A boy in Rowena, Missouri, ate mud one day. In a ditch, he ate it with a spoon. His mother had warned him, but the boy didn’t listen—he kept eating all morning, then scooted back up to sit where the ground was dry and licked the spoon. This was late May. He tucked the spoon down into his boot. Back home, his mother had a headache. She moved slowly around the house, a cool, wet cloth held to her forehead, while the boy watched. And the next day he found her dead on the floor, in the living room. The boy tried talking to her. He nudged her body with his foot, he picked up her hand and let it drop. Why hadn’t she told him? Why hadn’t she been clear that this was the thing that would happen? He would’ve spit it out, he thought, put the mud back in the puddle, or never touched it at all—the mud hadn’t even tasted good. He would’ve stayed stacking bricks in the back field, making a wall in case the field should ever flood.
The boy’s name was Dale. He was 9, almost 10. He didn’t mention the mud to his father, who hadn’t been home at the time—he was a truck driver. Dale had a feeling that his father already knew, or anyway that his father had a sense somehow that Dale was to blame. For two days, the boy had left her there on the rug, until his father returned. Maybe he was wrong, he’d kept thinking, maybe she’s napping, maybe she was just very, very tired. Dale’s grandfather had been there too, his father’s father, in his bedroom, or else in the bathroom, or stalled leaning on the wall somewhere in between, but the grandfather hardly opened his eyes anymore—all he could see at this point was darkness, he’d said, like the sky at night with little specks in it, in the center a circle of white almost like the moon, but more and more the circle was smeared. Walking past the mother, he hadn’t even paused. He did ask once where she was, when he realized it was Dale who was bringing the toast and jelly, the milk, taking away the dirty plates and cups, and Dale had said only that she hadn’t gone anywhere, she was here, she was lying on the floor.
Two weeks went by—the funeral, people in and out through the side door, the kitchen door, his father in there at the table.
When his father told him late one morning to pack up some clothes, his boots, a few toys if he wanted, Dale wasn’t sure why. They got doughnuts from a gas station. Out on the highway, his father reached over now and then and patted Dale on the knee.
Hours later, Dale understood they were on the way to his grandmother’s house in Virginia. His mother’s mother. She’d been there for the funeral, but she left right after—people were still eating lunch. He recognized the house now when they pulled up, though he hadn’t been here in years, but his father told him that the grandmother had moved, and so he wondered if the house had moved also, or if maybe that’s why she’d chosen this one—because it looked just like the old one. He kept the question to himself. That night, they watched an old movie, something slow and quiet about a girl on a train, then Dale slept in the spare bedroom, his father on the little couch with his feet hanging over the armrest. And then, in the morning, his father was gone. The truck was gone. The quilt was folded neatly where he’d slept.
Of course, Dale thought. Of course. His father knew, after all. He’d seen the way the mother had died—why would he want that for himself?
And even before that, his mother’s friend, the woman who watched Dale sometimes when the mother had work, the one with red hair, with the spots on her forehead—a year had gone by before anyone told Dale she was dead. Of course he understood now that he’d done it, but how? Sometimes at night, at the grandmother’s house, he would feel a tingling somewhere in his body—his heels, his fingertips, the tops of his ears—and he’d think maybe that was it, the tingling was a gathering of his powers. The powers could move through his body, coming close to the surface, then sinking again. But that was wrong, he’d think later. It wasn’t powers, it was more like a poison he carried inside himself: mix him with mud and the poison gets released. But that was wrong too—it wasn’t that simple. With his mother’s friend, he hadn’t eaten any mud. He couldn’t remember doing anything at all.
The grandmother was next, though. He could feel it. She was starving. Already the thinnest person he’d ever seen in real life, now she wouldn’t even eat. All she did was cook for Dale, then sit there across the table just with cold coffee in a jar. She knows, he thought. She’s not even fighting.
Or maybe she was—maybe that’s why she kept telling him to go outside, get some fresh air. She’d pull back the curtain and stare out at the trees behind the house. “I don’t know what you’re waiting for,” she’d say. She was trying to protect herself. Her hands would shake when she reached for things.
