THE CLEARING

The farmhouse sat on a rise at the end of a long dirt road, in a clearing surrounded by fruit trees and ninety acres of pines. It was painted white, and peeling, and some former hippie tenant had scribed a mandala on the wall just inside the front door in fine-point Magic Marker. I painted over it, but it bled through again and again. I finally left it there, a pale and pastel version of itself, hanging ghostlike in the hall.

My first weeks here, wandering the neglected orchard, driving down dirt roads, it seemed that this part of the South was abandoned, left to the deer and wild persimmon tree, and what people remained lived solitary lives. The few I saw were isolated figures in a landscape—a man on a tractor across a field, a woman at her mailbox by the side of the ditch. I was the recluse, the woman with dark wild hair, the stranger in the house at the end of the road.

It takes no time at all to fall in love with such a place, if you are paying attention. All it takes is a luna moth quivering on your porch light. A newborn mantid’s quick infant maw, attacking your little finger in the grass. A strange throbbing from the shrubbery at dusk, mysterious and sweet and insistent as sex: the call of a country bird, a whippoorwill. All it takes is a particular scent, the breath of a place like a lover’s breath before a kiss, full of the richness of life, digestion, desire. The breath of the clearing where I lived fell from pines and poplars, sweet gum and oak. It fell from the mouths of neighbor cows rummaging the apple tree and rose from the fermenting apples themselves.

It rose from the meadow grasses at evening, and settled into their dry stems, humming, at noon. It sang from the creek, under rocks, and from the pond, from the bellows of chilled, slow-moving frogs in the cool of the evening.

How can I describe this place? It was rich as molecules. I knew the microbes of the soil lifted to my tongue; sometimes rain fell, metallic and dusty as a tin roof. I knew the smell of my own body—legs, breasts, hair—inside the scent of the surrounding woods. All these things held in the air like the gold must of evening or the pink chatter of dawn.

In those first weeks, I lay in my bed, heart pounding with yearning for this place where I lived, my body infused with a delicious loneliness. Mine, I mouthed to the glimmering dying day. I wanted to die, so I could merge my molecules with that mungy ferment. I wanted to die of happiness.

One day a neighbor came to claim a cow that had taken up residence under my apple tree. Sarton Lee chugged right up to the house on his old tractor, spread in his seat like a wrinkled toad, told me his legs didn’t work worth a damn because of arthritis. His nephew hopped down and walked around the cow and began to wave his arms, slowly, like a swallowtail drying its wings. "Hey, cow, ho cow," he sang. "Ho cow." The cow snatched up another apple and jerked her huge bony pelvis down the path, away from those long slow arms, up the road toward home.

Sarton watched them go, in no hurry to follow. He began to talk in his pale husky voice, told me it was his pastures that spread out to either side of my long dirt road, full of those low square cattle called Angus, black against lush fescue. This was his milk cow, he explained. His Julie. He had named it after his wife who’d passed seven years before. He must have caught the look in my eye. "That might seem strange to you," he said. "You prob’ly never had a milk cow."

I nodded. I wanted him to go away. But he kept on. Milk cows were loyal, gentle, and completely predictable. They gave everything they had, their calves, their milk, and all they needed in exchange was a little grain now and then, some green grass in spring, good hay in winter. They had personalities, but what Sarton liked about them best was they were satisfied with the world. They knew how to hang on and wait for the good things in life.

His withered hands clutched the wheel; one groped, found the ignition key. Now he would leave. But no. He didn’t grudge Julie an apple or two in the fall. He hoped I didn’t mind. I shook my head. He looked up at the huge live oak spreading above our heads, listened to the choir of light breezes along its branches. "I planted this tree fifty years ago, for Julie’s birthday," he said. "This was her home place." His crackled face stretched tight, looking up. I could see the soft place in the white fold under his chin, a place where the sun had not burned him dark and sere.

Early that fall the kitchen pipes froze. The plumber’s name was Whiskey Collins, and he lived just down the road, in a tiny cinderblock house next to a collapsed barn covered in kudzu. I found him by asking the bleached blonde behind the counter at the gas mart. "Ever’body’s pipes froze," she said, shaking her head. "He’s fixed mine twice already."

I must have looked doubtful at this news. If he fixed it twice, didn’t that mean he hadn’t done it right the first time? "He’s a friend of my cousin’s," she explained, showing the gap between her front teeth. "The two of them were wild. He’s settled down some, I guess." People here want you to know their lives, I thought, wonderingly.

I called Whiskey from the pay phone. "I’ll come," he said, "but not till after supper. Everybody’s pipes froze, you know." I knew, I assured him. He did show up after supper, and he worked into the night on my kitchen sink, humming tunelessly, his compact body contorted in the cabinet underneath, the smooth tread of his workboots sticking out, his monkey face popping up now and then with a screwdriver between his teeth. I found myself pacing, sitting on the front stoop, back to the kitchen, reheating my tea, watching him restlessly, hoping he would finish quickly. There were owl calls I liked to listen to this time of night. At least I thought they were owls. Whatever they were, I preferred their round, haunted notes immensely to human bluster.

