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Praise for Monarchs of the Northeast Kingdom

“An intimate portrait of one woman’s grief and journey towards self-sufficiency . . . raw, emotional, and poignant. Hammons rules over the pen, writing with a deep and honest understanding of the complexity of human emotion and psyche.”

—Burrowing Owl Books

“Monarchs of the Northeast Kingdom is particularly memorable for its close reading of the ways of animals, and for its evocation of place: a would-be pristine winter kingdom continually threatened by human arrogance, carelessness, and greed. This is an astonishingly mature first novel, suspenseful, haunted—and haunting—from start to finish.”

—A. G. MOJTABAI, author of Shine on Me

“Ominous from its opening image—blood marring cozy domesticity—Monarchs of the Northeast Kingdom is a haunting beauty. Hammons’s prose is tight as tripwire. A quiet madness unfolds and the narrative forces the reader to look and see what the most fragile among us are capable of. Her characters, both human and not, will be with me a long time.”

—KELLY SOKOL, author of The Unprotected

“Chera Hammons writes fiction with the same lyricism that makes her poetry shine. Every sentence sings with grace and music. Monarchs of the Northeast Kingdom is a book you don’t read so much as savor.”

—RICHARD KRAWIEC, author of Time Sharing

Monarchs

of the

Northeast Kingdom

Monarchs

of the

Northeast Kingdom

a novel

Chera Hammons

TORREY HOUSE PRESS

Salt Lake City • Torrey

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons,

living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First Torrey House Press Edition, May 2020

Copyright © 2020 by Chera Hammons

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written consent of the publisher.

Published by Torrey House Press

Salt Lake City, Utah

www.torreyhouse.org

International Standard Book Number: 978-1-948814-21-8

E-book ISBN: 978-1-948814-22-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019952018

Cover design by Kathleen Metcalf

Interior design by Rachel Davis

Distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

Torrey House Press offices in Salt Lake City sit on the homelands of Ute, Goshute, Shoshone, and Paiute nations. Offices in Torrey are in homelands of Paiute, Ute, and Navajo nations.

This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how National Endowment for the Arts grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov.

“Fresh, untouched, green, lovely. Untrammeled, except by ourselves. A lifetime of warmth and beauty and fertility. The kind of life and world people have been dreaming about ever since they first began fouling this one. I can sometimes catch glimpses of what it will be like, and they are tantalizing—”

“I have seen it, you forget,” Gloria said. “In the mirror. It is more beautiful than you can believe.”

—Shirley Jackson, The Sundial

1

The first thing John says when he comes inside is that he has seen blood in the new snow.

“Blood?” Anna muses over her coffee, not awake enough yet to feel alarm.

“Yes, beside the driveway.” He hits the newspaper against his leg to get the ice off of the orange plastic wrapper. It’s a habit Anna hates because it leaves cold, clear pools on the kitchen tile that seep even through her thick winter socks. “Just a few drops, not a lot. Still . . .”

Blood. How stark it would look against the crystallized white, like rubies loosened from a ring and fallen into a white fur pelt. “Where could it have come from?”

“A deer, I think,” John says. “There were tracks going off into the trees.”

“Oh,” Anna says. “Again?”

“It looks like it,” John says. “They didn’t get a clean kill this time.” He sits in one of the worn oak chairs and unfolds the paper. “I’ll take Charlie out later and try to find it.”

“Why? What good will it do?” She wants it to be spoken.

“Well.” He clears his throat. “It might be suffering.”

She nods. They can’t allow anything to die slowly in the cold, bleeding to death. Not on their land. They’re decent people.

She asks, as she did the last time, “Should we call the game warden?”

He looks at her over the paper for a moment, thinking. “Let’s wait,” he says. “I want to make sure there’s a good reason first.” They are, after all, used to keeping their own counsel. Neither of them has any interest in hunting or knows anything of hunting laws, though they have read stories about these subjects in the Gazette and notice generally when hunting season falls. It hasn’t yet started this year, but it will soon. Anna doesn’t even know how to find the number for a game warden if she needs to call one. She assumes John knows, though he has never called one, either.

They eat in easy silence. Anna picks at her eggs and sips her coffee while John reads his paper. Every once in a while, he frowns; he must be reading bad news: obituaries, politics, crime, fracking, reports of invasive species that could kill the trees. That’s all the paper ever has in it besides births and weddings.

Anna tries not to think of the blood. It’s nice to watch John without his noticing. She studies his eyes, the pleasing wrinkles at their sides that mean that he has laughed a lot. Nearly everything he does possesses an air of benign absentmindedness that has only increased over time. He taps his foot as he reads. Anna can tell from the squeak that he has forgotten to take off his boots again; the snow will soon be melting onto the kitchen floor in dirty rings. She sighs. Still, staying annoyed with him is hard; he’s easygoing and tends to take good care of her.

She stands and begins to do the dishes while he finishes the paper. The window over the sink lets chilly air seep in that makes the metal faucet handle cold. The taps sputter at first. As she waits for the water to run hot, she looks at the naked maples and tall thin evergreens at the edge of the yard. The snow has clumped on the needles, making them droop. The trees look heavy, gray, depressed.

It’s still only the middle of autumn, and it has been harder than most. The ground will be white and blank for months yet. The floor under her feet leeches cold, making her heels ache. She’s glad there isn’t much to wash. The soap bubbles burst in the sink in tiny rainbows. The almost-translucent, spotted skin on her hands turns pink. The blue veins at the tops spread like roots.

As she dries her hands and slides her wedding ring back on, John stands and stretches, yawning wide and slow like a bear. “Well,” he says.

“Are you going out now?” Anna asks.

“I guess I’d better,” he says. “Who knows how far it might have gone.” He kisses her on the cheek.

“Be careful.”

“Old Charlie hasn’t thrown me yet,” he says.

She stands at the kitchen counter and listens to him rummage in the hall closet for the rifle. The rifle is only a secondhand .22 they purchased years ago, when they’d first bought their property, but it does well enough at close range. They both hate the gun and know nothing of killing except that it should be both careful and quick. They had originally been driven to buy it for protection of their livestock from wildlife and dogs, and it comes out only in emergencies.

Anna has never used the rifle, and has seen John shoot it exactly three times. Once at a tree trunk to warn off a couple of coyotes that had been prowling near the chicken pen. Once to put down the Hansons’ gelding, which had gotten loose and been struck by a car. She can sometimes still hear the horse screaming in her memory; she had called their own vet to ask where in the forehead to shoot it for a clean kill, shaking so badly that she had misdialed several times. And once to kill a dog with distemper that someone had dumped off near their house.

If you live out of town, you have to get used to some killing. That’s the way of things. But that doesn’t mean you have to like it.

Anna is sorry that John needs to take the rifle with him. He tries not to seem bothered by it. “Take your cell phone,” she tells him. “I’ll be in the tub for a while, but I can help you after I get dressed if you need it.”

But she is still at the kitchen window watching twenty minutes later when he leads the ageing mule, Charlie, out of the barn and toward the woods. The mule is, as always, beautifully rigged with one of John’s handmade saddles. John specializes in custom orders, hard-to-fit horses, the short-backed quarter horse sore from trees that bridge, the wide table back of a paint with no withers, the large flat shoulders of a Tennessee walker, the slab-sides of mammoth donkeys. John sometimes has Anna help him with the leather tooling when orders pile up in the spring. To her, it feels clumsy, unnatural, knocking the stamp into the unyielding hide, and the leather sewing machine with its noise and strength frightens her, makes her hold her breath while her heart pounds. She sometimes finds herself in awe of John, who is comfortable around such industry.

He checks his girth and swings up on Charlie’s back. The mule’s ears flick back and forth, listening. John pats the mule and speaks to him, then reaches back to check the rifle in the scabbard. Charlie looks thick and warm in his winter coat. John kisses the air, their signal to the mule to go ahead. It’s strange to see the expression from far away without sound. Charlie tucks his nose and strides forward, and they’re soon lost in the horizon of slim trunks. At least one out of every ten of the trees in Vermont forests stands tall even though the tree is actually dead, though it’s harder to spot the dead ones in winter. Going into the woods is a little like walking among ghosts. Anna pictures not only the spirits of trees, but caribou, mastodons. Lives that passed through the land before hers and will never come

back.

As she waits for her bath to run, she thinks of all she ought to do that day. She keeps a list stuck with a magnet to the fridge, ticking chores off as she goes, but today is a good day, and she can remember much of what the list contains. The barn needs to be mucked out, more hay dropped from the loft, the chickens fed and watered. The cold often makes these tasks seem impossible. There are some bills to pay, and the house, of course, could always stand a cleaning. The Epsom salts swirl and vanish in the steaming water roaring from the faucet.

She tests it first with her foot, then stands in the tub, acclimating herself to the heat. She ran it hotter than she was supposed to. It turns her skin red, and sometimes it hurts. The hotter the bath starts out, though, the longer she can stay in, weightless and untethered to her unwieldy body. She holds on to the sides of the tub and lowers herself inch by inch. She can feel her joints loosen, relax, and the pain soon seems to float around her, no longer a part of her, but a part of the water. The ache hovers around her wrists, hips, fingers, and knees in filmy clouds. She closes her eyes.

Once the cold starts to spill into the bath, too, Anna pulls herself up and wraps herself in a towel. She dresses in faded jeans and a sweater that is too big for her. Her once-brown hair, she pulls into a tight ponytail. Older women, she has been taught, are supposed to keep short hair, but she’s used to the low-

maintenance, collarbone-length style and can’t bring herself to cut it.

She doesn’t like growing older, though she doesn’t try to fight it; there’s no point. Appraising herself in the mirror, she tries to judge her reflection as a stranger might, but she doesn’t allow herself to focus on her wrinkles, the sagging lines of her neck; she looks instead at the dark brown eyes, which still have some of the depth and sparkle they had when she was a girl. She rubs moisturizer into her skin, enjoying the feeling of softness and luxury that comes from it. She doesn’t bother with makeup anymore.

