waves.

Cheap to buy and quick to set up or take down, tepees were especially popular with apprentices that summer. Chip lived in one at Keith and Jean’s, Greg had one up at his place, and a handsome visitor named David set his up in the back field while studying and working with the Nearings. Tall and dark-haired, David came from Arizona, where he’d lived in this tepee the winter before. I liked to visit David in his home made from buff marine canvas stretched over the pointed triangle of twelve thin poles crossed at the top. Wooden slats across the front held the canvas together, and a flap opened for a door, with wooden pegs to secure it. The space inside was roomy, about the size of a bedroom, and David set up a ring of stones in the center for a fire that puffed out through the hole in the top where the tepee logs met. At night the canvas was lit up by the fire inside, glowing in the darkness of the back field like a paper lantern.

While kind, David never became as friendly with me as Frank and the others. Mama later admitted that she thought him magnetic and found herself wishing he would take an interest in her. If Papa was no longer in love with her, as she feared, she might as well get her needs met, too. Everyone else, it seemed, was doing it. Scott Nearing himself, in his younger days, had often strayed. Soon Keith next door with Chip. This apprentice with that one. It was the 1970s, after all. But though adulterers were not stoned in our tribe, a memory of the ancient moral code lingered deep in the bones. Mama, while she may have found David attractive, was not the type to stray, even though she suspected Papa of flirtations.

By August, these distractions were lost in the frenzy of ripening vegetables. The farm stand was a hungry mouth to feed every day with an abundance of produce, and the three-hundred-some mason jars of vegetables and fruits had to be put away for our winter sustenance. We were consumed by picking. Beans, corn, raspberries, tomatoes. Picking the crawling yellow-black-striped beetles that appeared on unhappy potato leaves—much to Papa’s disgruntlement—and putting them in a metal can. Most of all picking, in my case, on Heidi to show it was not fair that she had gotten to go with Mama when she left.

“No-no-no!” Heidi said when I put a creepy beetle on her hair.

“Stop picking on Heidi,” Mama yelled as she carried a basket of tomatoes into the house. “Mama doesn’t like fighting.” When I followed Mama inside, I found her singing under her breath as she made farm lunch.

“Work your fingers to the bone, what do you get? Bony fingers—bloody fingers, more like it,” she mumbled. “Work your fingers to the bone, what do you get? Bloody fingers.”

“Why do you have bloody fingers?” I asked. Mama hunkered over the stove, sizzling onions in a pan as she talk-mumbled. She was so tired from the new baby,