“Go on,” she said. “It’s summer. Get out there.”
So he did, he went outside, every day a little farther. After a few days, his grandmother didn’t have to say anything—as soon as he finished his cereal, he’d put his boots on.
He was out there the following week, up in a tree, when the twins passed underneath. They moved silently, dressed alike in jean shorts and red shirts with the sleeves cut off.
The next day, out walking, he turned around—there they were again. Or maybe they weren’t. He hadn’t heard any sound—it was just a feeling that something was back there. In the woods, his mind was like that, always imagining things. A few days earlier, he’d seen a snake that disappeared when the wind blew.
The twins were real, though. They had a smell, a mix of soap and smoke and sweat. Up close he could see that they were a boy and a girl, both with short hair.
The boy said his name was Peter.
Dale stared back at him.
After a while, Peter asked, “What’s wrong with you? Can you talk?”
The girl stepped closer and said her name was June. She and her brother were 11, just turned. She guessed Dale was 11 too, then when he shook his head, she tried again. “Ten?” Dale kept shaking his head.
Later Peter said, “I like that you don’t talk much. Sometimes quiet people are smart.”
“That’s rude,” June told him.
“What? I said maybe he’s smart.”
Meeting him that first time, though, Peter seemed wary. “Just so you know,” he said, “where you are right now is our property.”
“It is?” June asked.
“But it’s okay,” he said. “I guess you can use it.”
Dale still hadn’t spoken a word. He had the idea now that he might not have to—he could simply stand here, and whatever this was would keep happening.
Then Peter offered a tour, and Dale and June followed him through the woods.
“Don’t touch that one,” he said, pointing at a bush, Dale thought, as they passed, but quickly Peter was pointing at something else. “Over there used to be a beehive,” he said, “but not anymore. I took care of it.”
A few minutes later, they stopped at a tree that seemed dead. It was gray, top to bottom, the branches dried out, but the trunk solid. Except for an opening, a hole that Peter reached his arm into, up to his shoulder. He grunted. Then out came a fistful of small feathers: gray and brown, a few mostly white, a few blue.
“If you find any feathers, you can put them in here.”
“But you don’t have to,” June said. “You can keep them if you want.”
“Not if it’s a turkey though. The turkeys are ours.”
“Don’t listen to him,” June said.
“And you can’t take these,” Peter went on, patting the tree. “These in the tree are ours.”
His grandmother would die, Dale thought, but he would stay, the house would be his—he never doubted that it would happen this way. He had a strange experience in the bathroom one night. In the mirror, he saw his face, and the face looked sad, of course, but the sadness was just a part of it, like the eyes, the nose—he couldn’t do anything about it, the same way he couldn’t just peel off his nose. Of course he missed his mother. Of course he didn’t want his grandmother to die, but he couldn’t do anything about that either—it didn’t matter what he wanted. This was a revelation: What he wanted didn’t matter at all. The sadness didn’t go away after that, he could still feel it, but he could feel it shifting a little bit. If you don’t look at the mirror, you can’t see your eyes, but the eyes are still there, they don’t go anywhere—it was like that, maybe. Just don’t look at the eyes. And maybe after his grandmother was dead, he thought, maybe then he could just lock the door and be alone in the house and no one else would have to die.
In the meantime, in the evenings, he watched his grandmother move quietly from one piece of furniture to another. They never spoke about his mother. They watched game shows, detective shows, movies the grandmother had seen before.
Every once in a while, the father would call. “How’s it going?” he’d ask. “How’s your grandma?”
“Fine,” Dale would say.
Usually the grandmother fell asleep upright in the recliner, still dressed in her daytime clothes, her house shoes, arms wrapped around herself under a light blanket.
By mid-morning, the twins would find him. Not that he was hiding—most days all he did was walk slowly in a wide loop through the woods, waiting, peering this way and that, never sure which direction they might come from. They had this game that Dale couldn’t quite follow. Peter would draw a circle in the dirt, a triangle beside it. Then he and June would take turns moving acorns and feathers from one shape to the other. They arranged piles. At June’s turn, Peter would lean in and mouth sounds like a beating heart. Occasionally June would caw like a crow, and Peter would chirp or hiss.