But Whiskey took his time. He worked past midnight, and when he’d finished, run the tap for me a few times, and sat down to help himself to some tea, he started telling me his life story, the way people seemed to like to do here. He was moonlighting, he told me, from his real work: monitoring pollution in the river, hoping to get a grant for a big study, studying biochemistry on his own. "I get books at the end of semester sales at the college," he told me. "Some of them are good." Whiskey’s pale yellow eyes gleamed with earnestness. I imagined him studying by oil lamp, a room full of outdated textbooks. I could have named them: they were books I had long since thrown away.

"I gave up on graduate school," he said, looking at me curiously, inviting me to tell what I had given up on.

I had given up men and science. Science had been a kind of religion for me but I had lost the faith. It still showed up in my mailbox twice a month in the form of papers I would edit for a journal. Every formula needed checking. Some believe the weight of mankind’s fate lies in such calculations. For many a year, in a faraway northern city, I had dedicated every waking hour and much of the night to such questions as: Would humanity die off from excess estrogens in plant foods? Would CFCs invade our pulmonary linings and make it impossible to breathe? Would electric fields cause brain cancer and miscarriage? How will science save us?

All these inquiries had once seemed essential. I worked weekends, nights, in a desperate battle to save the human race. Some winters I never saw the light of day. Suddenly, at thirty-one, it all made me tired. It seemed part of some relentless, self-perpetuating system, like the endless waves of cold air that blow across the Great Lakes from Canada, bringing blizzards, hailstorms, tornadoes, the mad acts of a vengeful God. For a time I amused myself by spinning lines for an article I would never write: If You Focus on Destruction, Will It Come More Quickly and in More Gruesome Forms? I imagined I would sign it Elizabeth Enfield, not Liz, my old science journal name. I wanted to be strange and formal, even to myself.

I remembered an ad from the back pages of Nature magazine. "Farmhouse with 20 acres land, 5 cleared, $12,000." I had enough for a downpayment. It seemed incredibly cheap. It sounded far away. I had no children; I had no obligations; my car was paid for; I had a small payout from my pension. And, after Robert, I had every reason to leave. I closed out my bank account, quit my job, packed the car, and left.

I planned to become lean, and hard, and strong. I wanted to be the stranger at the end of the long dirt road, the mailbox, the science journals, my remaining link to the world. In October, I began to use the crisp vellum of outdated journal pages to light the evening fire.

When my pipes froze again, I considered abandoning the plumbing. It was too much trouble entertaining plumbers. I would use water directly from the pond. As the day warmed, however, and the pipes thawed, I heard the sound of water trickling, a gentle sound. When water began to pour down the wall onto the floor, I went for help.

Whiskey’s door was bare in places, peeling silver paint like an aluminum bucket. I was lifting my hand to knock when it swung open. He saw the panic in my face and said, "I’m busy right now." I opened my mouth to protest, but he said, "Don’t worry, a little water won’t hurt that house. It’s built solid." I forced myself to stay silent, to fit into the slow, dull etiquette of emergencies in this place, but I could feel my face pumping blood. He regarded me solemnly. "Since you’re here, come on in," he said. "I’ll show you my rig."

On a big oak table across the room, lit by shafts of sun through the single small window, was a gadget made out of test tubes and beakers and glass pipettes. I was amazed at how clean it all looked, how clear the distillate—like cold water from a good deep well. "Taste?" he said. I shook my head. He said he made the best white liquor in the county, and he sold it straight. Folks diluted it with corn syrup and cherry Kool-Aid, but that was just habit, "it goes down smooth without all that."

The space around the still was smooth and clean as a chemists’ lab. The rest of the house was knee-deep in science magazines, books, and old clothes. There was no path through this detritus. You waded through it, like leaf litter on a forest path.

Whiskey wanted to save the river, which he said turned blue, green, and red with dye from the yarn mill upstream on Mondays, Thursdays, and Sunday mornings. Why don’t you clean up your house first, I wanted to say. "They flush it out Saturday night," he said. "They figure everyone’s hung over, or in church, and nobody will notice."

I could see he was a believer, one of those who know the world is broken and can be fixed. It was a good thing, really, I mused, watching him work that night. The way the houses were built around here, no doubt my pipes would freeze and burst often.

Whiskey came again, many times, all through the cold season. He knew the secrets of well pumps, water heaters, electrical outlets that put out puffs of smoke and sparks. His eyes often looked tired behind his wire spectacles. He read too much, he said. Those worthless books, I thought. But he knew the oddball names of southern trees— "sourwood, that’s for honeybees," and "sweetshrub, smells like licorice," and "redbud, also known as flowering Judas." I wondered at his story—could a grown man have hung himself from those spindly, brittle branches? Whiskey identified properly seasoned split oak by the smell—spiced apples—and could identify the former tenants of abandoned birds’ nests by their linings: wren, goldfinch, hummingbird. "See the horsehair?" he said, holding one cupped in his hand, close to my face so I could see. A circlet of rough hair shone like silver wire. His fingers were long and perfectly formed. I drew back, expecting him to touch my face.

