“I’m trapped on an idiot farm,” he said, speaking to the barn’s dark interior.

  during those early days on the farm the dogs took on a certain savage mission of their own. In sometimes hourly sorties through the yard and surrounding fields, they rousted, fought, killed, or drove away any animal too slow to evade them or too stubborn to leave on its own.

  Each dog had a style. Vi, the experienced runaway, approached hunting as a vocation—work to be done with minimum effort and maximum precision. Twice John had watched her snatch a squirrel, born and raised in a dogless world, straight off the trunk of the little maple tree and deliver a kill-shake without breaking stride. Needles, a born assassin, gleeful and tireless, considered hunting pure sport. Gus adopted a philosophical middle ground: unless an animal ran directly in front of him he preferred contemplating wildlife to hunting it.

  In the mornings, as soon as So Jack threw open the barn doors, all three dogs would dash inside to investigate the dark crannies of the tangled salvage pile in the barn’s dim center. On their fourth morning a pitched battle took place so loud and pandemoniac that So Jack trotted Granddaddy out of the barn and hitched him to the maple tree. After a quarter hour of scuffling and yelping, Needles emerged carrying a rat the size of a rabbit. He lay the corpse at John’s feet. Gus delivered a second. Vi trotted out with a garter snake hanging slackly in her jaws. (This last was too bad, So Jack remarked, since the snake was on their side in the general war.)

  Needles made a special project of the house mice. At night, after John and Mary extinguished the bedroom lamp and the other dogs had bedded down, Needles’s toenails clicked on the stairs, and John and Mary lay listening to the drama-by-footsteps playing out overhead: hunt, pursuit, capture.

  Thus, before the first week was out, the wild world’s vanguard had largely been evicted from every interior except the barn’s mow, where birds, mice, squirrels, rats, and possibly larger fauna, ignorant of the new government, still lived full and rewarding lives. Scamperings and squeakings were audible through the night—this Frank told John during one of their nightly talks, during which Frank, keeping to the bargain they’d made at Devil’s Lake, detailed to John and John alone all the newly evident reasons why their undertaking was, or would soon become, a fiasco.

  On Friday morning John and Mary went up into the mow to have a look. This involved climbing a slat ladder built into the barn’s east wall, wrestling open a small but remarkably heavy hatch door, climbing through, and stepping off to the side. It wasn’t John’s first time up that ladder: hanging from a nail just to the right of the hatch was a burlap sack containing Frank’s prosthetic leg. At the sight of it, John wondered, briefly, if Frank had moved his bed out to the barn (where he lay sleeping; they’d passed him on their way to the ladder) in order to be closer to his leg.

  He watched Mary take in the vast interior of the mow, empty except for a few piles of old hay lying near the back. Tiny labyrinthine rodent trails ran through the loose chaff.

  “So Jack says we need a barn cat,” John said.

  Mary made a face. “One cat turns into twenty cats.” She looked around. “Can we get the dogs up here? They’d have some happy hunting.” But carrying a dog up the ladder and through the little hatch was out of the question. They walked to the front of the mow and swung open the broad loading doors and looked out from a height of a dozen feet. Past the overgrown garden plot a wall of trees moved with papery shivers in the breeze. A small cloud was passing over the sun. They watched its shadow-edge draw the sunlight like a bright sheet up the lower field and across the yard, where So Jack and Elbow had So Jack’s wagon propped up in order to pull off one of the rear wheels. Granddaddy stood hitched to the maple sapling, dipping his enormous head to the hay So Jack had scythed for him in the south field. Gus and Needles lay watching the horse from the far edge of the maple’s shade; Vi, still wary of Granddaddy, had retreated to a spot nearer the pump stand.

  “I suppose Elbow could build a ramp,” John said. “But that’s a lot of work.”

  “And a lot of timber. What’s that?” Mary said. She was pointing at an iron track that ran the length of the barn’s ridge beam and out to the end of the triangular peak projecting over the barn’s entrance. A trolley device, like a little iron sloth, hung from the track, and from the trolley hung a triple-sheave pulley block. John looked around. The corresponding traveling block dangled from a peg beside another slat rung ladder, this one going up the barn’s front wall to a shallow platform over the loading doors. From there, a third ladder paralleled a tall slit door that opened the barn’s front wall from the ridge beam down to the loading doors.

