So he turned and walked right past me toward the dining room.

I asked where Palmer was.

Fern didn't pause but pointed behind him. "He's in the Office clearing out mess. Asked me to help him but I declined."

I stepped out into the cold midday light, blank as any chemical fire, and trotted to the Office.

I'd scarcely ever been in there, no farther than the doorsill. But when I gave the door a light knock, n.o.body replied. I turned the k.n.o.b and took a few steps in. The room was bigger than I'd expected, bigger than most of the rooms in the main house. It seemed perfectly square with a pine-board ceiling that rose to a peak and a cast-iron stove in the midst of the floor. The floor was beautiful heart-pine boards at least a foot wide. Even I knew there were no such trees left alive in the world. And the only furniture I saw at first was a big old roll-top desk with a thousand stuffed pigeonholes. If this was the only available private place Palmer knew of, it could be made to serve. It looked as emptied and long abandoned as any ship ransacked by pirates and left adrift in the midst of nowhere.

A voice said "I hope you know how to make curtains."

It startled me and I couldn't find the source. So I froze in place.

To be sure, it was Palmer--but Palmer changed in the past quick hour as much as Fern had changed in these recent months. And like my brother, my husband seemed a full decade older. He was half laid back on the dark brown blanket of an old bra.s.s bed. A shotgun was lying across his thighs.

Somehow it seemed normal. Guns were as much a part of country life as they are of the public schools today. Maybe Palmer intended to hunt after dinner or finish off any squirrels or swallows that might have invaded the premises. I looked at the only two windows, tall and glazed with wavy panes--no trace of shutters or curtains. So I said we could tack up old bedsheets if his mother had any. And then I could probably sew something better, awkward as I was. When I looked back to Palmer, he'd laid the gun on the floor like a low wall between him and me. I said "I trust that thing's unloaded."

He said "No, sorry to disappoint you again. That's all I do."

I could see Palmer was in some mood I'd never found him in till now, distant and edgy. I told him "This far, I don't have big complaints." It was true enough to let me smile.

That seemed to free him or jog him loose in the feelings that held him. He extended his long right arm straight toward me.

And I said "What?" though I guessed I knew.

In the times that Palmer had brought me to him, I'd come to think I knew all he was. But in that next quarter hour in the Office he'd swept clean for us--with us open to view by any pa.s.ser and his mother's huge meal chilling on the table--he labored on me with a kind of wild purpose and aim that were freshly revealing. I still can't say what exactly was revealed. His face continued to look like Palmer. The heat of his body and hands were the same, even in that unheated room. But the charge that was in him, the voltage itself was as high as sheet lightning.

And it clearly ran him, not vice versa. For the first full time, I was totally excluded so far as I could tell from Palmer's eyes which were open but elsewhere. He was solving in his way some equation that had blocked his mind. And working it out caused him obvious pain, though once he was done and had caved in on me, he felt like every tired child I'd held.

Just at that moment I guessed he'd hacked a path through the recent sadness of Major's death and his own regret to be chained back down in his old rut here, his mother's servant. But he never said that, not then nor later, and I may well have been describing myself. I know anyhow that, with all the hard times we endured between us in years to come, from that time onward I mostly knew I mattered to Palmer in the direst way. Who else could he have found on Earth, in our spa.r.s.e corner of s.p.a.ce at least, to take calm part in the secret plays he staged in his tall crowded skull?

When we'd stood and composed ourselves, we went to the house in perfect silence. If you'd been watching from a reasonable distance, you might have thought we were fifty years old each and that speech or touch was as unnecessary to us as to oxen in a field. But I at least didn't feel that separate, and apparently no one in the main house thought we'd parted enough to bear the insertion of the thinnest blade between us. They smiled to greet the sight of our faces.

And it turned out that they'd held the whole hot meal. Not one question was asked, then or ever, about where we'd been or why we were late. And it was only midway through the food before Palmer for the second time called me the full name I was so seldom called.

When Miss Olivia made some mild remark about wishing I'd get more rest for myself--that my eyes had looked tired ever since the wedding--I said "Miss Olivia, there was one long week you didn't see my eyes. I'm as rested as the sunrise."