"Who has horses around here?" I said.

"Miss Julie used to." He made it sound like Miss Julie was alive, and I knew her.

The mailbox brought endless flows of pointless journal articles that I made fascinating, important-sounding. Late in January it brought a letter from Robert. I had sent him a printed card giving change of address, without a note of any kind, a way of saying, I am gone too. Robert had left me, saying he needed to be alone for a time. Robert, who made sure we had the right clothes, the right mountain bikes and espresso maker, the right friends and fashionable vacations. Now, he said, he was looking for the right life, a solitary one, as if that were the newest style. I was right not to believe him. Two weeks later he was with my best friend, who also happened to be my boss, who had been telling me for months, for years, that I shouldn’t work so late, that saving the world could wait, and I ought to get out more on weekends.

I had burned an entire album of happy vacation photographs at Christmastime, some with Robert, some with other lovers, going back in time. Now I opened the letter. It was short. The subject of each sentence was himself. Lizzie—I have been going through changes. I quit my job. I sold the car and went trekking in Nepal. I spent six weeks in a monastery there. I have found some peace. Write me.

A laugh choked in my throat. A monastery. Robert, who thought of yoga as a way to scientifically increase the pleasure of sex. I could see the bristle of his cheek, his windburned jaw, in harsh Nepalese light. I wondered for an instant what he would find to satisfy him in that world. Then I burned the letter.

In February a front howled in from Canada and the pump froze solid. Whiskey worked late again, past midnight, his work shoes gleaming in the moonlight, stuck out from the little door in the well house in the yard. I stayed up reading my journal articles at the kitchen table. At one he staggered in, cheeks and hands red with cold, wirerims steamed opaque with the sudden heat. He needed another tank for his torch. This was his night to check the river. "Come with me," he said. "It’s not far. You’ll keep me awake." I nodded. Whiskey, for all his books and wrench sense, couldn’t keep the river from turning colors. There was something perversely satisfying in that. I wanted to see.

He drove his old Plymouth Duster, lights out, so that I recognized the road only by the crunch of gravel and washboard. He took a turn down a tangled path no wider than the car. Jostling over ruts and rocks, the car flung my body against the door, against Whiskey’s shoulder. I pushed my feet to the floor, flattened my back against the seat. "Not far," he shouted over the spin of the tires.

At the river Whiskey grabbed his flashlight and shone it over the curvilinear water. The edges were velvety with ice, but the center of the stream flowed free. A smell like metal mixed with fabric softener filled my nostrils. The water bubbled bright magenta, foamy pink. I remembered it was Saturday night.

On the way back Whiskey stopped in an open place in the road. My skin prickled with how close he was, how his breathing warmed the air. I observed an animal reaction, the hairs standing up on my arms, an urge to make a guttural sound, something like a growl. Don’t get too close.

Whiskey stuck his head and shoulders out the window. He was staring at the moon, so bright it lit the road. "I found a lump of iron in that field once," he said, happily, to the air. His neck stretched back so tight I could see the cords of his throat shining, blue-white and smooth, like some pure element extruded from his body. I watched his lungs expand and contract. "I had it checked at the college." His voice was squeaky with excitement. "It was a meteorite."

Whiskey slipped back behind the wheel. I became aware of his smell, like wool shirts and sweat and lichen. He tapped my shoulder, pointed out a planet through the windshield. "Mars, I think," he said, his exhalation warm and mossy on my neck. I edged to the window, stuck my head out, threw it back and looked straight up. Mars was a red and steady glow. The stars blazed a painful light. The world seemed upside down, ready to fly away. "Are you happy?" Whiskey whispered. He seemed to be speaking to the stars.

That night I went to my warm bed and never slept for the tingling of my skin. I could hear Whiskey downstairs finishing his work, humming in his throat and clanging around till all hours. In the morning all the faucets worked fine and his teacup was washed and dry, placed upside down to drain on a clean hand towel. Looking at that cup, for just an instant, I could have died of loneliness. It’s a cup on the counter, I told myself firmly, it’s not your life. I went outside and lay in the sun and listened to the birds talking to each other, zooming above my head, for the rest of the day.

A few weeks later, Whiskey came to the door unbidden. "Why don’t you help me," he said, "with the river?" I stared at him. He nodded at the stack of journals on the kitchen table. "You know your stuff. They would listen to you."

I shook my head. The prospect was repulsive. "You’re the one who can make a difference," I lied. I tucked my hair behind my ears. "I’m no good at that."

Whiskey stared at me with his pale eyes. "You would be good at it," he said.

He was disappointed, I could see that. He would have to get over it. I closed the door. The dragging muffler on his Plymouth sounded like an accusation. This is what it comes to, I said to myself, relying on people.