There have been no missed calls. John likely doesn’t have a signal, which is spotty even on the best days so close to the ranges. The Green Mountains and White Mountains together are like two hands cradling the Kingdom between them, isolating the region from the rest of the state, making it colder and lonelier, but also protecting it—giving it a history all its own. Its inaccessibility has become part of what she likes about it. She texts John so that he’ll have a message to respond to when he can: “Is everything okay? Find the deer?”

It’s hard to stay motivated when John is gone; with so much to do, she doesn’t know where to start. He has a way of streamlining tasks and making them seem easier. Without him, she too easily falls into the trap of resting through the moods of the arthritis.

Anna decides to go into the barn first and throw more hay down for the week. They are on track so far this year, only about 15 percent of the way through their winter supply, which they’d bought over the brief summer at a low price and stored in the loft. The sweet mild smell of it usually soothes her, reminds her of the soft green breezes of an easier season. She sometimes wants to lie in it and dream the way she did when she was young, but it could prickle through her clothing and leave welts on her skin.

She plunges through the deep snow into the warm cloud of her breath, the barn tipping up and down in front of her as she tries to step into the footprints John left, struggling to match his wider, straighter stride. The snow and the white-veiled trees muffle every sound, the bright summer birds have long since moved south, the animals all huddle somewhere in burrows; against the silence of the hibernating forest, her breath seems loud and uneven.

She opens the barn door. Dust motes swirl and rise, but they soon settle and hover in the cold light that comes in through the planks. Her short, gentle Icelandic horse, the one they named Keeper, their only riding animal now besides the mule, whickers and bumps its head against its stall door as if asking her to open it. The only other inhabitant of the barn is the border collie that stretches from its bed and pads up to her, tail wagging in slow arcs.

She pats the horse and speaks to it for a while in low, singsong tones. It has been cribbing on the edge of the stall door; the wood there is splintered and pale. A quick-natured horse, it has difficulty staying inside all winter. She checks its hay and water. She needs to take it out for a ride, give it some exercise. She mentally adds that to the list.

The dog whines when she begins to climb up the ladder to the hayloft. She looks down at the pale wolfish eyes and reassures it. “Good girl,” she soothes. “Good girl. I won’t be long.”

The dog never whines when John climbs the ladder, as if it, too, views him as the stronger member of the household and her as the weaker. In the same way, the house cat never leaves its toys in her shoes, only John’s. She wonders how they know, what it is about her that they read as submissive, as lesser.

Anna takes the smooth tan cowhide gloves off the hook at the top of the ladder and puts them on. The fingers, too big for her, hold bits of hay that have broken off and fallen to the tips to lodge in the stitching. They prick her as she opens and closes her hands. She tosses the hay down in the easy rhythm she learned long ago, swinging it by the baling twine to get momentum and letting go at the top of the swing to throw it over the edge. She throws down three before a hitch in her hip nearly knocks her over. She leans over a bale, breathless, holding her hip and trying not to look down. The dog whines. She should leave the loft while she still can, in case the hip locks up. She hasn’t done as much as she’d intended, but it’s something.

The dog circles the ladder as she comes back down, and when she steps off the ladder and lets go of it, the dog bumps her legs, sniffing. She pets it to calm it down, holding its head to look into the sharp, intelligent face and rubbing its warm ears. It barks after her in staccato yelps after she closes the barn door.

She checks her phone where it charges in the kitchen; still no messages. John didn’t pack a lunch. It’s 11:38. Maybe he is nearly back home. Or maybe the wounded deer has gone farther than he guessed it would. Perhaps it’s really okay and he won’t find it at all. He will get to a place where the snow shows that the bleeding has stopped and the deer has run off, tracks wide apart and blurred with speed, indicating the deer has disappeared into the wilderness, as it is meant to do. The rifle will hang cold and still in its scabbard, unnecessary weight. And John will turn around.

Anna eats canned tomato soup and watches the local news. Cold, cold, and more cold. More snow. It never changes. Winters are always the same. Each winter runs into the next in her memory, a dashed line of frozen pipes and raw throats and the smell of space heaters burning off their dust. Even in spring and summer, the sun rarely breaks through such a landscape, one hewn by clouds and glaciers.

She puts her bowl in the sink and runs water into it. She doesn’t bother to wait for it to get hot before she washes the bowl. She scrubs the red line on the side until it has disappeared, then rinses it and sets it on the drying rack.

She looks up. Movement at the edge of the window catches her eye.

It’s Charlie, pawing desperately in the snow in front of the barn. He raises his head and calls with his strange sound, the noise somewhere between a whinny and a bray. He takes a step and trips; his leg is between the reins, which drag on the ground. There’s a white froth of sweat like foam along his neck.

He is riderless.

2

Anna runs outside without her coat. She stumbles through the snow all the way to the barn, growing hot and clumsy with the exertion, though her cheeks numb with the cold. Pain shoots through her hip, but she ignores it.

Her floundering movement and her rasping breaths frighten the mule, and he startles and backs away from her as she approaches. The reins jerk the noseband of his hackamore when he steps on them, pulling his head down. His eyes are wide and afraid.

Anna makes herself stop and slows her breathing. Inhale, exhale. Inhale. She has stopped running but her heart hasn’t. Her pulse pounds in her ears. “Whoa, Charlie. Whoa,” she says, low in her throat. He holds his head as high as he can, the muscles of his neck hard and tense; he is the statue of a mule. He doesn’t look at her, but over her; she may as well be invisible. She makes her way to his side, speaking consolingly to him as she picks up the dragging reins. She holds her palm open to him. He flicks his ears toward her, then back toward the gray forest. She tells him it’s all right, rubs his neck, and he begins to soften. Of course animals never want to be afraid, any more than people do.

With shaking hands, Anna undoes the knot in the reins and frees his leg. She strokes Charlie on the shoulder. He’s trembling, and he leans against her with a sigh. She feels the vibration all through his big warm body. Dried sweat runs from under the saddle pad down to his belly in a crust of salt. The rifle scabbard is empty.

“John,” she calls, turning to look around the yard. Then louder, “John!” There isn’t any answer. The watching trees swallow what’s left of her voice. The snow is churned down to black dirt where Charlie pawed at it, but there are no new boot prints that she can see. It doesn’t matter anyway; she knows with strange certainty that John didn’t come back with the mule.

Anna leads Charlie into the barn, strips off his saddle, and lays it down on the floor of the tack room. She hurries him into his stall while the border collie crisscrosses behind them, believing as it always does that it herds the mule in itself.

Anna shoves a square of hay into the mule’s feeder and leaves him to settle. She pulls the barn door closed against the reassuring sound of the mule beginning to lip the hay from the net. At least he isn’t so upset that he can’t eat.

Anna stands with her back to the barn, facing the trees, the wintery sky seeming darker than it had a few minutes before. The clouds have gathered into a close bundle and are growing dense and wet. Charlie’s trail in the snow leads from where Anna stands to the line of pines, where she loses sight of it.

Heart still pounding, Anna makes herself walk back to the empty kitchen to pick up her cell phone (fully charged now, still no messages) and winter coat. She shoves her hands into the thick ski gloves that don’t allow her fingers much mobility, but will keep them from frostbite. She looks around the room, hesitant to leave its safety, suspecting that she is forgetting something, but unsure what it could be.

Following Charlie’s deep tracks is easy. They cut across the clean snow like sutures. He had come from the trees in the same place he had gone in, along the familiar trail; he had probably followed the trail as long as he possibly could have. People and mules are the same that way, relying on their habits. She wonders if she ought to ride the Icelandic horse instead of walk but doesn’t want to use the time and energy saddling it. Not when John is probably not far off.

Just before she reaches the tree line, Anna turns and looks back. Small and lonely, the house nestles in the clearing against its backdrop of trees and boulders. The mountain crouches like an ancient god over it, shaggy with rock and earth, higher than anyone would care to reach, sometimes with an attitude like brooding anger, sometimes benevolence. Now, it sleeps, blanketed with snow and clouds, waiting.

It has gotten dark enough for her to see that she left the kitchen light on, and even from that far off she can see the chairs pulled out from the table unevenly, as though she and John had only just finished breakfast and gone off to their separate, but intersecting, days. The outlying trees hover over her, watching what she does likes spies, roots whispering to each other below the soil while the trunks slumber. They tell the forest to expect her, a stranger, to enter its wilderness. She wonders which seems more beautiful to them—the bare, still winter season or the summer with its birds and leaves and life. The evergreens are always the same, no matter the weather.

She steps into the dusk of the trees, leaving the house behind her.

The path takes Anna ahead with a slowness that is almost cruel. The whiteness and monotony of the trunks make the horizon a dreamscape that moves by as if on a reel while she stands still. She fights her way down the trail on cold, unfeeling legs where the snow has drifted. Steady walking will eventually warm her up, so she focuses on the ground instead of looking forward, marking each step before she takes it, trying only to follow the trail without slipping.

The clouds grow so heavy above Anna it seems she could hit her head on them. The ground and sky press her between them, and the air tastes moist. Maybe she should have ridden the horse.

Even in the low light, she can see that the nature of the tracks going and coming differs. Heading out, Charlie had, of course, been walking, unconcerned. He had picked up his big hooves in no apparent hurry, and set them nearly straight down. Those tracks are almost circles.

He had returned to the barn at a full run, strides far apart and stretched at the edges where his legs had been at more of an angle. Those tracks are ink smeared across a page in carelessness. His run had chopped the ground. Did something spook him? Anna wonders. Had he actually thrown John, or maybe just run off after John had dismounted? John is a good rider, though not perhaps as good as she is. Or used to be. But then, he had started later in life. She expects any moment to hear her husband wading through the snow around the bend, cursing the mule in his gentle but persistent way. That gentleness that means no one takes him seriously when he loses his temper. She feels the warmth start to grow in her stomach and spread to her chest; the exercise is working.

Here and there, too: the scattering of blood, the stray sharp print of the wounded deer. The same signs that John had followed. It is more blood than she expected.