  John smiled. “That,” he said, “is a dog hoist.”

  Two hours later the slit door had been opened, rope threaded through the block and tackle, the trolley rolled to the end of the iron track, and the traveling block lowered to the ground. A second rope, attached to the trolley itself, hung down to the mow floor. John had tested the block and tackle by repeatedly lifting a bucket of rocks, the act pleasingly reminiscent of the counterweights he’d used for handstand training in Hartford. Mary stood in front of the barn doors, a garment made from mattress ticking draped over her arm.

  “Who takes the maiden voyage?” she called up.

  “I vote Gus.”

  At Mary’s call, Gus came trotting over. She knelt and unfolded the garment, which was in fact a sling, and passed Gus’s head through a slit in the forward flap, wrapped two side flaps up from below his belly, then worked the hook on the traveling block through a set of triple-reinforced slits that lined up where the flaps came together.

  “Okay,” Mary called. “Lift him a little.”

  John looped the rope around his forearm to make sure it was secure, then hauled back. The rope rolled smoothly through the block and tackle. Gus levitated twelve inches. He paddled in the air briefly, then relaxed and let his legs dangle. Mary rotated him, checking the sling’s seams and making marks on the ticking with a grease pencil.

  “Up a foot,” she called. “Again. Again.” Now she and Gus were eye to eye. “You’re doing fine,” she told him. Gus didn’t need reassurance. He was the world’s first flying dog, was his attitude, but was that anything to get worked up about?

  Mary tugged the sling back and forth, yanked down hard, and ran her fingers under the hems to make sure Gus wasn’t being pinched or rubbed. Satisfied, she steadied the dog and gave him a kiss on the nose.

  “He’s all yours,” she shouted. “Fly him to the moon!”

  John walked the lifting rope back until Gus appeared in front of the loading doors, slowly revolving to face the woods, then the mow’s interior. With the hauling rope John released the trolley from its lock point and pulled the dog into the mow and paid out the hoisting rope until Gus stood with all four feet on the floor. As soon as he was free of the sling, Gus braced his feet and shook off, as if he’d bounded out of a lake. Then, nose to the floor, he set off exploring.

  “That worked perfectly!” John called down. “Let’s do another.”

  When it came to aeronautics, Vi was less sanguine than Gus. She whined and paddled the instant her feet left the ground. It took Mary several minutes to reassure the dog before John could float her up and in for a landing, but once unslung, she hip-bumped Gus and the two dogs set off on crisscrossing paths.

  Needles was a hopeless case. He started yelping even before Mary had secured the sling flaps around him and, once aloft, thrashed and galloped. He yanked one of his front feet into the sling and put it out the neck hole, then twisted around trying to chew on the hoist rope. All of this before he was two feet off the ground. So Jack and Elbow took a break from doctoring the wagon to look on.

  “I just wonder what that sweet Vi dog mated with in order to produce such a creature,” So Jack said, shaking his head. “A badger? A wolverine? An alligator?”

  Mary guided Needles back to earth. Freed of the sling, he hurtled around the barn, barking up at Gus and Vi, who barked back from the mow door like neighbors complaining about a racket.

  on sunday afternoon john returned from Elbow’s workshop to find Frank sitting on the porch on their one chair. Frank didn’t look good. The rims of his eyes were a sickly crimson and his skin was as pale as a cave creature’s. In his good hand he held a piece of bannock from the batch John had fried up at breakfast. The piece was about the size of a pack of playing cards.

  “It’s good to see you eating,” John said. He knelt to stroke his hand over Vi, who’d curled up in the kitchen doorway.

  Frank broke off a minuscule chunk of bannock, put it in his mouth, chewed, and swallowed with a pained look.

  “I’ve got to get my digestion working,” he said. “I need my leg.”

  “What’s wrong with your digestion?”