The winter turned milder, everyone’s pipes stayed intact for a time. I spent the remaining days of February tromping the fields, watching the slow daily progress and retreat of ice skinning across the surface of the pond, spying on winter birds in the thickets and vultures riding high thermals on thaw days, checking the bird book I got through the mail. Watching the clear blue sky for a shred of cloud. Chunking bricks of wood in the huge old potbellied stove. Finally getting the air mix right, learning the trick of the draft so the smoke didn’t billow back, black and sooty, into the room.

At night I wrapped myself in quilts and lay in the north field, watching stars blaze like fire, listening to the owls—barred owls by their cry, Who cooks for you? Listening to the sounds wind made as it conversed with sleeping plants. Listening to my breath.

One cold morning after brief rain, frost came like quill feathers, stuck white and ribbed and random into the surface of the dirt road. I almost danced with the pleasure of it, its strangeness. Things were going to be different here, I was sure of it. The cold slapping my cheeks, the dazzle of each day, even my mastery of the wood stove were like promises of passage to a new world, crystalline and clean and solitary and safe. I did not miss people; the pain and marvel of cold air made good company.

When March came, full of endless pale blue days and dry burnt breezes, I planted peas, potatoes, spinach—my first garden. I had studied up: soil tests, manure, lime, crop yields, fresh seed. By the end of the season I would have everything required to last the winter. I watered once, and waited. I did not know, when nothing came up, that it needed rain. I thought it just needed time. I finally heard it on the radio. My perfect sky was a hundred-year drought. Corn was roasting in the soil, crows were finding it by the cooked smell.

By early April the fires had started across the Piedmont, and the county lay under a haze of burnt soil, the microbes sizzling and ashes drifting, onto cars, roads, porches. One day I lay naked in the yard, watching something like a gray feather float and sway, then land in my pale lap. Holes appeared in the laundry on the line. I couldn’t keep the stoop swept clean of cinders. It was as if the whole world was a hearthstone, holding the ruin of chips and ash to its breast like evidence of a hidden source of heat.

I went to the gas mart for news. They knew me by then at the Esso station, where I went for gas and hoop cheese, cigarettes and RC Colas, and all I required of human contact, the old men’s weather reports more accurate than any on the radio. When I got there the usual crew was talking in slow, tense drawls about the fires and the weather and when it would rain—if ever again—and whether the wind had shifted from the big 300-acre tract still smoldering on Headon’s Mountain. The prognosis, it seemed, was not good. There had been a brush fire at Sarton Lee’s. Flame had raced across his back field and killed some cows.

"I guess my trailer will be next," the bleached blonde, gap-toothed clerk said, shaking my cigarettes down into a paper sack. "Too bad I ain’t got insurance."

"It’s not too late," I said, thinking how impossible it would be for me. I had not earned a penny in weeks. The broken-down house was not yet mine.

"Maybe you’ll get a break," one of the men agreed. "Maybe the wind will change."

I paid for my gas, headed for the door just as a group of firefighters shouldered through. I found myself nose to nose with a man in a fire suit. He gripped my arms. "Stop," he said. "You can’t go back." It was Whiskey Collins.

"What?" I said stupidly. "Why?"

"Fire jumped the line," he said. "Wind’s picked up. We’re moving Sarton’s cows."

"Oh Lord," said the blonde behind the counter. "Oh my Lord."

"Jack’s clearing out the trailer, Lucky," Whiskey said.

I’d never asked her name. It was Lucky. She had a boyfriend. He was Jack.

A laugh caught in my chest. My beautiful house, my luna moth, my meadow. My safe place. My mandala, my home, my high soft bed. My precious loneliness.

"I have to go," I said firmly. "I’m going."

My reputation as a crazy Yankee lady had by then been established, I learned later, by my refusal to attend church or cook in my kitchen. People knew. Word got out. I lived off apples and air, people said. I kept my money under the stoop, they said. I was a lesbian, a drug dealer, a misfit. They had seen a picture of an African prince on my wall. I was married to a foreigner, I had mulatto children.

I had nothing. I had the grass singing in the night.

Whiskey saw the wild light in my eye. He said, "I’ll take you."

We banged and bumped down the road toward rolling muscles of smoke. The wind shifted again, long enough for the black cloud to ease out of the road, to swing away from Sarton’s pastures. We made the clearing.

Sparks whipped up into a yellow sky behind dark pines. I opened the car door and stared. "Get what you need," Whiskey said. "Not what you want."

There was nothing in the house I needed: a bed, a lamp, a chair. I wanted to rip the sweet sun-dried sheets off the line. I wanted to dig the ghost mandala out of the wall and carry it away. I wanted to go to the smoky orchard, fling myself to the earth and hold on. "Give me a minute," I said. I strode into the yard and nosed the air for something I knew. I closed my eyes and saw morning light shining through the bare window onto the bare floor. I smelled the heat, building every day from the west, toward summer, and the melting tar and singed pine needles settling over my house and fields and apple trees and woods, like the hot breath of a charcoal grill.

The clear air collapsed and smoke filled it. Blind and choking, I ran for the car.