Anna stops, realizing what bothered her when she stood in the kitchen, what she is forgetting. Not just the empty saddle—the empty scabbard. Where is the rifle? The more she tries to imagine what happened, the more she worries. It means John had a reason to take the gun out of the scabbard before he was thrown. Or maybe it had simply fallen from the scabbard as the mule galloped and bucked toward home. If John doesn’t have it with him when they find each other, they will have to look for it. It isn’t the sort of thing someone should leave lying around in the woods.

Anna doesn’t know how long she walks. The snow makes for slow and clumsy going, and she stumbles many times. It’s deep enough snow for martens to tunnel in, hunting for mice. The toothy, mink-like animals are returning, she has read. First the trees came back, then martens; maybe, one day, wolves.

Anna shivers. Her hips and knees ache, a pain somewhere between fire and needles. She has grown warm and then cold and then warm again. She rests on fallen trees, brushing the snow off of them with hands that feel huge and numb in the neon blue and black ski gloves. Her face has grown so stiff that it seems unable to hold any expression. She wonders if her nose is running, as it often does in the cold, but she doesn’t have enough feeling in it to tell.

The watery light that was left after the clouds gathered has quietly ebbed, but the clouds’ full bases and the white ground still hold enough luminosity between them for Anna to make out shapes without much difficulty. She keeps on, growing miserable with hunger and fatigue. I shouldn’t be out here.

At a place in the trail where the tracks abruptly split, Anna hesitates. The morning version of Charlie had continued at its measured pace along the path; the later, frightened Charlie had come from the south and rejoined the path to run home. Following either track should get her to John, in theory, but which will be faster? Don’t panic. She should have found John by now. He should have passed her on the way home.

Then again, maybe not. John doesn’t get disoriented in the woods as she sometimes does. He might not rely on the trail to get back. He could go straight through the trees. Maybe he is home, looking for her. Returning home to warm rooms with John waiting would be the answer to every prayer she’s ever had. But she can’t be sure he’s there.

She checks her phone again, fumbling to get it out of her pocket and get the screen to turn on, but it shows she has no signal.

“John!” she calls to nothing. She waits, watching her breath melt into the air.

She turns down the mule track that leaves the trail. It might be nice to walk a different direction for a while. It’s marked only by the mule’s tracks, no sort of boundary. Quiet makes the forest seem darker, emptier the farther she gets from the path. A few white flakes fall like ash between the trees. She shivers. She walks into her own silence, like she is the only person left on earth. “John!” she cries again.

Through her gloves, Anna can barely feel the outline of the button that illuminates her cell phone screen. She presses it and shines the mild light away from her so that she can better see the uneven going. Though dim, the blue light comforts her. Every few seconds, she hits the button again to keep it on. With some steps, her feet sink into snow up to her knees; with others, the ground sits closer to the surface and she steps too hard and trips. Her jeans stiffen with caked ice.

Anna works far beyond the level of exertion she normally allows herself. Under her determination boils a desperation borne from the inability to change where she is. There is no easy way back. She doesn’t know when to stop, can’t stop until she finds John. For all she knows, she is closer to him than to the warm kitchen.

The trees stand dark and quiet over her while the tracks go on and on, as far as she can see. Anna wonders if she has gotten lost, if she is even still on their own land. Getting lost had been impossible in the place they lived before. Getting lost is good, Anna tells herself. The ability to get lost is what they had

wanted.

The snow keeps secrets from her. Anna is stumbling forward half-asleep when the toe of her left boot catches on a covered tree branch and she falls hard onto her side, wrenching her ankle. She curses and sucks in the cold air. For a moment she lies on her back and looks at the clear stars frozen in the spaces between low clouds, which are breaking and floating off from each other like calving ice.

Her phone, which has landed beside her, buzzes.

She scrambles to pick it up and pulls off her gloves to unlock it. With her numb fingers, it takes several tries. The message appears on the screen, and she mouths Thank you to the darkness. It’s from John.

The floating words make her dizzy with relief. “Nearly there.” She reads it three times. Nearly there, nearly there, nearly there. She blinks tears out of her eyes. They could be caused by the cold; she isn’t sure.

So John really has passed her in the woods. She tries to respond, but the signal has dropped again, and the message fails. She wonders how far he is from home. He will get there before her, see she is gone, and worry. But there is no help for that.

Anna stands up, ignoring the pain in her ankle, and turns back the way she came. Everything seems easier now that she’s going back. She limps a little, but as she walks she supports herself on the trees, leaning against the rough trunks. How cozy the wood-burning stove will be, her slippers, the cat curled in her lap, a hot cup of chamomile tea. She and John will sleep late in the morning after such a day as this one, wake when the sunlight falls too strongly between the gaps in the curtains for them to stay in bed any longer, make steaming coffee and read the paper and listen to the peace of the woods, snow dropping off the branches.

The main trail appears before she expects to see it. It’s trickier here to walk on the ankle, the trees spaced farther apart, but she manages. It’s only a minor sprain; once she gets home, she’ll wrap it with the same bright elastic material she uses on the horses. What color will she choose? Electric pink? Neon green? Behind her, the snow proves that she walks unevenly, dragging the foot. The forest is silent except for the sounds of her progress, her ragged panting and the scrape of her boots in the thick, soft ground.

She must be getting close; she has been walking now her entire life.

A chilling howl breaks from the darkness to her left, beginning with some high-pitched yips, like someone trying to choke off a sob. Then it finds itself, pure and tonal, and rises up and up through the bare canopy of the trees and hangs there. She stops to listen, pinpricks on her arms and neck. It can’t really be wolves; they’ve been extinct in Vermont for years. Hybrids? Coyotes can possess wolf DNA. This is surely only what is left of the wolves, their residue, some kind of memory or ghost of them, something that stalks and haunts, then disappears.

The entire forest has stopped to listen with her. The melody threads the trunks, moves darkness over the moon, and drops, and then there are cries and laughter all around her, many sharp voices begging and threatening and laughing and arguing at once without listening to each other, exactly what humanity must sound like from far away; she is sure then that it is coyotes, many of them together. Nearby.

Anna glances back, but there is nothing behind her. Nothing she can see. Coyotes are common and she’s never been frightened by them, but she’s never encountered a pack of them at night on her own before, either. Only one or two at a time, in daylight that shows the texture of their sand and cream and black coats. She forces herself to walk faster until she can go no farther. Lungs stinging like sunburn, she rests, sitting with her back to the wide trunk of an old maple. The song of the coyotes ends, leaving no trace of them. She may as well have imagined it. Still, they have taken her calm from her. She takes off her glove to feel her cheeks and is surprised to find that they are still wet. She can see her breath, how quick and white and hollow it is.

If I were going to freeze to death, this is where I would stop . . .

Where is John? She wonders it with irritation. He should have found her by now, shouldn’t he? It is awful for her to be out in the winter at night this way. But time feels strange, moves strangely in situations like these, and she has no idea how long she has been out, or how long she should expect such an errand to take.

The cold grips her legs, pulls her down again, since she has stopped walking. It pains her. She has always considered it a mercy that, before people die of hypothermia, their bodies feel warm to them one last time. She wonders if that means they stop shivering.

Don’t be dramatic, she tells herself. You’re not freezing to death. Home is just around the corner. She counts to four for each inhale, slowing her breath down.

Using the trunk for leverage, Anna drags herself to her feet and goes on. Two hundred and fifty feet farther down the trail, she emerges into her clearing, hers and John’s, the little board house still standing against the darkness with the yellow kitchen light still shining through the windows and the chairs pushed back.

3

Anna fumbles with the doorknob. She opens the door too hard, and it bounces off of the stop. The knob makes a dent in the wall behind it that John will have to fix. She walks into a wave of heat and feels the door shut out the cold silence behind her.

“John! John!” she calls, throwing her wet gloves on the table. The ice maker in the refrigerator drops ice; the heater hums. She limps into the living room half expecting to find the television turned low, but it’s off. “John?” Back in the kitchen, she glances into the mudroom, looking for his boots. Where they should have been, there is a smear of old mud and meltwater.

Anna half runs, half pulls herself up the stairs with the worn banister, calling John’s name every few steps. The second floor is dark, but perhaps he’s in bed, warming up and resting, waiting for her to get back. She opens their bedroom door and flicks on the light. The old four-post sits empty, the wedding ring quilt smooth. Untouched since that morning.

All of the rooms upstairs, bathrooms, closets, all are dark, all empty. Anna’s skin tingles with the heat returning to its surface.

Moving more quickly now, fighting panic, Anna makes her way back down the stairs to the ground floor. The house cat chirps at her inquisitively but she pushes it away with her foot. She returns to the mudroom and listens for a few seconds at the door that leads to the cellar. It always sounds like water is dripping down the cinder blocks, though John swears nothing leaks down there. It is, more likely, the groans and pings of an old house settling. On nights John works late in his shop, Anna can almost believe she hears voices, but she can get carried away with her imaginings. It’s really only mice.

She opens the white wooden door and tugs on the chain attached to the bare bulb overhead. The stairs stretch before her like a perspective drawing, all lines and shading. At the bottom, they disappear in shadow. She never goes into the cellar; it makes her dizzy, that feeling of being underground with no exit, that buried-alive feeling. It is older than the house and damp and has an earthen floor that has never been covered by any of its long history of owners. She doesn’t descend this time, either; her hurt ankle causes her to be unsteady, and the darkness at the bottom of the stairs tells her that John isn’t there.

There are still three places John could be. Anna decides to check the barn first. It would be just like John to get home and make sure Charlie was okay before anything else. He would want to know that the mule hadn’t been injured in its wild flight through the trees. Anna turns on all of the remaining downstairs lights in the house before she leaves it, then pushes her aching body through the churned snow for what seems like the hundredth time that weary day.