Palmer turned on his mother and said "Leave her alone. Roxanna's a thoroughbred saint. She lives round the clock. You let her be." Everybody drew one long deep breath, startled or scared. Then everybody laughed, thank G.o.d, as I still do just to recall it. A saint, by Palmer's and most folks' meaning, is just a person who never blocks your path but grins and yields all paths to your will.

It went on more or less that way for a year and two months. I made us some thick curtains fast, and gradually we turned the Office into a fairly pleasant room. The main house didn't have running water either, so we didn't feel especially deprived. But Palmer cleaned and polished the iron stove, and that took the chill off the worst days and nights. Of course we ate most meals in the house, though occasionally Palmer would come in at dusk wet and cold from estimating miles of timber and ask me if I could just bring our supper out from the main house and we'd eat alone by oil light.

Movies hadn't yet made lamplight romantic, and I remember it mainly for the

smell and the chimneys to clean and the danger to hair and clothes. Still I think my husband and I took pleasure in staying close inside a small hoop of soft light with n.o.body else anywhere in view. And oil light did show Palmer's face at its best--strong as a great head carved by a sculptor in search of the image of patient strength.

The population of the Slade place went down in late February when Ferny announced one evening that he'd be heading back home in two days. Did anybody have last ch.o.r.es for him? Truth to tell there'd been no genuine work for Fern once the major was buried. For a while he'd invented small jobs for himself--there's always plenty of ruin around a country house--but Miss Olivia had told him she wouldn't be able to continue the modest sum Major had paid him for help and company. Fern knew that wasn't stinginess.

The Slades were no more wealthy than most people up in the north of the county back then. It would take more than a hundred years, not till the 1970's and eighties, before that part of the world had even half recovered from the slavery war. And by that time of course, you couldn't persuade a smart young person to live anywhere but in a town of at least fifty thousand with numerous malls.

Furthermore I knew that our father was pressing on Ferny to come back down and help him in the store. So n.o.body felt any shock at his leaving, though I knew how much I'd miss his presence. The morning he was set to leave, Palmer had driven to Roanoke Rapids to pay off various merchants he owed. Miss Olivia was busy with her duties.

But I was as idle as any stalled car when Fern didn't knock but walked right through the Office door with no prior warning. I must have been dozing because his footsteps brought me upright from the bed where I'd lain down after breakfast, feeling not only tired but bored to distraction and halfway reading d.i.c.kens' Tale of Two Cities for at least the third time. I smoothed my hair and got to my feet.

Fern took a chair and said "Rest on. You need to. But I need to tell you one or two things before I go." He motioned for me to lie back, but I declined and took the other chair.

Fern had never had trouble saying what he

meant, and he started right in. "I know that you and Miss Olivia are both too big to live together--"

Lean-framed as I was, I had to laugh at the picture that suggested.

But Fern waved me silent. "I'm thinking in terms of your minds, not your bodies, girl. So I want you to know that I told Palmer yesterday how soon he'd need to move you out of here. I couldn't have told him if I hadn't already seen how restless he was in these old tracks of his. He told me he was watching for the first good chance to put the Slade place in some good other hands and move you and him to somewhere better."

What I said next shocked me as much as Ferny. "The main chance," I said, "would be Miss Olivia dying." I tried to cover it by laughing again.

But Ferny was earnest as any good butcher knife. "That would do it," he said. "But Palmer's too kind to hasten her on, and she could live another forty years."

I asked if he had any clear idea of Miss Olivia's age. I've never been good at judging age.

Fern said "I know, to the month and day. She'll be fifty-nine on the first day of spring."

That was younger than I'd guessed. She could easily see me into the grave.

I said "Well with Palmer and me out here in the separate Office, things could be a lot worse."

Ferny's head shook hard. "A year from now if you're not out of here, you'll be near dead if not insane." Fern was the only member of my family who'd ever discussed my hard times with me.

I almost wondered if he'd lost his mind in these sad months, but I didn't bring it up. I told him I felt as strong as I'd ever been.

Fern looked up and down me. "You look it but you're already pregnant."

This will be hard to take in modern times. But while I technically understood the connection between adult love and oncoming children (and though I'd imagined being pregnant the year before), it had scarcely crossed my mind since marriage that I might have started a baby this soon. Palmer hadn't mentioned it nor anyone else. And I'd been so involved with learning the way my husband thought and felt and fending off my own creeping

boredom that it hadn't grown into a fear or a hope yet. I'd likewise had no physical sign I could recognize. So I told Fern he was out of his mind. Where on Earth had he got that notion?