Whiskey took me to a house in town, put me in the guest bed, and went out again to try to save the town. I lay there listening to the hungry wind tear at the windows.

Twenty hours later they sent him home, wind having shifted again, back-burning the blaze away from where most people lived, lightning finally coming, starting new blazes, and finally bringing rain. I woke from uneasy sleep, heard him come in and settle on the couch, then dreamed I watched him dreaming, his pale eyes closed and sooty, twitching with visions of fire.

I heard him showering the next morning. He came and stood in the doorway, hips wrapped in a towel. Without his wire-rimmed glasses his eyes reflected many colors—they were not pale yellow at all, but hazel: blue, green, and gold. The line of his torso was angular and finely muscled and compact. His chest was deeply scarred on one side.

"Are you hungry?" he said. A woman came and stood behind him, a small bird of a woman with thin red hair. "Hello," I said.

"I’ll cook," she said, and looked at Whiskey, who did not look back. She walked away.

"Girlfriend?" I asked Whiskey.

He looked at me with his sad hazel eyes and shook his head. "Used to be," he said. "She’s a good person."

It occurred to me then that Whiskey might be that impossible thing, a man who is at ease with love, who finds a way to love everyone he knows, and keeps loving them just for the pure hell of it. For an instant, I envied him that easy connection with the world at large, wondered what that could possibly be like.

Whiskey sat down with me for a breakfast of eggs and grits. The woman stood watching us, dressed in nurse’s whites, then headed out for her weekend rotation, walking on silent shoes, closing the door softly as she went.

The rain sheeted down the windows, obscuring all but angry light. It had rained so hard last night, Whiskey told me, the water could not soak in, but flung itself across the scorched land and downhill toward any ditch. Ditches, streams, rivers were filled to overflowing. I washed the dishes while Whiskey made some calls. I listened to his crackling radio reports. Everything I had in the world was burned or drowned. I crawled back under the covers and stared at the window, unable to move.

Whiskey came and sat on the bed. He made a sound in his throat that was part song and part question. I looked up, face smeary with tears. He reached out with his long singed fingers and pushed the hair behind my ears, the gesture I know is my own habit, my own ritual of anxiety. I wondered if Whiskey thought he knew me well. Lovemaking would be an exquisite grief with such a man—shuddering, collapsing, helpless, sorrowful. I put my fingertips on his wispy beard. It was time to drown in sorrow.

I had never known a man who cried when he made love. Before Robert I had had six lovers, each of them, like Robert, businesslike and efficient, proud of his prowess, not prone to talk. Tears streamed out of Whiskey’s eyes as he touched me. He pressed his wet face against mine, cried out when he came, shuddered and groaned in collapse as if in pain. He called my name as a kind of begging: Elizabeth, Elizabeth. I found myself touching him to comfort him, holding him as if he were a precious bird. I wanted to weep with him, but as if to refute his flood, my eyes became stingy with tears, squeezing them out, one at a time, tasting of bitter salt.

Sometimes a smile would spangle his face like sun and rain together. After a time, it was as if a layer of skin had burned off between us, leaving something clean and tender, smelling of pine and lichen and salt. We slept through the day, waking in the dusk light to eat and make love again. Whiskey told me about his scar—snakebite, copperhead—and asked me about my belly scar, appendicitis. He told me the story of his life, where he was born, how much he loved the people and the land and the river. I soaked his story in like rain, but could find little to say. Like the spangling light on Whiskey’s tears, I knew this time would be gone soon, meant little. It was a comfort for two lost souls. It could not last. I had never known such a love to last.

"You are so quiet," he kept saying. "What secrets are you keeping, lovely Elizabeth?"

My house was half burned, the front porch and kitchen ell gone. The second story wing had survived, but with one wall entirely consumed, and there was my four-poster, exposed, like a doll’s house bed, safe and dry. The rain had turned the fire. The rain had saved it.

Whiskey poked around in the charred frame of the first floor, looked up at the floor joists of the bedroom. He began to list the kinds of things that needed to be done. I could see him picking up, one by one, and shouldering all the pieces of my life that were broken. I could see him thinking about the pleasures of running my life. I could see my life diminishing to something ordinary, involving serious plans and hardware stores. "You could—" he began.

"I’m staying," I interrupted.

Whiskey looked up and said, "Of course you’re staying." He gave me a funny look. After a while he said, "I’ll be back." I didn’t watch him go.

I propped an orchard ladder against the blackened bones of the second floor and climbed to the bedroom. A few cinders had sizzled on the quilt; the small holes were deep, as if etched by acid. I pulled back the spread. The sheets were clean. I got in, fully clothed, and spread my arms and closed my eyes. Mine. A roasted smell rose from the beams of the room below. A wren darted in and out, making a nest above the headboard.

I slept, waking to hear the night sounds from time to time: A mockingbird across the valley. The muttering of an owl. Wind clacking the charred limbs of trees together like bones. The wren’s feathery snore above my head.

I didn’t notice that Whiskey didn’t come.