She opens the barn door to find that the tack room light is already on. She switches on the fluorescents; they sizzle to life and hum. There’s the sound of cloth and movement, and her heart leaps. But it is only the border collie, which has stood from its bed and stretched, and now trots toward her, wagging its tail and blinking against the sudden brightness of the overhead bulbs. Charlie is in his stall as she left him so long ago; he and the Icelandic horse, Keeper, look at her with too-bright eyes reflecting the glow of the light. Anna checks the tack room. She must be the one who left the light on there. The mule’s saddle still sits on the floor where she threw it. With shaking hands, she replaces it on a saddle rack, its proper place.

She allows the border collie to come with her to check John’s workshop, the old sugarhouse. The dog cavorts around her in uneven curves, leaping into the drifts, sometimes burying its face in the snow and grunting, snapping its teeth. She gets to the door and calls the dog toward her. Its tail hits her leg in a steady cadence as she turns the bolt. She feels braver with the dog beside her as she steps inside. The air is cold and still, smells of leather and oil and maple and winter. No one has been there for many hours.

As in the barn, the lights come on with a low buzz, dim at first. Everything in John’s shop looks in order, just the way it had been the last time she’d sat with him and helped him to stamp a trail saddle with basketweave. The heavy-duty leather sewing machines sit covered and quiet. There are saddle trees arranged by material, type, and size on shelves along the wall. Rawhide stretches across the work table with patterns arranged across it. Anna recognizes most of the shapes—fenders, cantle, skirt. Shears, pliers, screwdrivers, and other tools are arranged in large coffee cans, the old metal kind that used to be in every grocery store. An antique potbellied wood-burning stove, not the kind with a window for viewing the fire, but the kind meant only for heat, sits in the center of the room. Anna touches the cold metal as she walks past. The dog follows her, leaving balls of snow from its pads on the wooden floor.

A phone and a well-used gray computer are in the corner alongside the safe. John reluctantly got internet only after one of his clients suggested they market their saddles online. Now most of their orders come through the computer. A once-colorful

banner that says Northeast Kingdom Saddle Co. drapes across the wall over it—their way of trying to make the technology seem friendlier.

The message light on the shop phone blinks red. Despite their website’s order form, John still averages about one phone order every week or two. Some people still like to do business the old way, he’d told her, preferred a voice to a screen. John’s favorite customers are the locals, though—the people he meets in person and befriends.

The dog whines and pushes against her leg. Anna has been standing still for some time. She takes one last, long look around the sugarhouse before she turns off the light. Without John, the shop is just waiting for John, as if he has merely stepped out.

Anna makes her way to the detached garage, their only remaining outbuilding, slowly. Twenty feet from the house, it has the space for two cars if they are parked carefully, and both the four-wheel-drive farm truck and the hybrid car they use for rare road trips are kept within it. A thin layer of snow-covered ice coats the driveway, just enough to make it slick. Anna doesn’t recall how long ago measurable snow fell, but it holds no tire tracks. She fights with the garage’s walk-through door, which expands and jams into its frame every winter. It opens so suddenly, with the scrape of wood against wood, that Anna must catch herself to keep from falling.

Like the workshop, the dark garage has an air of waiting, but it has a dankness that the shop didn’t have. Anna hesitates, hand on the light switch. She tries to feel the space around her and how much of it has been taken up. It smells faintly of gasoline and mildew. The concrete would be gritty if she bent to touch it, would dirty her fingers with motor oil. She can feel the grit under her feet. If the truck is gone, if John has come home and taken it, there will be an oil stain in a ragged oval where it was parked, with a few drops of fresher, darker oil from a slow leak covering it.

The border collie’s tags clink from somewhere in the darkness as it sniffs past the corners of a room it is seldom allowed to enter. Anna turns on the light.

The truck and the small car are parked side by side, too large and quiet, taking up all the space between the walls.

Anna looks at them for a long time, then whistles for the dog, and it bounds past her and out into the night.

4

What bothers Anna most is that John will be hungry. Cold, too, but it won’t be his first time caught overnight in the forest, and, as a rule, he learned in his younger days as a hiker and camper to carry his well-used pocket knife and a book of matches alongside the ink pen and notepad in his shirt pocket. He will know how to stay warm enough to survive. According to the morning’s paper, the forecast low for the night is fifteen degrees Fahrenheit. They are only a few hours away from dawn.

Though resuming the search for John while it’s dark would be fruitless, Anna can’t make herself sleep. She lies down, then gets back up. Her whole body feels as though it’s buzzing; the fatigue disorients, dizzies her. She fights the resulting nausea by chewing on a piece of ginger root. Her ankle throbs. Instead of resting, she packs and repacks saddle bags until she gets all she might need: John’s winter socks and ski gloves, hand warmer packets, glow sticks, lip balm, snack-sized bags of mixed nuts, a bottle of water, a thermos of coffee that sticks a fair amount out of the top of the buckled bag, but not enough to tip. And she will bring her cell phone, still plugged in though the charge has been at 100 percent for some time.

Exhausted, Anna wipes down the kitchen counters, then waits at the table for the darkness to lessen. She pours the scalding coffee that remains at the bottom of the carafe into a mug and gulps it. The heat makes her cough, and she spills some of the dark liquid on her shirt and onto the table, where it spreads until she wipes it with her sleeve. The pain of it has jolted her awake, though her tongue turns to cotton with the burn.

She can’t wait any longer.

She finds Keeper lying down when she enters the barn. She pauses outside his stall. He stands and shakes the straw bedding off his coat. He looks at her with large dark eyes, showing crescents of white at the edges, and nods his head. Charlie drowses with his chin resting on the stall door. Anna learned long ago how intuitive horses are—a mule even more so, since it has a share of the donkey’s more agile mind. She wonders if

Charlie might understand on some level what has happened, might know where to find John.

“Wake up, old boy,” she says. He blinks at her, and she rubs his forehead. He flicks his long ears back and nudges her shoulder. She leans against him for just a moment, swallows the lump in her throat, then goes to the tack room. Saddle, blanket, bridle, brushes—Anna, already cold through her muscle and down to her bones, fumbles for everything she needs and sets it all in a pile outside of Charlie’s stall.

The mule sighs and turns to look at her, but doesn’t object, as Anna throws the saddle pad over the dried sweat mark from the day before. His coat is dull with the salt she hasn’t taken the time to scrub away with the rubber curry, chalky where it is thickest. His back doesn’t seem tender; she had pressed it before doing anything else, running her thumb and forefinger hard down both sides of his spine to see if he’d flinch. That at least is a good sign.

She swings up onto him as soon as they are outside the barn, leaving the mounting block standing like a small black buoy against the snow. She doesn’t ride the mule often; he is wider than Keeper, and she has to open her hips painfully and twist her thighs inward to sit in a way that feels at all secure. She lets her foot with the swollen ankle hang outside its stirrup while she guides Charlie toward the barely visible gap in the trees. The entrance to the path is like a blank window in a bedroom at night, a darker shade in a tableau of darkness. Knowing that Charlie can see far better than she can in low light, she keeps the reins loose and lets him find his own way through the frozen ground.

The mule begins to tense about twenty feet from the tree line. He stops hard, startling her. He lifts his head, ears pricked forward, listening. His stance is such that, if she had been riding a horse, Anna would have prepared for a spook. But Charlie almost never spooks. That’s one reason John likes him. Anna holds the pommel of the saddle with one hand and concentrates on making herself relax while the mule stares into the woods and huffs his breath. His ribs move in and out, in and out under her legs. He feels unwieldy. She reaches down to stroke Charlie’s neck, but it’s as hard and cool as a slab of granite. “Come on,” she tells the mule. She kisses to him, urges him forward with greater energy, pushing with her seat bones. He flips his nose in the air twice to tell her no, scratches the reins through the grip of her gloves, and plants his feet.

Anna knows she can’t make a mule do anything it doesn’t want to do. But Charlie hasn’t balked before, and it frightens her. She takes a tighter hold on the pommel and tries wiggling her hanging foot to get it into the stirrup, to give her more to brace against if anything happens, but it hurts too badly to force her foot in, so she settles as deep into the seat as she can with her toes barely on the stirrup’s edge. She seesaws the reins and nudges the mule with her heels, trying to get him off-balance enough to step forward, but he resists. If she didn’t know him so well, she would call him dumb, unwilling, a coward. Against her better judgment, she pony-kicks the mule, bringing her legs hard to his sides to surprise him forward. He flinches and grunts with each kick, but he doesn’t budge.

I don’t have time for this. Anna drops the rein on one side and Charlie turns without hesitation and trots back the way they came. She slides off his back at the barn door, removes his bridle, and loops it over the saddle horn so that he carries it, tying a rope halter onto his head instead. She lets the lead rope drop to the ground. He stands ground-tied outside of the barn, eating snow while Anna saddles Keeper.

Maybe it makes more sense to take both the horse and mule, anyway, she reasons. John will need something to ride back, after all. If he is injured, she can tie him into Charlie’s saddle to keep him steady, draped over his neck, the way she has seen in old Westerns. John will know how to tell her to do that, which knots to tie. In a past life, Charlie had been used to pack out elk for hunters. He would likely carry a hurt man gently despite an awkward distribution of loadweight. Anna doesn’t wonder how she will heft an injured man onto a mule in the first place, only trusts that she can when the time comes, because she will have to. She ties a frayed lariat rope onto Keeper’s saddle in case she

needs it.

When she points him toward the barn door, Keeper nearly pulls Anna outside into the yard himself; the little horse is sharp and ready in the cold dawn air. His breath appears in a warm mist and dissolves again, steadily as the soft ticking of a watch; soon, ice will coat the guard hairs around his nose and mouth. She picks up Charlie’s lead rope and holds it while she scrambles onto Keeper’s back. She tells Keeper to walk. As the slack comes out of the lead rope, Charlie starts to walk, too, adjusting his strides to match the horse’s, and Anna shortens the rope until the big mule’s head is alongside her knee.

Soon they are facing the path again, the opening in the trees flat and ominous in the new gray light. Anna braces herself, expecting the mule to balk again and unseat her as she tries to hold on to the rope while Keeper walks on. Instead, the mule moves closer to the horse, nuzzling his large, honest face against

Keeper’s shoulder. Anna tugs the rope to back him up, worried he’ll press too hard on her leg.