He said "I can see it."

"I surely can't."

Fern pointed to the smoky mirror behind me. "Take a good long look."

At first I laughed but my brother's seriousness finally made me get up and look. I've mentioned that mirrors never meant much to me. I only used them to comb my hair or to check on any sudden blemish. I probably hadn't spent a total of fifteen minutes with this particular mirror since the honeymoon ended. So I told myself that the hazy strangeness across my eyes and the firmer cheekbones were nothing but symptoms of ongoing time. I was aging steadily like the rest of the world. Still when I turned back to Fern and said "Wrong!" I found myself smiling deep inside at the distant chance he might have stumbled on amazing news.

Fern stood up then and just said "All right, I'll see you at Christmas." I'd promised Father we'd come home for Christmas.

I gave him a kiss on his fine broad forehead and stood in the door to see him go. He'd got all the way down the steps and was walking fast before I whispered loudly to call him back.

Twenty feet away he paused and waited. I asked him again where he'd got his idea about my condition.

He looked behind him toward the main house before he spoke, and then he whispered too. "Larkin told me last night in a dream."

I knew by his face he wasn't joking. Yet I didn't believe any such thing could happen, so I was left wondering again if all these months of sadness and country idleness had confused my brother for a while or forever.

Fern held in place for a silent moment and fixed on me like a book or a set of vital instructions he meant to memorize.

I let him look and I tried to search him almost as closely. Just in those few minutes in the Office, his brown eyes had darkened and clouded further. And the few yards between us seemed a desperate distance we could never reclaim. I well knew that, even in our narrow world where

families tended not to scatter, Fern and I were changed forever and all because of him trying to give me a birthday surprise when I turned twenty.

Lark was long gone. I'd made my choice of Palmer Slade and didn't regret it, and Ferny Dane was out of a friend and his first employer. I knew he was young enough to start a grown life, and I honestly thought he'd do that now. But even so it was painful to watch my good brother turn his back then and head toward a world that soon turned out to hold nothing for him--nothing that could save him.

In another ten days Miss Olivia found me alone in the kitchen and asked me the same thing, politely and gently. Was I expecting?

I told her she was wrong but didn't ask why she suspected as much. I honestly thought I was telling her the truth. So it was not till the first day of spring, that I really began to know for myself. My monthlies had never been all that reliable. And I hadn't paid much attention to their lateness, even in the face of recent suspicions.

But then we got in sight of Miss Olivia's birthday, and Palmer asked me one evening if I'd like to ride with him into town the following day to buy his mother something. I took the chance gladly, to get a little fresh air and maybe see my family. We managed to do both. The day was bright and warm. The drive was easy and we got there in time for dinner with Muddie and Father. Leela was visiting friends in Halifax some twenty miles east. Ferny was off on a trip to Raleigh hunting a job there. He and Father weren't working well together.

As we left Muddie caught me alone for a minute and asked if I was "bearing up." It would turn out later that Fern had told her he was sure I was expecting.

At first I didn't hear the hint in Muddie's question, and I told her I had seldom felt stronger. Though I'd heard that kind of concern all my life, I was somehow unable to hear the worry in her and Miss Olivia's questions. Older women back then often looked on pregnancy as a hard dark tunnel of sickness and pain maybe ending in death for the woman, her baby or both at once.

That common dread was not unrealistic if you looked back at the old b.l.o.o.d.y record of

hemorrhage and sudden overwhelming infection that were common as head colds and killed young mothers like flies, a fact that's all but forgotten today in America at least. One visit to any old cemetery will show you how many men's graves from those former times are surrounded by two or three dead wives whereas today many dyed-blond widows spend hours a week tending several husbands' graves.

I'd gone to school with a number of children whose mothers had died the day they gave birth or within a week thereafter. If you listened to any one of them closely, you could hear their belief--for the rest of their lives--that they'd killed their mothers. Imagine what it did to sons and husbands. If a man had an ounce of sense or conscience he had to realize that, every time he took his pleasure with his wives, he might be tripping a process which would kill that mate in under a year. Maybe it was fate itself which kept me from sharing such a common sense of fear, but why was I ignoring the plain natural signs?