The twins packed lunches—crackers, bananas, peanut-butter sandwiches—in their pockets. Peter ate leaves too. He knew which plants were safe.
“Actually this one here is fine,” he said one day. “It’s not poison, but it tastes like an armpit.”
“You would know,” June said.
“See, now, that’s rude.”
Then to Dale he said, “But this one over here? This one tastes like lemon. Try it.”
Some days Peter was a minister. “Please,” he’d say. “Please be seated.” And June would sit first—she’d be the example—on the fallen tree they used as a bench. “What a lovely congregation we have today. What a beautiful bunch of sinners.” Peter would shake his fist at June and Dale, then at the sky. His eyes would roll around. He’d tear a bread slice and flatten the pieces between his palms.
“Don’t grab it,” June said the first time they played. “Let him put it in your mouth.”
So Dale closed his eyes and felt Peter’s fingers on his tongue. He tasted dirt. Then, when he was finished, Peter softly flicked Dale’s forehead. “Bless you, my son.”
“It’s a lot more fun this way,” June said afterward. “When it was just us, I had to eat all the bread myself.”
It was Peter’s idea that they go visit the Miles brothers. They lived nearby, apparently, beyond the woods somewhere, though in all his wandering, Dale hadn’t yet found a place where the woods had an edge. It was early July now, the air was hot but dry.
“Watch out,” Peter said. “Don’t step on that flower.”
Dale was staring at the ground already, but he didn’t see any flower.
“Hey,” Peter said. “You stepped on it.”
Eventually they crossed a dry creek bed and climbed—June on all fours—up a mossy, rocky slope. The woods ended abruptly at a barbed-wire fence.
“Over here,” Peter said, and led the way to a stump that had grown right beside the fence. He climbed up onto the stump and jumped over the wire.
The Miles brothers were crouched in the tall grass, dressed in desert camouflage and red bandannas. When Dale and the twins got close, the brothers stood, one tall, the other short.
“Is this him?” asked the tall one.
“What do you think?” said Peter.
The short one said, “Get an attitude and the deal’s off.”
“What deal?” June asked.
Dale wondered the same thing, but no one answered. The tall one took off, and they followed him through scratching weeds, waist-high at times, then down a hill to an old barn. The barn was small, crooked, with two rotting trees beside it. Fallen branches were crumbling into the ground. Dale tried counting the antlers mounted over and alongside the door, as the tall brother unwound a chain from the handle.
The barn was dim inside, mostly empty, with a few stacked tires and barrels in a line near a back corner. A black rubber hose hung snaking from the rafters. Slowly they all stepped farther in, and Dale thought he could hear breathing. He was right—behind the barrels was a beagle lying awake in a cage.
Peter knelt and whispered to the dog, who was slow to react. Peter turned back around. “She seems hungry.”
“We’ve been feeding her,” the short brother said.
They talked for a while in whispers, Peter and the two brothers. Dale shifted his weight back and forth, foot to foot, eyes aimed sideways at June. She was staring at Peter, at the back of his head.
Then the whispering was over—the short brother unlocked the cage, and Peter pulled a leash from one of his side pockets.
Dale wasn’t sure what had happened, but now Peter had the dog. June was patting it on the head as they turned to leave. The dog’s tail was wagging. Dale was following the twins and the dog out into the sunlight when the tall brother caught him by the shoulder. The grip wasn’t tight, but somehow Dale couldn’t move. June stopped too, but Peter pulled her along by the wrist, and the hand on Dale’s shoulder gently guided him backwards. It was a trade, he began to understand: him for the dog. He watched June trying to pull away from Peter as he jerked her forward, into the weeds, up the hill. They were gone.
The short brother was still standing beside the cage.
“Is he deaf?” the tall one asked, and Dale realized they’d been talking, but he’d missed the words.
The short one got up close to Dale’s face. “Are you deaf?” He asked the question loudly, slowly.