Keeper enters the woods with his ears pricked and neck arched. Anna has to keep a hold on his reins to keep him from breaking into a faster gait. She is amazed how much easier the path is to follow by the weak morning sun despite the way her blunders of the night before have confused the tracks. The horse beneath her loans her its courage and some of its warmth, and she feels comfortable bundled in her winter clothing in the crisp air. Less tired than she should be. Charlie occasionally hangs back, and Anna sometimes has to stop and pull on him to get him to catch up, especially where the path narrows between the trees. Beneath the creak and metal clink of the tack and the breath of the animals, Anna hears clumps of snow falling in cascades from branches too far in the woods for her to see.

They make good time to the place the tracks split.

The strengthening daylight causes the trees to cast deep blue shadows. Anna decides to stay on the trail this time and guides Keeper straight ahead, past her own footprints leaving the straightaway like a spirit’s, footprints that she almost doesn’t remember leaving, as if she had watched someone else do it. The snow is cleaner before them, and the tracks of the almost-

forgotten injured deer sometimes cross the old, deep tracks of the mule. Behind Keeper, Charlie walks with lowered head, swiveling his ears forward and backward, listening to something only he can hear.

It’s Charlie who tells Anna that she has found John. They have been walking for a while lulled into calm, enjoying the warmth of the sun on their backs in the clearings. Keeper has settled, too, and is striding out well but not rushing or pulling on the reins.

Without warning, the mule grunts low in his throat and sits back hard, pulling the lead rope through Anna’s hand fast enough to burn a patch of material off the palm of her glove. Keeper spooks and jumps forward; Anna drops the end of

Charlie’s rope and grabs for her horse’s mane as he spins and rears, snorting. The trees flash by in dizzying arcs. Anna feels like nothing at all is underneath her. She doesn’t know how long she can hold on; her hands slip. Keeper stops and she slams back into the saddle crooked.

The horse snorts and blows, then stands trembling while Anna tries to gather herself. Her legs shake and she can put no weight on either ankle; doing so causes her feet to spasm in the stirrups. She can hear Charlie crashing back through the forest farther and farther away, and then he’s gone. Anna curses. She has never liked the mule as much as John does.

Anna swings off of Keeper, needing to catch her breath and feel solid ground. She has forgotten about her injury and lands on the wrong foot. Pain shoots up her calf into her back, and she falls sideways against the horse. She stands still, heart pounding in her ears, and buries her face in his mane. His warmth and softness reassure her. She keeps a hand on his neck for stability even as he grows impatient with her and sidesteps away.

Something is ahead of them. Something that badly frightened the mule.

At first, all she can see atop the gentle rise in the small clearing is color, a shock against the monochromatic white and gray landscape. Rust, black, orange, blue. It has been arranged together like it has some kind of intention. It’s almost beautiful. It reminds her of an amateur abstract painting she once saw in a

local gallery, the tableau of shapes something fascinating, obscene, and obscure at the same time. She hadn’t been able to look away from it. She blinks, trying to focus, and hobbles closer. There are pieces of color radiating off the center like waves of heat.

A plaid scrap of fabric, ragged at the edges, stained with brown, arranges itself at her feet. Anna takes her gloves off and picks it up. It is both wet and stiff; something is wrong about it, and her brain screams for her to drop it, but she holds it closer and makes herself look, turning it over and over in her hands. It’s familiar. Drop it, she thinks.

It’s from John’s shirt.

She follows the pieces at her feet, her mind a cold blank. She can’t make herself look ahead. When she does, the colors are too bright all the way to the center, a mass of reddish brown in the reaches of endless white. The coyotes had found him before her—him and what was left of the deer; a glance tells her that the backstraps and tenderloin have probably been stripped from the deer cleanly, with a knife, the head removed, and the rest torn and left ragged by teeth. She knows how hunger looks. The deer still has skin over its neck, fawn fur, a white tail that looks yellow against the white ground. And the body that is in the middle, the one she can’t look at. How could something so awful exist?

“John?” Anna says. But it doesn’t move, not even to breathe. Not even to look at her. She had known it wouldn’t. It has too many holes in it.

Anna closes her eyes and counts, then opens them. It is still there. She has fallen to her knees, and the melting snow seeps into her jeans, spreads to her calves and thighs, a tide of cold and numb. Keeping her head turned to the side, gulping back bile, Anna bends and touches the trousers that are coated with ice. Her hand finds a sock, then a leg, the skin cold and stiff and smooth. She retches beside it, clutching the fabric helplessly.

Choking, swallowing in gulps, she feels her way to John’s back pocket. His wallet is there, right where it ought to be. With trembling fingers, she opens it and looks at the thumb-sized photograph of the face she knows so well. It’s too thin, too pale, too flat. She grips it so hard it could cut through her palm. They hadn’t taken his “eating-out money,” ten or fifteen dollars he kept for when he and Anna didn’t want to cook.

An urge to turn the body seizes her. She can’t stand to lift it where she will see the face. She worries the face has somehow vanished, become a blur, is featureless. But maybe she can roll the body toward her and keep her eyes at the waist and be okay. She grabs the tattered clothing on the right arm and leg and pulls. It is frozen to the ground and won’t yield; she slips and falls backward twice.

She digs her feet deep into the snow to brace her lower legs. She pulls as hard as she can in jerks, but she can’t get enough leverage. The motion has, however, worked the trinkets of John’s shirt pocket out onto the ground. Shivering, Anna gathers the knife with the notched blade, the spoiled matches, John’s cell phone (she flips it open, but it is dead, with droplets of moisture along the screen), and the pad of paper he kept for notes and ideas, which has a hole in the side and is glued closed with blood, ruined.

She sits back on her heels for a long time and watches the light changing over the body, how the shadows go from one side to the other, as if it is a tree or a stone. She is as chilled as the air and can’t separate from it. Her legs fall asleep.

After a while, she tries to lie down beside John, but the position is too awkward. She doesn’t want to touch him, he isn’t real, but she takes his hand out of habit, tries to send her heat into it. She studies the rounded nails, the white scars where the awl and needle had slipped over the years and he had healed. She has no other place to be, no direction. Without him there, home is an empty box.

There’s a shuffling behind her; Keeper nudges her hard in the back, and she looks up at him blearily; she had forgotten him. He snuffles her clothes, nuzzles her cheek, warming her in little disconnected patches. She touches his forehead with its star in the shape of Alaska. She has always liked his star. Of course, he will want his evening feed. She stands and gazes at him. He looks back at her with eyes as deep and calm as the night sky.

There must be the prints of a stranger’s boots in the snow, a line going parallel to their own as he had tracked the deer by sight, waiting for it to weaken. Somewhere beside where she stands, there will be tire tracks, probably from an ATV, going off into the woods, venison in freezer bags in a cooler, the deer’s head packed in ice. She doesn’t search for the evidence; it must be so.

Sometime not long ago the poacher who had killed her husband would have flown through the darkness, getting far away from the woods where John had lived. Far away from her. But he wouldn’t have gone so fast he’d get caught with the spoils of an untagged deer. He’d do that carefully, the way he had trimmed the deer’s body to get what he wanted from it. John must have surprised him in his work, or just after he’d finished.

Later, she is glad she wasn’t able to see John’s eyes empty and meaningless, as they would have been without his life illuminating them. That she has no memory of that emptiness to carry.

She doesn’t want to find the gun and doesn’t search for it.

5

Anna wakes in bed, uncertain how she got there. She blinks against the insistent white light that spills through the open curtains. She awakes with the same feeling she has after a realistic nightmare, when she leaves sleep relieved to find that she hasn’t taken the wrong plane after all, that she hasn’t forgotten to pay an important bill, that she hasn’t set the house on fire with the stove or run over the neighbor’s cat, that she hasn’t made some other disastrous and irrevocable mistake. Daylight usually corrects the dread of such a dream. But the feeling of wrongness lingers this time. Something is off. She feels so hot and uncomfortable, clammy, like she has been sick. She still wears her clothes from the day before.

John. She sits up too quickly, and her stomach lurches.

With one hand on the wall to steady herself, she limps down the stairs, her swollen ankle sometimes banging against the lip of a step and causing her to wince. It alternates between numbness and pain, but the numbness is worse. Her head aches. In the kitchen, the previous day’s damp supplies are spread across the tile in muddy piles to dry. John’s phone sits on the counter in a bowl of dried white rice. She hasn’t tried to turn it on.

Anna can’t get her boot over her ankle, so she tapes plastic trash bags over her socks and struggles outside. Though still cold enough to sting her skin, the air is warmer than it was the day before. The ground under its white blanket squelches as she makes her way across it. The mud feels lumpy and thick beneath her toes. She slips and catches herself several times. The choppy snow in front of the barn has begun to transition into slush.

She wrestles the barn door open, and the border collie runs to greet her, frantic in its enthusiasm. Keeper whinnies and hits his stall door with his hoof, a bad habit he resorts to if she is late to feed him. The sound cracks and echoes in the barn aisle; Anna cringes and covers her ears until it stops. Keeper seems too alert. It seems strange to Anna that she is alive and safe and in the barn. Everything looks too bright, sounds too loud.

Charlie sulks in his stall with his rump toward her. He doesn’t look at her though she pauses and speaks to him. What has happened? Her memory has chasms. She must have found him after he had taken off. No one else would have caught him, stripped him of tack, and deposited him in his stall. Only her. He hasn’t been groomed; neither has Keeper. But they do have water. She must have seen to that, at least.

Anna moves through sand, unable to make herself focus. It’s as though her vision has slanted; she has no balance. She walks from Keeper’s stall to the tack room several times, forgetting what she is doing. The undeterred dog weaves around her legs. Keeper paws at his stall door again, and she sets out the

buckets.

While their beet pulp soaks, Anna tidies the tack room. All of the tack has been dumped beside the door in a pile. Barn dust and prickly bits of hay coat the saddles and pads, and the pads are still wet. She grows frustrated trying to untangle the bridles—the buckles and straps of leather seem like they have turned inside out and fastened together somehow. The cheek of Charlie’s halter has caught on something and torn so that the leather is held to itself by a bare fiber. In frustration, she lays the dirtiest tack on the table to clean later. The feed is ready.