  “Morphine. It anesthetizes the gut. You wind up with a world-class case of constipation. I just need to move, walk. A person’s gut only works when they move. It’s designed that way.”

  “You’ve been getting around pretty well using the chair.”

  “I said move, not creep. Shake things around. Look, how about we call this over with? You’re absolved of responsibility, all right? You did everything you promised. We’re square. Just give me the leg and take me to the train depot.”

  “You said you’d ask. You made me promise not to listen.”

  “I was out of my head when we made that deal. But I’m better now. I’m past the hard part. I just need the leg.”

  “I can’t give you the leg.”

  “You can! If I’m asking for a reason, then you can. Goddamnit to hell, don’t shake your head.”

  “Look at it this way. This is day eight. You’re halfway there. More than halfway.”

  Gingerly, Frank pressed his wooden hand against his belly. “I haven’t had a bowel movement since I was at Malone’s.”

  “Those were the days.”

  “Well then, get lost.” Frank threw his bannock onto the porch floor. It came to rest near Vi who woke and got to her feet. She looked at the bannock laying there, then at John. Then she hung her head over the bannock as if thinking very hard.

  “Go ahead,” John said quietly.

  Vi picked up the bannock with her front teeth and circled around to her sleeping spot and lay and broke the bannock into pieces, then ate the pieces.

  “I have an idea,” John said.

  “Oh no.”

  “Let’s go for a drive.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Frank said. “I don’t feel well.”

  “All right,” John said. He put his hands in his pockets, leaned against the kitchen doorjamb, and looked out the porch windows. He felt practiced up at not talking. He’d spent the past three hours assisting Elbow and the shortest of their silences had pushed fifteen minutes. He watched Vi lick her chops and peer at Frank. He looked downfield hoping to spot Mary coming back from her walk to the creek. The sun was shining. The scent of drying hay wafted through the porch screens. There were a lot of birds doing a lot of bird things.

  “Oh for crying out loud,” Frank said. He put out his good hand. “Here.”

  John grasped it. Frank hoisted himself one-legged out of the chair, slung his good arm across John’s shoulders, and hopped along beside him, down the porch steps and across the yard. His sour exhalations washed against the side of John’s face.

  “God,” he groaned. “It feels like I’ve got an anchor-chain for guts.”

  After Frank was settled in the Kissel, John came around to the driver’s side and tipped open the rear door, lowered the window, closed the door again.

  “Watch this,” he told Frank. He ran to the porch and brought Vi out and led her into the weedy garden plot north of the maple tree, maybe twenty-five yards from the Kissel but square on to the back window he’d lowered. Then he ran to the Kissel.

  “Vi,” he shouted. “We’re going for a ride!”

  Vi came at a gallop. Two or three strides from the car, she gathered herself, leapt, and arrowed through the back window, landing feet forward on the back seat. The car rocked on its springs.

  “Neat, huh?” John said. By then Gus and Needles had come running out of Elbow’s shop. John opened the rear door and shooed the two younger dogs in. “Vi just did that one day. I don’t know where she learned it. I suppose from whoever had her before she came to us. I can’t get Needles or Gus to even try.”

  “Smart dogs,” Frank said. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Not far,” John said. “You’ll see.”

  the little bell on the door of the Popcorn Corners dry goods store jingled loudly when John entered, but he wasn’t at all sure Walter Paine’s daughter knew anyone was in the store. She sat perched on a stool behind the counter, alternately drawing on a pipe and lifting the bowl to study the embers in the manner of someone engrossed by a difficult problem. The air in the place was thick with a pungent, tangy smoke. Walter himself was nowhere to be seen, a disappointment. John and Mary had been fond of the man from the moment they’d first spoken, and only more so after two subsequent visits.

  He walked to the counter. “Good afternoon, Miss,” he said. The girl glanced up, registered him, then returned her attention to the bowl of the pipe. Her hair was a phenomenon, a luminous blond eruption that engulfed her face and trailed down her shoulders, and which seemed to catch the light from the windows and run it in hoops about her head. From the doorway, this corona so dwarfed her features that she’d looked almost like a child, a waif, but up close, John saw it wasn’t true. She could be his senior by five, maybe even ten years. But no—no. She was young, though not as young as he’d first thought. Perhaps eighteen years old.