Dale felt his head moving side to side, as the brothers backed away. With the door closed, he couldn’t tell the voices apart—one didn’t like it, whatever they were up to, he said that more than once. He said, “I think there’s something wrong with him.”
It must have been the other one, then, who started locking the door from the outside. The chain clinked, sliding link by link back through the handle. Dale could hear muttering, then maybe a slap, then another one, or maybe clapping. Whatever it was, Dale didn’t care—when they let him out later, he’d see that this was partly the problem, the taller brother telling him that he wasn’t any fun, he wasn’t doing this right, he was supposed to fight back. But Dale didn’t feel like fighting. He felt confused, stunned, but also oddly at ease. He hadn’t thought of his mother in days. Outside, the brothers had gone quiet, or they’d left. Eventually his eyes adjusted. Above were pinpoints of light, holes in the roof, and a little more shone through gaps in the wall boards. Inside the cage was an old blanket, a chewed bone, a pot with a broken handle with water in it. Dale lowered himself and reached in for the blanket and spread it on the ground. Maybe this was good, he thought. If he could stay here, his grandmother could quit starving herself. He imagined her waiting, wondering where he was, then giving up and eating whatever she cooked for him that night. He lay back on the blanket—it was a thin quilt, loose threads here and there, pieces peeling off, the edges frayed. It smelled like the dog. But in the air he could still smell June. With his eyes closed, it was like she never left. They were lucky—she and Peter both. He could’ve killed them too.
It was still daylight when the Miles brothers let him out. They had to pull him, one brother at each arm. They looked scared, the short one more so. He was supposed to fight back earlier, the tall one said, not now—now it was over, they wanted him gone. Dale still hadn’t spoken. The short one pointed up the hill, toward the fence. “Go.”
The tall one stomped at him, like Dale was a dog. “Go on,” he said. “Go home.”
“I didn’t know that’s what we were doing,” June said. “I swear.”
A few days, most of a week, had passed, Dale staying closer to his grandmother’s house, just far enough that she wouldn’t see him if she stepped out back to water the plants. For hours at a time, he’d been lying in the shade of a shrub row, in a narrow hole he’d dug by hand.
But now he was out in the woods again. The twins had followed him up into the maple tree where he’d been sitting all morning.
“Tell him I didn’t know,” June said.
Peter was slumped, straddling a lower branch, his hands deep in his side pockets. “She didn’t know.”
“Tell him you’re sorry.”
Peter sighed. “I’m sorry.”
“Look at him,” June said. “Look up here and say it. You can’t trade people for dogs. I swear I didn’t know,” she said to Dale.
Dale leaned out and looked down at Peter. “Where is she?” he called down.
“Who?”
“The dog.”
“I don’t know,” Peter said, shaking his head. “She ran off again.”
June reached out and laid her hand on Dale’s knee. “Do you forgive us?”
Dale stared at it, the pink freckled hand, the green on the fingers from tearing blades of grass, maybe, or leaves. The fingers felt hot. “Okay.”
“You have to say it.”
“I forgive you.”
“Do you mean it?”
Dale nodded.
“Can we get down now?” Peter asked. “Can we do something else?”
“Look at me,” June said. “At my face. Do you mean it?”
Dale couldn’t stay away. He tried. But his grandmother kept telling him to get outside. She stood moving her hand like a broom through the air, sweeping, sweeping, and it worked: She swept him out the door. He tried hiding for a time, but the twins always found him. One morning he even tried burying himself, but the twins were there before he could finish. He’d closed his eyes for a moment, not a nap, just a long blink, and then there they were, staring down at him. They helped brush the dirt from his legs, then played like the dirt was sand. They tried building a castle.
Dale gave up. He quit hiding. It was easier, he decided, if he just did whatever anyone asked him to. He felt less responsible that way. Some days an hour or two might go by and he would even forget to worry. But always the moment would pass, and June would say, “What is it? What’s wrong?”
Dale would look away, over his shoulder, up toward a high tree branch, like he’d heard something up there. He would freeze, unblinking, like a deer.