In the morning I looked out and saw that the rain had saved the huge live oak, the one Sarton planted for Miss Julie, and half the ninety acres of woods. Blackened stumps steamed behind the fringe of living pines. The orchard was gone.

The meadow sparkled in new light, black and singed green. I walked it in my white sneakers, and they turned black. Charred branches scratched at the clapboard, scribbling messages in crazy ink. The trunk of the old apple tree was scorched to a crumble.

I walked to the end of the road. Whiskey’s cinder-block shack was blackened, but standing. His car was gone. I stood on a stump and looked in the window. Someone had been cleaning up. Almost half the floor was clear down to linoleum, bags of trash piled up against the wall.

I kept going. Sarton’s cows gathered on the green side of a rise, the other side black. Up at the gas station my car had burned, frame twisted, roof blown off, tires melted to the ground.

Lucky was salvaging half-charred cartons of cigarettes. "Want some?" she said. "They’re free."

I was hungry, chain smoking Chesterfields and scrounging apples from the rubble, when Sarton Lee chugged by that evening with a box of food and an old Coleman stove and lantern. "You’ll need this to tide you over. Don’t thank me. We’re neighbors." He tooled over to the second-story ell. Leaned and knocked on the support beam with his knuckle. "She’ll stand," he said. "But I’ve got a spare room, if you get tired of spiders in the sheets. Don’t be shy to ask, now, girl."

I nodded. How had I missed how kind he was?

When Whiskey Collins came to check on me the next day, I was boiling an egg on the campstove. "I’m fine," I said. "Sarton Lee brought some food. I can walk to town if I have to."

Whiskey looked around with his multicolored eyes, pale as watered bourbon in the morning light. "Can we sit down a spell?" he said.

"All right," I said slowly. Here it comes, I thought, the Where-do-we-go-from-here discussion.

We sat on stumps. He straddled his like a cowboy, scratched the cinders with a stick. "The thing is," he said, "I have something to tell you."

I had never known a man who articulated the color of my lips, the tender edge of my chin, my deep, deep eyes, my wild hair. I always knew these things about myself by the way men held me in their beds, pushing and straining, going after some beautiful place they could claim, groaning with delight or shame. The fingers of faithless men had traced my lip, my ribs, my thighs and clutched at my heart. They had not sat across from me on a Southern summer morning and stammered out the words for loveliness as Whiskey did that day. "I love your eyes," he said. "I love your mouth," he said. "I love the shape of your lips. They are like apples. I love the way you talk and don’t talk. I love how your ribs move when you breathe."

Hot tears sprung to my eyes. He looked at me, a pained expression on his face. "Oh, no," he said. "I meant to make you happy."

How do you say to a faithful man that true love is not what is needed in your life? What was needed was charred branches clacking, waking me from sleep; what was needed was tender morning light picking out each cell of devastation. What was needed was a way to shuck my cold, bitter husk, the hardened shell of someone I had been for a long time, who would share a bed without any faith or meaning.

Whiskey wrapped his arms around my shoulders and let me cry. He said he loved me anyway. "You are so alone," he said. For a moment—for half a second—I let myself think of him, his whiskery chin, his pale eyes, his neatly muscled arms and legs, his heart and gaze, in my high soft bed.

I made him promise to go away.

I stayed in my ruined house, open to the meadow on one side. A sheet of canvas kept the rain out, flapped like ship’s sails in spring thunderstorms. After a week or so my meadows sprung up such a green that it might be a new color in the universe. The green was so full of water, and sun, the sky’s blue paled in comparison. The old apple tree erupted in petals, rainwet against black branches. Tree leaves grew large and heavy with warm days and rainy nights.

I learned the bank was forgiving mortgages, for the next six months. I had a chance of staying. Cattle egrets came clacking across the roof the next day, like a gift. They stepped high, bobbing heads and waving their sex-blushed wings in a slow dance. They mated for a day and then moved on.

Finally, in May, I turned my attention back to the garden. It was time to start over. I couldn’t afford to make mistakes. I would grow my food, and preserve it, and save enough to rebuild. I planted every kind of seed I could scrounge from my shed, along with some tomato plants and onion sets from Sarton Lee. I studied old home ec books I found in his shed. I studied canning.

As I planted and hoed, I began to imagine the lives of the people who lived on this road, all engaged in this ritual of rebirth: Sarton in his kitchen, spooning grits, watching Dixie cups of watermelon seedlings grow on the windowsill; Lucky behind her trailer, coaxing tomatoes up a trellis; the mailbox woman hoeing potatoes, picking beetles off fat green leaves and dropping them in jars of suds.

I could not imagine what Whiskey was doing.

One night in July the frogs stopped singing and in the silence there blew up such a storm that it ripped the canvas cover from the house. Rain flew sideways, drenching quilt, sheets, mattress, leaving me cold and shivering. Lightning struck the live oak and left a gash, oozing sap. In a lull, I crabbed down the ladder, ran and crouched in the dry corner of my shed. The earth breathed ozone under my feet, fear like aluminum on my tongue.