Anna brushes the animals as they eat. Charlie only picks at his feed, but Keeper has a good appetite. Dried foam streaks Keeper’s sides, and he pins his ears if she presses too hard on his ribs. They must have had a hard ride home, she and the little horse. She tries again to remember it, but her effort only makes the headache worse.

Charlie has small scratches down his sides from branches, and a tender nose, probably because he had stepped on his lead rope and jerked his head down while he had run. He chews slowly and watches Anna with one eye while she brushes him. She doesn’t quite trust him not to bite or kick her. Every time his ears go back, she holds her breath. Is he angry or just listening? They will have to learn to trust each other again, and the thought makes Anna tired. It was John who had wanted a mule. Anna had argued that they were not as simple as horses—had longer memories, nursed tempers, held grudges, could be quirky or aggressive if not handled carefully. But that was exactly why John had wanted one. Because mules can be so incredibly loyal. But you have to earn everything they give you. You have to work to deserve a good mule.

It’s as if Charlie resents Anna for taking him back to a man that wasn’t really his version of John.

John. As she cares for the horse and mule, Anna’s day starts to feel to her almost the same as every other day. But it isn’t the same. She can see the body spread in the snow as clearly as if she still stood before it. That rough, broken shape, empty now, had been John.

She can pretend it is like every other day for a while, if she wants. She could spend hours waiting for John’s work in the shop to end, watch for him to come back inside to where she waits, where she looks through the window and feigns being busy at his approach. Her reliance on him was a secret she had kept from him, knowing he wouldn’t approve. He had probably kept small secrets from her, too; it was only natural. He probably would have told her anything, if she’d asked, but that wasn’t their way.

Anna knows she will have to learn to stop waiting for him. If she keeps waiting now, she will wait forever. She will never see him walk into the kitchen again.

She gives the horse and mule enough hay to keep them content until morning. When she leaves the barn, she calls the border collie, and it runs after her.

There is so much to do, and she doesn’t know where to start. The immensity of it overwhelms her. The coldness of her feet travels up her legs as she pushes through the sludge back to the house, wobbling on the swollen ankle. In the mudroom, she sits on the dirty floor and peels off the plastic bags, leaving them balled up by the door. She goes into the kitchen and begins to put the dried outerwear and contents of the saddlebags away. The border collie, which has never been allowed into the house, runs from room to room in a frenzy, sniffing and sneezing in the corners.

Once she finishes tidying up, Anna sits at the table and looks around the space, clean and quiet but for the hum of the refrigerator. When will John come in? He will want something hot for dinner on a day like this—she takes leftover hamburger patties from the fridge—then she glances out the window toward the shop, is ashamed and chastises herself for forgetting so quickly. Strange that nothing will change in the house now unless she changes it; she won’t find snacks left out or mysterious trackings of dirt on the tile. All waste and effort will belong to her.

The cat jumps into her lap, and she strokes it down the spine so that it lifts its back and purrs. She sees herself as if from far away, a tiny aging woman alone in a diorama, a little isolated container with toy furniture. Outside, the shadowed mountains on either side mean she lives in the tense place between colliding plates of earth, and there are spreads of kettles and kames like burial mounds, too, left by frozen rivers gone extinct, and somewhere in the stands of elm and maple, ash and pine, there are teeth. There is a gun. She shudders. Her body is dull and buzzy; she’s probably in shock. She is supposed to drink something with sugar in it for shock, isn’t she? But she can’t make herself move. It’s all right now, really, this lack of feeling.

She has other chores, and so much to do. Someone ought to call the sheriff. But she doesn’t have the energy for it just yet, doesn’t know how to say to someone else that John is gone, can’t imagine leading uniformed men back down the path with their stretcher and questions and tape. And then, to see him again . . . to know that he isn’t really there. That somehow, he isn’t there. She is tired.

The dog snores near her feet, where it lies curled and twitching its paws. Anna sits still until it gets dark outside, then she sits in darkness. She has never liked darkness before, but now it almost seems merciful, blind. When is John coming in?

The sound of plastic sliding across the countertop startles her, then the muffled thud and rainstick sound of rice spilling across the tile. The cat has knocked John’s phone onto the floor. John. Anna gasps, gropes her way out of the chair, and limps to the light switch.

The light fills the room with yellow and makes the night outside the windows look flat and black. Anna’s face floats pale against the glass. She closes the curtains and turns to the mess. She picks the phone up out of the spilled rice and studies it. White rice dust and patches of sticky grime coat it unevenly, but it doesn’t appear to be damaged. She plugs the charger in, hesitates while the kitchen clock loudly counts off the seconds, then flips it open and tries to turn it on.

At first, the trick seems like it didn’t work. She holds the power button down and counts to three, but upon its release, the screen stays black. She tries it again, holds the button for what seems like far too long. Finally, the phone sounds a metallic tone. A circle in the center of the screen spins and spins while the phone recalls itself. A notification of missed calls pops up, and Anna selects it. All of them are from her. If she selects voicemails, they will all be from her, too. The phone is slow, but it functions.

She clears the notifications and finds the texts. She has left notifications for John there, as well. The last one John sent was the one to her. It has a timestamp of 11:05 a.m., two days ago. Two days ago, that’s all. But she hadn’t gotten it then. Everything had gone wrong. It must have been delayed by lack of service, perhaps by some cruel circumstance, a solar flare. It wouldn’t be the first time that happened. So when John had told her he was nearly there, what he must have really meant was not that he was close to home, but that he knew he was close to finding the

deer.

She wouldn’t have been worried yet. She would have been close to opening a can of tomato soup. The hands holding the phone shake; she looks at them as though they are separate from her body, and she doesn’t bother trying to control them.

When did she last try to call John? When had she given up on reaching him that way? If she understands the time, maybe she can reorient herself in this unfamiliar place. She navigates to the call log. She had called him thirty-seven times, the last one yesterday morning at 4:00. She selects the outgoing call log and freezes.

There, at 1:38 p.m. two days ago, a call had been made. John had tried to call 911. It has the red X beside it in the log, indicating it had failed to go through. The call before that, at 1:36, showed that he had tried to call her, too. Anna stares blankly at it. Oh.

She slips to the kitchen floor still holding the cell phone. Its charger pulls from the socket and clatters down beside her. Rough sobs overwhelm her and bruise her ribs with their force; she can’t breathe, and the border collie pads to her in alarm and rubs against her, whining and licking her face.

John had still been alive when the poacher left. He had been hurt, but alive. He had been waiting for her. How long had it taken for him to die alone among the silent trees, knowing that no one would come for him? Was it before the coyotes came?

Anna wakes some time later on the tile, propped against the cabinets, cramped and aching, cold but for where the dog lies against her side. What time is it? She squints to see the clock that ticks from the kitchen wall. When will John come in?

6

Anna decides not to have a funeral. Neither she nor John had ever purchased life insurance; their mortgage had been paid off several years before, and they had had no children. Besides the cost of a funeral, there is the difficulty of arranging one. Anna can’t bring herself to do it. The calls and the decisions. The sympathy, the questions, the morbid curiosity. What food to serve. What kind of flowers to buy. It’s worse even than planning a wedding—there isn’t any chance for happiness at the end.

And where to even start? Anna can’t convince herself that it matters. John wouldn’t have cared anything about flowers, would have rejected the ceremony of death and resented the invasion of their home and privacy. A funeral would be a formality at best attended by Anna, a handful of meddlesome neighbors, perhaps, and John’s local customers, people who could just as easily be strangers.

Anna had been closest to John and needs no more closure than what she has gotten. She can’t justify making such an effort for the benefit of people who had only been at the periphery of their lives.

No, there’s no good reason for a funeral.

Anna is alone for the first time. The ankle, which had not been badly injured as Anna thought, heals. The days pass in silence and all have the same shape. Without John, she has no reason to use her voice. It starts to sound strange to her when she does. She speaks rarely to the animals in passing, and the sound of it almost always surprises her. She enters their world, one in which language depends mostly on movement or posture and sound isn’t often needed for understanding. Anna, the cat, the border collie, the horse, the mule, and the chickens live together in peaceful, if bewildering, routine. Every day, the same.

Anna has no real reason to cook meals, either. She twice forgets and makes something that John would have liked, but ends up throwing the food out when she realizes what she has done, feels guilty, and loses her appetite. She is often angry with herself. She lives on cereal until the milk sours. Then she lives on the family-sized bag of potato chips that once had been lost on the top shelf of the pantry. Over two weeks, she loses fifteen pounds, but this shrinking doesn’t bother her. She is drawn in, unattached to her body or its hunger.

The cat eventually runs out of food. She pours the last few kernels from the crinkles of the bag into the bowl, but it isn’t nearly enough to get through the day. The cat gulps and crunches, then rubs its lithe figure against her leg, asking for more. Anna shuffles through what is left in the pantry. There is no canned food left for it, either. No tuna, no chicken. There’s nothing that would be healthy for a cat, even if a cat could be made to eat it.

She will have to go into town.

Anna hasn’t driven for a long time, though she renews her driver’s license by mail every time it comes close to expiring, and as far as the state of Vermont knows, she is physically capable and in good standing. Really she hasn’t felt safe enough to drive, isn’t alert enough, reacts slowly. But there’s no way around it. She leans against the counter indecisively for several minutes while the cat meows, running through scenarios in her head—slipping on ice and running off the road, swerving too late to avoid a loose cow or moose, flipping over and over, ground and sky rushing past the windows until she lands in the ditch, helpless and bleeding— She jerks the keys from their hook.

The garage smells of grease and clutter. It exhales dry chill and staleness like a freezer.

The farm truck has snow chains on the tires; she unlocks it and gets in. In the dusty interior, she runs her hand over the smooth steering wheel, over the cracked dash, feels the handle of the gearshift. What is driving like? She almost has it. If she doesn’t overthink herself into inaction, she can do it. She turns the key and the truck shudders and dies. She tries again, and it catches and holds. It has over half a tank of gas.