Anyhow Palmer and I pushed on that bright March day and bought a few nice things for Miss Olivia. It wasn't until we'd finished our errands that Palmer said it might be a good idea if he dropped by Dr. Rogers' office and let him take a look at the felon that had formed on his thumb and wouldn't turn loose. The thumb didn't look that bad to me, but I went on with him and sat in the dingy old waiting room till the doctor came out with Palmer lanced and bandaged, and stepped across the room to me--the last person there.

When he was a new young doctor, he'd delivered me and Leela and treated our simple complaints through the years. Ever since a crazy man in the backwoods had shot him in the chest ten years ago (the man imagined Dr. Rogers was having an affair with his moron wife), the doctor had seemed far older than his years.

After we'd exchanged a few pleasant words, Palmer suddenly said "Doctor, while we're here how about checking on Anna's health?"

I laughed. "No such thing! I'm strong as a bear."

Dr. Rogers said "I can see you are. Step in though and let me check your heart and blood pressure."

I tried to decline but Palmer said "Be sensible please."

So I followed the doctor. And to shorten the

story, within a quarter hour I was more embarra.s.sed than I'd ever been. Dr. Rogers thought I might well be pregnant. And Palmer's eyes were burning like searchlights. It made him that happy to my unending surprise even now.

We didn't mention the change to anybody for several more weeks. I could tell Miss Olivia was watching me like a dynamite stick and calling on me for fewer ch.o.r.es, so I had even more time on my hands to think of how my life might change and what Palmer might feel about who I'd be. By early April I was fairly sure the suspicions were right. So I agreed to ride in again and see Dr. Rogers, still asking Palmer to keep our secret as long as I needed.

My mind had not been responding normally to the possibilities--or what I thought was normal. It might have been the even emptier hours and days that were gathering round me in the Office. But I felt myself drying out at the edges, the way I'd first felt in those bad weeks after Larkin's death when Palmer was out of sight in my life, and I spun downward nearly out of control into serious blues.

Yet once Dr. Rogers made a full internal checkup--the first I'd ever had, which was normal enough back then before there was a gynecologist at every supermarket--we knew where I stood. I was well on my way to bearing a first child. The physical signs indicated I was healthy. And as Palmer and I drove back to the Slade place through endless woods that were greening fast, my heart began to give off a silent emotion as new to me as the tender leaves. Strange as it was it felt mainly happy, and it felt big enough to take over in me.

Palmer kept his word about guarding the secret. We hadn't stopped by to tell Muddie and Father when we left the doctor's office. We didn't tell Miss Olivia that evening. Ferny and I were corresponding weekly by then; I didn't tell Fern. Palmer and I just held it between us like a sizable wreath or a handsome tray that would soon bear a gift for the world at large. Not that we felt any softening of the brain, any sense that a child would prove to be the answer to whatever lacks or

sadnesses we'd known, not to mention other people's. Such carrying on about babes in the womb was not a part of our world or any world I'd read or heard of in my young life.

Children were, beyond question, acts of G.o.d. In starting and bearing one, you and your mate were doing a share in keeping G.o.d's orders to thrive and multiply. But back in those days anybody with two working eyes and two grams of sense could see what tragically many people are blind to now when, with all the modern drugs and doctors, reality turns out to be much the same as it's always been--that many children are born maimed and agonized, that many mothers suffer thereafter and die in poorer darker places, that many healthy children grow up under hails of meanness and unthinkable outrage from the people meant to love them, not to mention how many marriages crumble under the weight of nothing more urgent than pure human selfishness. So both of us kept a careful silence, seldom discussing it even in private.

Finally in early May, another fine day with a long peaceful evening, Palmer looked to me across the supper table and mouthed Can I tell?

In just that instant I felt it was right. Coy had just walked up to the table with fresh hot biscuits that no two angels trying hard could have made in Glory. And I whispered "Go to it."

Palmer took up his knife and tapped on his water gla.s.s.

It was the first time I'd ever seen anyone call for attention that way.

Miss Olivia looked up sternly as if he were nine years old, and she said "That gla.s.s was my mother's, Son. Kindly don't crack it."