In the morning I slid the soggy mattress off the bed, hoping to prop it in the sun, but it slipped and tumbled out the second story to the ground. I headed to Sarton Lee’s, thinking his tractor bucket might be able to scoop it back to the second floor.

At Whiskey’s house there was a stranger’s car. Had he moved out? My god, I thought, he’s gone. I edged around to the window and peered in. The floor was clean, shined and polished. There was a sofa with a bright new sheet thrown over, some colorful pillows. There was a rag rug in shades of blue and green. The still was gone. On the table in its place was a jar of flowers; there were place mats, plates, and silverware set for two.

There was a low murmur of voices. Two figures emerged from the bedroom door. I pulled back from the window, but not before I saw who it was: Whiskey, with his arm around the red-head’s shoulders. The light caught their faces: hers sleepy, smiling; his loving and protective. I’d seen this exact scene before, these same expressions: Robert and his new lover, at my favorite breakfast place. Feeding each other bits of scone with their fingertips like courting bluebirds. I must have made a sound. Whiskey turned and saw me.

I stepped off the stump, twisted my ankle, fell. I could hear him coming. "Elizabeth?" he called out. "Oh, no, Elizabeth." Sorrow filled his monkey face, wrinkling his forehead like an animal’s. "She’s helping me," he explained, those pale eyes glinting. "I’m fixing up for you."

It was so obviously untrue. Why would he even bother to lie?

He came over to help me walk. I pushed him away. It was obvious I mattered little in this scenario. "Go away," I choked. "Leave me alone." I ran, hobbling, as fast as I could, toward the road.

"Wait," he called out. "Wait."

"Leave me alone!" I screamed at him, running, running, every step a shooting pain, toward the safe kitchen of Sarton Lee. Whiskey did not follow.

Sarton nursed me for three days with comfrey tea and BC powder. He kept a Bible on his kitchen table and read from it each morning after milking Julie. Sometimes I listened while he whispered the words, murmurs of the fruitful earth, and the labors of man, manifest by fire. A heat wave had arrived, sneaking up on dry breezes, then sitting, like six tons of dead weight, on the shoulder of the land. Heat pressed down on my body at night, drugged me to weariness in the morning.

On the third morning I was able to walk with no trouble. "I’m better," I announced at breakfast. Sarton handed me my coffee in a chipped teacup, loaded with sugar and milk, "Ladies style," as he called it.

"You can stay if you want," he said, looking down at his hands. I got this terrible feeling he was going to try to hug me.

"I’m fine," I said. "I should go." I watched one more time as he went through his lonesome morning rituals, his lips pursing at his coffee, forearm trembling to lift the frying pan, then out at the barn, head bent against the flank of his slow-moving milk cow, fingers squeezing the teats, still missing his Julie.

Outside, on Sarton’s stoop, heat slammed into my face like the side of a shovel. For the first time the company of summer seemed too much to bear. Sarton had made up a sack of things, some clean sheets and linens, a load of tomatoes to can, and a cold quart of buttermilk. I held the bag to my chest and asked, "Is it always like this?"

Sarton Lee nodded. "Like the plagues of Egypt around here, must seem to you. Fire, flood, lightning, heat wave. I’m expecting locusts."

"I’ve never been this hot in my life," I said.

Sarton looked at me seriously. "Barn gauge says eighty-six already," he said. "It’s going to be a scorcher. Best take a break, cool off somehow." He paused, squinted up at the white sky, seemed to listen to a sound behind the whine of cicadas. "Did you know he was married?" he said.

"Who?" I said.

"Whiskey Collins," he said. I shook my head. Sweat was already trickling from my scalp. "Wife run off on a day like today. For the longest time he thought she was coming back." He looked up at some far off shimmer of breeze and I glimpsed that white place under his chin.

"Julie used to say, ‘Only the guilty run away.’"

I didn’t know if he meant Whiskey’s wife, or Robert, who he didn’t even know, or Whiskey himself. It didn’t occur to me until I was halfway down the road that he meant me.

I had never loved Robert, I saw it then. He must have known it too.

When I got home there were forty more pounds of ripe tomatoes hanging from the crusty vines. Four days later it was still blazing hot. The flame from the gas burner shimmered like a mirage; by two o’clock in the afternoon I burned my hand twice, forgetting that fire was hotter than the air and required special handling. My tee shirt reeked with sweat and tomato juice and seeds. I’d worn the same cutoffs for days, sitting in the dirt, grinding in the grime. My body smelled like cottage cheese gone pink with mold. The stink of my own body was making me sick.

I pumped some well water over my head, rinsed out my tee shirt in a bucket, wrung it out, and put it back on. I picked a fresh apron, the last one, from a pile of Miss Julie’s linens. It smelled hot, like starch, and sage. In one pocket was a fold of page torn from a Bible; inside it was a twist of fine hair, like a baby’s.

The verse was about a child who could not be healed.

It occurred to me then that I might be the only woman on earth who was so contained, as if sheltered inside a jar, through whose clear glass I could see life played out, but refuse its touch. I peered into the jars of whole tomatoes, suspended like peeled human hearts in clear plasma. Then I lowered them into boiling water.