She inches out into the driveway and puts the truck in park. The garage door closes behind her with finality while the truck idles. She touches again the gearshift, steering wheel, gauges, as if she is handling artifacts in a museum. She tries the blinker both ways. She turns the lights on and off, then back on. She swipes the windshield wipers once across the windshield, though the windshield fluid is frozen, and the rubber edges screech and only smear the dust.

The road lies ahead of her by about fifty yards. She eases the truck into drive and carefully lifts her foot. The truck coasts too quickly to the end of the driveway and skids to a stop partway into the road. Her knees scream with the effort of braking. Anna grits her teeth and puts one hand on her right knee to massage it. She has a long way yet to go.

Belbridge is about ten miles away—three by dirt road and the rest paved and winding. It is a proud, if poor, town. Its residents boast to outsiders that the famous Governor Aiken had Belbridge specifically in mind when he named the Northeast Kingdom—that the town’s independent inclinations, the rugged beauty of its land, and the plentifulness of its game animals evoked royal associations. Belbridge hosted many of the governor’s fishing trips. The snowshoe, bait, and sporting goods store he frequented still stands.

Anna has always felt invisible in town, overlooked. People spoke to John instead of her.

She takes a deep breath, flips the blinker on, and turns away from the house. The truck noses forward onto the street. She straightens it and lets it crawl forward until she gets the feel of it. She pushes the gas, but nothing happens at first; she pushes harder and her breath catches as the truck jumps forward. The wheel shakes in her hands. John had intended for years to fix the loose steering.

The level of alertness Anna has to keep up to drive exhausts her. At every thick clump of trees, she expects a deer to run across. She worries that hikers or horseback riders will appear without warning ahead of her, that she will hit them, ruin all of their lives. Maybe a timber hauler has lost some logs in the road up ahead, and her truck will barrel into them; she will be stranded. Maybe a milk truck has stalled. Such things have been known to happen.

At the stop sign before the pavement, she puts the truck in park again and rests. Her hands ache from gripping the wheel; her back and shoulders ache from the way she crouches forward; her knees ache with pushing the gas pedal and then the brakes over and over. She sighs and leans back.

A honk startles her, and she looks into the rearview mirror to see a car waiting. She turns on the blinker, waves apologetically to the driver behind her, and turns onto the highway.

At Belbridge Grocery, she finds a space away from other cars. She listens to the engine click while it cools. Sitting alone and tired in the truck reminds her of her last day at work, years ago. She and John had known she was sick, but not what was wrong. She never looked sick on the outside. She had arrived home from the office a few minutes before he had, and he had found her sleeping in her car in the garage, the overhead door closed, her car still running. No, she had told him, she hadn’t been depressed, nothing like that. Only very tired. The garage had been cool and quiet when she closed the overhead door, and she had simply fallen asleep. He had been so shaken after that. Had he not come home in time, she may have died. The incident had at least shortened the list of possible diagnoses: multiple sclerosis, chronic fatigue, an autoimmune or neurological disorder. Anna sits in the cab of the truck watching people go in and out of Belbridge Grocery until enough cold air seeps in to drive her out.

The store seems too bright and open. The labels on the shelves, seen together, are garish. The piped-in music is too loud and fast. It occurs to Anna that she may as well stock up so that she can limit her trips, so besides cat food, dog food, and carrots for the horses and chickens, she picks up items that won’t spoil—cans of soup, canned pasta, canned milk, peanut butter, John’s favorite wine. She fills her basket, though she hasn’t felt real hunger for a long time. It makes her feel better somehow to know that her pantry will be full. It feels normal.

The cashier recognizes her.

“Here without your other half today?” she asks.

Anna studies her name tag but can’t read the name. “Yes, I’m afraid so,” she says.

“I hope John is well.” The scanner beeps steadily in the background.

“He’s busy in his shop. Lots of orders,” Anna says. That she can lie so easily surprises her. But the grocery store is not the place to talk about a dead husband, or how quickly one’s entire world can change.

“Well, I hope he likes soup,” the cashier says, holding up a can and smiling. “This is enough to last through the apocalypse.”

Anna’s words come as if unburied from a great depth. “It warms you up in the winter,” she says.

“I prefer mulled mead, myself,” the cashier tells her.

A man Anna doesn’t recognize gets into line behind her. Anna pays for her groceries and stands out of the way while she digs her key out of her coat pocket.

“How are you today, Mackie?” the cashier asks.

“Fair to middlin’,” he says.

“Is that right?”

“You seen any strangers in here?” he asks.

“No, not lately. But I’ve been off for the last couple of days. Why?”

“Poachers again,” the man says. “Cut my fence and took a whitetail. They cut off its head, took some backstraps, and left most of it to rot.”

“Harder to get caught that way,” the cashier suggests. “The meat’s easier to hide.”

They both notice Anna staring at them at the same time.

“Ma’am?” the man says. “Are you all right?”

“Where do you live?” Anna asks. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

“West of town a few miles,” the man says.

Out toward our place. “What can we do about them, do you think?” Anna asks. “The poachers?”

“You got poachers at your place this year, too?”

Anna hesitates. “We’ve seen signs,” she says. “We’re worried we might.”

“Well, there’s not much you can do. Even if you catch them red-handed, they’re hard to convict,” he tells her. “You should put up some trail cameras. Check your fences and gates and make sure they’re all still up and working. If one poacher sees that someone else has plowed through your fence, he’ll be less shy about going in himself.”

“Thank you,” Anna says.

“Yes, ma’am. And make sure you post No Trespassing signs everywhere. That way you’d have a leg to stand on in court.”

“No Trespassing. Got it,” Anna says.

“Ma’am?” the man says.

“Yes?”

“Be careful. These guys are out in the woods getting drunk and shooting at whatever moves. Lots of them have buck fever.”

Buck fever, Anna thinks to herself. She should look that up later.

The man is saying, “Most are just idiot kids, but some of them will do anything not to get caught. It wasn’t more than a few years ago that a poacher killed a park ranger by beating him to death with one of those big flashlights.” He looks at her with his brow wrinkled in concern. “What I mean is, don’t get too close. Let them do what they’re going to do, then call the police after they leave.”

“I will,” Anna says.

As she leaves, the talk turns, as it often does, to weather.

She ought to do more while she is in town—buy the No Trespassing signs that the man suggested, replace John’s lost rifle—but by the time she has loaded the groceries into the passenger side of the truck, Anna has run out of energy.

The truck starts more easily than it did before, but she has to back out of the space, and turning her head to check for parking lot traffic hurts her neck. She puts the truck in reverse, and after a couple of near-misses, angles out of the spot despite the car that has to stop behind her. Its driver gestures at her, but she is out; she waves and mouths I’m sorry, then puts the truck into drive with relief.

The way home seems much longer and colder than the way into town. Clouds have matted together again; the sky hovers close and gray, stifling her. The road has grown busier, and she doesn’t feel comfortable driving at the speed of the traffic. The cars stack up behind her on the curves and fly by her on the straight with breathtaking acceleration, then swerve in front of her with just enough clearance to avoid clipping the truck’s bumper. Anna feels herself starting to panic. A mile or two before she gets back to the dirt road, there’s a wider shoulder, and she allows herself to park there for half an hour until her hands stop shaking and her heart rate slows.

By the time she pulls into her garage, not bothering to back into it the way John used to, exhaustion has overtaken her body. She hasn’t felt such a widespread aching since the last time she was bucked off a horse, in her twenties. If not for the danger of the food freezing and bursting its containers, she would leave it in the truck until morning. She unloads it instead an armload at a time, carrying it all to the porch first, and then taking it from the porch into the kitchen.

The cat eats its kibble as if it is starving. It’s so eager in its hunger, though its hunger was short-lived. Anna decides she should probably heat up some soup for herself.

Chicken and rice. She waits for the watery stuff to cook, for the gelatin of chicken fat to melt, watching the tiny cardboard cubes of meat float in the pan as she stirs. Once the soup steams, she pours it into a bowl and sits down at the table. She eats a few bites, letting the liquid sit on her tongue for several seconds before swallowing. It warms her, makes her feel cared for.

The cat finishes crunching its dinner and leaves; the kitchen falls into silence. The border collie snores from somewhere in the next room. Anna can hear the breeze in the tops of the trees that ring the yard. She hadn’t meant to eat the entire bowl of soup, but it is gone, leaving a line of yellow grease that clings to the sides of the porcelain.

For a while, Anna sits at the table waiting, as she so often had when it was almost time for John to come in from his work. It had felt as though her day couldn’t move forward otherwise. She misses the rush of cold from the opening door, the sound of his soles hitting the floor as he stomped the snow from his boots.

She clears her dishes and drops the empty soup can into the trash bin in the pantry. The receipt from the grocery store has fallen onto the floor beside it, and she picks it up. She hadn’t even paid attention to the total. John’s work had been their only source of income. How much money does she have left in

checking? How long will their savings account last? She has no idea; he had always done the finances, told her when to pay each bill. She frowns. The logistics of her survival haven’t occurred to her before with so much else on her mind. She folds the grocery receipt carefully and puts it into the pile of bills on the counter that will soon come due, intending to make a budget soon.

She calls the shop phone to hear John’s voice on the outgoing voicemail message, as she has gotten into the habit of doing two or three times a day, and always before trying to sleep. But instead of his mild tenor, a machinated female voice tells her that the mailbox is full.

After looking at the rates listed in the paper, Anna decides not to run an obituary, either. There doesn’t seem to be a point in spending the money if there’s no memorial or funeral to announce. She can just as easily tell people the news one at a time. Surely John’s friends know what sort of person he was, what his many talents and accomplishments were, and don’t need a paragraph to prove it. Don’t need to remind each other of something no one who had appreciated John could possibly forget.