  He tried again. “Your name is Ida, isn’t it?”

  The girl nodded. With the tip of her finger she stirred the embers in her pipe and peered in again. Then she frowned and looked out the front window, at the Kissel, at the dogs as usual shoving their heads out the windows, at Frank in the front seat, his visage pale even at this distance.

  “Oh,” she said. “Wait.” She lay her pipe on the counter, leaving it to issue a tall streamline of smoke wavering and crawling into the air as she bent to rummage somewhere below.

  Caught in the fountain of her hair, John noticed, was a maple leaf. Also, if he was not mistaken, a timothy head.

  The girl straightened up holding a small parcel wrapped in brown paper, which she pushed across the counter.

  He looked at the package. “What’s in it?”

  “The prunes.”

  Moment of confusion. He reviewed the recent past. He’d entered the store intending to ask for prunes . . . Had he spoken the words? “But,” he said. “I mean.” He definitely had not spoken the words. “How did you know we came for prunes?”

  The girl picked up the pipe. She took a long draw. She looked out the window at the Kissel again. “I didn’t know he’d want them today,” she said, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “Fifteen cents. Anything else?”

  He fished a dime and a nickel out of his pocket and held them out, but the girl leaned back as if wary about touching him.

  “Just put them on the counter,” she said.

  “All right. Is your father here? I’d like to say hello.”

  “Probably.”

  “Around back, you mean? Or where?”

  She considered the question. “Most times he’s here. I mean, it would be unusual for him not to be here.” She frowned, looked into the pipe’s bowl again, seemed to lose track of the conversation. “He gets lonely when I’m gone,” she said. “It will help if he has one of your puppies. You pick her out—you’ll know which one he’ll like.”

  “I’m sorry, Ida. Mary and I placed all Vi’s pups before—”

  “No,” she said. “Not those. The next ones.”

  “Next ones?”

  “You know,” she said. “The ones that come later.”

  “Later,” he said. He understood that he was sounding more and more like a parrot as this exchange went on. He was close enough to the girl that he could have leaned over the counter and plucked the leaf out of her hair, yet he had the impression, the unshakable impression, the very disturbing impression, that she was speaking from across some vast remove.

  “What a peculiar conversation.”

  She looked at him, startled. “That hasn’t happened?”

  “What hasn’t happened?”

  She narrowed her eyes and pinched her lips together in annoyance. “No, it’s not funny,” she said, under her breath, speaking to no one. She swiped the coins off the counter, opened the register, and dropped them into the drawer. Now fully present, she looked at John. “Please don’t tell Walter. I keep explaining that it won’t matter, but he gets so upset.”

  “All right,” John said, thoroughly confounded. He started for the door.

  “Your prunes,” she said.

  “Right. Thank you.”

  “I’ll tell Walter you came by,” she called after him.

  In the car, he handed Frank the package. “Here. I’m fairly sure I just bought you some prunes.”

  Frank opened the package. “They’re prunes all right,” he said. He picked one up, sniffed it, put it in his mouth, chewed. “What did you expect?”

  “I’m not sure. Did that girl say something to you the first time we stopped here?”

  “She asked to touch my prosthesis.”

  “What?”

  “What is what I said. Then she said, ‘I just wonder what would happen with a wooden hand.’”

  “Meaning what? And how did she know about it?”

  “I assume because you walked in and started blabbering about how you had a cripple in tow.”

  “This might come as a shock, but we weren’t talking about you. Besides, she was never in the store.”

  “Well I wasn’t exactly waving my hand around.”

  “What did you say to her?”

  “I said, ‘If I show you my hand, will you go away?’ Then I put it out the window. She pressed the back of her hand against it and stood there like she was listening to the radio through her fillings. That’s when I knew she was loony. I yanked the hand back and said, ‘Get lost.’ And not in a friendly way, either. For a minute she looked angry. Then she said something crazy and ran off.”