After the allotted time I lifted the rack, and three jars exploded, pouring scalding juice on my leg and sprinkling glass on my sneakers. As I stared at the glass, watching my skin turn the color of rage, I heard a car coming down the drive. It was Whiskey, rambling up slow in his Duster, raising great clouds of grit into the thick air, two others jammed into the front seat beside him. Whiskey pulled right up to where I stood in the yard, as if the world were one big road.

Before I could move, they tumbled out of the car. Lucky waved. "Hi," she said. "This is Jack. We came to rescue you." Jack looked at the mess at my feet and grinned. His face was leathery, like a work boot. "Looks like you need it," he said.

"You burned your leg," Whiskey said. White blisters rose on a red patch of thigh. Lucky pulled an ice cube out of her Hardees cup. "Put this on it," she said. "Are you okay?"

I took the ice. It melted, popping the blisters and flattening the skin.

"Feel better?"

I nodded. It was so hot my skin was one long throbbing ache. The ice made an island of balm.

"Come see," Whiskey said. "We brought you something."

In a Styrofoam cooler in the backseat was an ice cream churn filled with white froth and packed in ice and salt. "This girl from the mountains brought blueberries," Whiskey said, in his excitable voice. "Wild ones. Sarton had cream. I had sugar. Lucky had ice up at the store. We just have to turn the handle."

"You mean you just make it? By turning the handle?"

Jack guffawed. "Sure you make it," he said. "This is a city girl, all right."

"Let me do it," I said. The idea of ice cream took hold of me: more than anything I craved something cool, and sweet, and lots of it.

By the time it hardened up we had each taken four turns and we were sweating from the effort, hotter than before. We ate blueberry ice cream until we were sick with it and our lips and tongues turned black from the berries. It was still too hot to live. "Feel your stomach," Whiskey said. He pulled up his shirt and lay his palm on his belly. Lucky did it. I did the same. "It’s cold," I said.

"Not cold enough, though," he said. "Here." He grubbed some ice cubes out of the cooler, handed one to me, started rubbing the other on his forehead. Lucky grabbed a handful for herself and Jack. We lay on the ground, sated, sliding ice cubes up and down our arms and legs, all over our faces and the backs of our necks.

"I know this place on the river," Whiskey said, "where a spring comes up. The water’s always fifty degrees."

"You measure it?" I said, skeptical.

"Naah, I just feel it," he said.

"That river is polluted as hell," Lucky said.

"Don’t eat the fish," Jack said.

"This is different," Whiskey said. "Different water."

"Let’s go," I said. I didn’t care if he was making it up. I didn’t care if it was polluted. It was too hot to live.

We were all wearing next to nothing. It would have been ridiculous to leave it on. We stripped, flinging our clothing on rocks and tree limbs, and jumped in the water. Whiskey had scooped out a deep basin and lined it with rocks, walling off the main flow of the river. The spring bubbled up from the gravel at our feet, cold and clear. I caught flashes of Lucky’s breasts, white and bulbous, and the thick pubic thatches on the men. It occurred to me for an instant that it might be cruel for me to show myself in front of Whiskey. Then I plunged my head underwater and forgot everything.

There was some splashing, and laughter, but mostly our movements were slow and luxurious. The water reflected opaque green and shifting blue from the trees and sky and hid our nakedness. We all settled into perches on submerged rocks, just our heads sticking out, dunking them too now and then, hair streaming over our faces. Lucky sang some songs, Jack chimed in, Whiskey hummed tunelessly along, I applauded. It was like some wholesome summer camp I’d never been to. Lucky and Jack sang in excellent harmony. "Do you play?" I said. Lucky giggled. "I mean, do you sing for people?" "Just for Jack," Lucky said, making a kissy face at him, sucking air through that front tooth gap. When evening came, she and Jack went off to the woods to be alone. I lay, floating and dozing, in a shallow patch of sunset light with a rock under my skull, the delicious splay of water and heat lapping my skin. Whiskey came and crouched beside my head, dripping water from his fingertips into my hair, onto my eyelids, then in my ears

"Hey!" I said. "Cut that out." I shook my head and opened my eyes into the sun and saw my own body blazing before me, red and wavering in the water, the tips of my breasts floating at the surface, my pale hands and feet like fishes, submerged, lucent

I saw then what Whiskey saw: I was beautiful

My microbes shimmered. My molecules were forms of light. I fell in love with myself for an instant, and in that moment, opened my arms wide. Whiskey slipped into the water and glinted before me. A memory of tears shone on his face: river water, spangled with the colors of his green-gold eyes. I did what Judas did: I kissed him. I kissed him to tell him he was a good man and I was not worthy. I kissed his monkey face to be as beautiful as what he saw. I kissed his lips to drink the cooling water of his blessing, his steady faith. I kissed him, again and again, and did not stop, because I was a creature of this world, and like all living things, subject to the dizzying laws of nature.