Mild-mannered John. He had seemed so amiable that people who didn’t know better tried to take advantage of him, but they soon ran into that unwavering core of strength that Anna had come to rely on. He gave much, but he had never compromised. John, who besides being devoted to Anna, had adored stray pets and the children of strangers, who always stopped when he saw a baby and tried to make it laugh. She had seldom seen him lose his temper, and never for his own sake—because he was wronged—but because someone or something else had been wronged. It was for her that they had moved to this cold, lonely region where she might feel safe from the uncertain, often cruel world that had seemed always just outside the window before.

Here, they had finally been able to build a home exactly as they had wanted it, or close to it. Here, her sickness and all of her faults had become manageable. She had regained some control of her life.

John, who had been more social than she was, had given up a fuller existence, perhaps, to provide her with one of relatively little stress, one in which she could heal from her unpredictable limitations and a lifetime of hurts and worries she couldn’t count. It was John who had shown her that care for something could so often be equated with sacrifice. John who had pushed without complaint through the snow in the darkness to make sure the animals’ water hadn’t frozen. John who couldn’t let a deer bleed to death slowly and painfully. John hadn’t ever been able to stand seeing the innocent suffer, and he had seen her as an innocent.

Over the years, the thing they had learned to value most had been their peaceful wilderness home, of which they were both a part. John had helped her through illness, through sorrow and loss, through all the unintentional disappointments of a well-meaning marriage, gracefully and with good humor. And she had loved him.

An obituary wouldn’t really be important to anyone but her—she is the one who would cut it from the newsprint and keep it—but she doesn’t need it.

7

Anna opens the door of the saddle shop. The dust lifts into the air where she stands and floats in the morning light. She sneezes. The way the shop has changed during its short time without John in it surprises her. The air smells dank; a mustiness has settled over the clean oiled scent of the leather. The corners hold cobwebs.

Anna can see the red light on the shop phone blinking from its corner. She makes her way to it, the border collie zigzagging in front of her so that she nearly trips. She lifts the phone off of its cradle and dials into voicemail.

The messages sound like they come from far away.

“This is Colin,” the first says, “checking on the progress of the saddle I ordered in October. Could you please give me a call back?”

“Hello, my name is Ondrea Castille. I was looking at your saddles online and wanted to speak to you about possibly placing an order. I have a horse with mutton withers and nothing seems to fit her. Can you help?”

“Yes, you have my saddle in for repairs. Fixing the seat and re-stitching around the skirt. I was wondering if I could pick it up soon? This seems to be taking a long time.” Anna winces at the irritation that hovers under the polite words.

There are eleven new messages total, four from clients checking the status of their orders, and seven from people who want to place orders.

There are several saddles in differing states of disrepair or construction scattered around the sugarhouse. Anna had intended to delete the messages, clear the mailbox, and retreat back to her kitchen, but the voices nag at her more than she expected them to. Does she owe them an explanation? A refund? John would never ignore his customers, she is certain. He would be ashamed that they had received no answers. He would try to make it right, keep them happy. The dog, out of habit, has settled on its saddle blanket bed near the cold woodstove, as though it plans to be there for hours. Anna feels bad about that, too. Despite the shop’s chill, John’s presence lingers in it as though he has only just stepped out. He had loved this place. The dog wags its tail as Anna works on lighting the firewood that had been piled inside the stove by John in readiness for his next day’s work.

Anyone should be able to light a fire when the wood has been prepared for them. Anna holds the lighter irresolutely, studying how John had stacked the wood, as a sort of scaffold with the largest logs on the bottom and the smaller logs perpendicular over those; the top layer is kindling. She tries to memorize its architecture. This must be the best way to build a fire. Shouldn’t anyone who lives in the Kingdom find starting a fire as natural as breathing?

She lights the kindling and it catches and flares bright orange, but smokes and burns out within seconds. “Huh,” she says. The dog doesn’t even raise its head. John used to make this look so easy. In frustration, Anna spends several minutes trying to light kindling and some of the smaller pieces of firewood, holding the lighter on underneath them until her thumb hurts from pressing down the igniter wheel. At best, she gets a weak flame that struggles and then dies. It can’t burn; it is malnourished and fickle.

Of course, fire is alive, it needs something; it needs air. Something to feed it. Anna lights the edge of a bit of kindling and, instead of closing the front of the stove when the kindling catches this time, she leaves it wide open. She steps back as the paper turns black, then coughs when the space near the stove fills with smoke. The fire has gone out again.

She has almost decided to give up and accept the cold when the wind whistling in the chimney pipe reminds her that the stove has a flue that allows air in. She studies the diagram molded into the metal of the cast-iron stove under the flue lever. One side means open, one side means closed. She isn’t sure which is which, but she moves the lever to the opposite side of where it was.

After much trial and error, long after the dog has shifted to a quieter corner of the shop, Anna can feel the warmth begin to radiate from the fire she has built. She looks at the clock; it has taken her just under two hours to light a fire that keeps. And she has no idea how to put it back out if needed. So she will stay, she tells herself, until it burns out.

The heat emanates into the air around the stove, and she stands close to it until her calves get too hot, enjoying the improvement in temperature.

Though hungry again, she doesn’t want to eat. She takes her time walking around the sugarhouse looking at the saddles. She finds the one that must be the repair order in the voicemail and looks at the yellow tag John had attached. It shows the customer’s name, phone number, and address—a local. John didn’t make this saddle; its latigo keeper has the stamp of one of the bigger brands. He had finished replacing the suede seat and had stitched a looping pattern into it, but the skirt still needs stitching, and the saddle needs to be cleaned— “knock the dust off,” as John would say.

Anna walks to the row of leather-stitching machines and removes the cover from the one John most often used. It still has thread in it. She had watched John work with this machine many times, running the leather under the thick needle with slow,

deliberate movement, but she has never used it herself. She sits in front of it, turns it on, and lifts the foot. How different could it be from sewing a spring jacket or mending a blanket for a horse, anyway?

But there is no way to maneuver a heavy Western saddle in order to stitch it the way she would a piece of cloth or canvas. Even if the table wasn’t in the way of her turning the saddle under the foot under the machine, she doesn’t have the strength to turn it. It weighs somewhere between thirty and thirty-five pounds. Surely John hadn’t used the machine to do repairs like this one. Or he had had some trick at his disposal which she doesn’t.

Anna sets the saddle on the floor and looks around the sewing table. On the shelves behind the machines, next to the bins of awls and rows of scrap leather, she spots a spool of thick white thread with a needle stuck through it. Of course—the holes had been made in the leather of this saddle long ago—she can stitch the skirt by hand, using the holes that are already there. It will be tedious work, but she can do it.

She threads the needle and sits with her eyes closed, trying to concentrate. She hadn’t paid enough attention to John. He had done repairs like this, sewing, his hands going in and out with a regular sway, a waltz, one-two-three, one-two-three. That’s it: the needle ought to be in the middle of the entire length of thread, the thread shouldn’t be folded over. She had found that strange before, having only done home sewing herself. But this type of sewing differs; it’s like a knot is tied front to back with each stitch. Yes, now she can picture it.

After finding the hole on the near side of the skirt, Anna runs the needle through it, enjoying the hiss of the smooth thread through the opening. Now that she has begun, finishing is a matter of weaving. She uses an awl from one of the metal cups of tools to push the thread from the back through, crossing it with the thread from the front. She pulls each stitch tight. After

several minutes, she has created a neat row that runs along the edge of the skirt and under the fender of the stirrup. So far, so good. There is much to go, but it’s a start.

She loses track of time as she works, stopping only to feed the animals. Sometimes she gets the thread tangled up in itself and has to work it back through and fix it. Unsnarling it can be difficult with the poor circulation in her hands. She runs out of thread once and has to tie off the stitches and open another spool. By the time she finishes, it’s dark out. Tired, Anna steps back to look at the completed skirt, her hair stuck to her clammy face, fingers bruised from near-misses with the needle. No, it isn’t perfect, but it is probably good enough. It will pass.

Since she has stopped concentrating on the sewing, feeling returns sharply to her fingers. They are cold and cramped. The fire has gone out. Cracked orange coals glow in the ashes. She throws another log in, and the stove is miraculously still hot enough for the wood to catch on its own. I can do this, she tells herself.

She brushes the saddle off, oils it, and buffs it with a soft towel. With her throat tight, she picks up the shop phone and calls the number on the yellow tag, hoping it isn’t too late yet; it feels much later than it actually is.

The phone rings several times before someone answers. “Hello?”

“Yes,” Anna says, her voice thin and tinny. “This is Anna with Northeast Kingdom Saddle Company. I’m calling for Walt.”

“Speaking.”

“I’m so sorry for the delay.” She clears her throat to stall; she should have thought of what to say before she dialed. “My husband John . . . has been ill,” she says. “But he’s just finished your saddle repairs if you’d like to pick it up.”

“Just in time,” the voice says. “My horse has been eating his head off for the last few weeks and forgetting all his training. Could I pick it up tonight? I’d like to work him tomorrow.”

They make the arrangements and she hangs up. The total, according to John’s yellow tag, comes to four hundred dollars: three hundred for the beautiful new suede seat, one hundred for the stitching. It seems a good wage for the work the two of them have done.

While she waits for the customer to arrive, Anna reads the yellow tags on the other saddles. Three of them are stock saddles—saddles John made in his spare time to sell for a slightly lower price than the custom ones when a client didn’t want to wait. There are three well-worn demo saddles of different tree widths. The other five are custom orders. John had written the details out with care; the first says: “Size fifteen inch, seven inch gullet, wide tree, flared bars. No horn. Oak leaves tooling. Natural leather with chocolate seat.” Each has a completion date penciled in. So far, only one is late, but the rest are coming due within two weeks.

At a knock at the door, Anna calls, “Come in.” It hadn’t occurred to her to straighten up the shop before the customer appeared, but at least the shop is warm.

A balding older man bundled in a tan coat steps inside and spots his saddle immediately on its stand by the sewing table.

“Anna, I think you said? I’m Walt,” he says, and nods toward the saddle. “That one mine?”

“Yes,” Anna says, lightheaded. “It’s all done.”