And then one day, late morning, he got to the feather tree and found only June.
“Peter has a fever,” she said.
A day later, she told him they’d figured out why—there was a spider in the bed, Peter got bitten.
“A spider?”
June nodded. He had one bite on his leg—she pointed to her thigh, the inside of it, up high—and another behind his ear.
Dale was quiet. He picked up a stick and held it close, rotating it, staring hard at the bark.
“He says when he closes his eyes he sees fire,” June said.
“Fire?”
“Yeah, but he’s said that before. I think he always sees fire.”
With Peter away, their games were more subdued. Mostly they moved from tree to tree, climbing a few branches, sitting for a while, dropping back down.
“If we were monkeys,” June said, “we could just swing. We wouldn’t have to go all the way down to get around.”
“Or squirrels,” Dale said. In his mind, Peter was still there, always hovering, sweating, shivering at the edge of things, but for some reason Dale had less trouble speaking now. June noticed—she told him she was glad. She liked his voice, she said, she liked his accent.
“What accent?”
“That one,” she said. “Right there.”
One afternoon she told him she wanted to be a rancher when she grew up. She’d felt this way for years, always imagining cows, brown ones, only brown, in a field with a pond in the middle and one tree beside it, but now the dream was a fox ranch. She had no idea where it had come from—it felt like a vision. She closed her eyes now, smiling. Dale felt nervous watching her sway slightly on the branch. Then she opened her eyes and added, “It’s not about the fur. I don’t want the fur. I just want the foxes to live there, in the field, you know?”
Dale nodded. “Foxes are good,” he said after a moment.
“When I picture a fox,” June said, “I always smell cinnamon.”
Then Dale told her he’d seen a fox on the highway, on his way here, with his dad, and June said, “Please tell me it wasn’t roadkill.”
“No, it was alive.”
June was relieved.
But this wasn’t quite true—he’d only thought at first that it was a fox. Really it was a dog, a small collie in a field where the hay bales were getting rained on, but June was smiling.
Later that afternoon, she said, “I almost forgot,” and brought out a wad of rubber bands from her back pocket. Dale had never seen rubber bands so small—he could roll them up his fingers like rings, pink, blue, yellow, green. June’s hair was only a few inches long, but she showed him how to twist the strands together, then pinch a small white feather in with the hair and fasten it all with a rubber band. It looked easy, but Dale kept pulling out hairs, finding them wrapped around his fingers, or caught swirled in the sweat of his palm, which June seemed not to notice. She went on handing him the rubber bands, one at a time, over her shoulder.
When they finished, she swung her head side to side. “Is it good?”
“I think so,” Dale said. The feathers were uneven, but they stayed in place. He rolled a few stray hairs into a ball, let the ball fall into his pocket.
“Thank you.” June squeezed his hand. “In 1 million years, my brother would not have done that for me.”
Walking, she said, “You know, I prayed that this would happen. Something like this.”
“You did?”
June nodded. “And now here you are.”
Another afternoon they were sitting in a shallow hole, about the size of a bathtub but not as deep. Peter had said before that it was a deer’s bed, which maybe it was. Dale was leaning back at one end, propped up by his elbows, June at the other end, their legs stacked in the middle. They were quiet. A breeze rustled high up in the trees. He could hear June breathing. Then she pulled a small plastic bag out of her pocket with two cookies inside, and Dale reached forward to take one—the chocolate chips were soft, melting on his fingers—and he had the thought that this cookie wasn’t meant for him, this was Peter’s cookie. June hadn’t mentioned her brother in several days. Dale tried to remember how many. He felt like he should ask.
But June got up before he could do it and Dale followed her to the creek bed. They sat on the bank on a flat, slanting rock. June folded back the hem of her shorts. Her name was written on the fabric there in black marker, in cursive. She traced her finger over the letters. Dale was scared. He stared at the side of her head, her hair still wavy where the rubber bands had been. He felt like his ribs were getting smaller, tighter.
Then when June looked up from her shorts, he turned away—his head came around so quickly, his neck hurt.
“I’ve never been in love before,” she said.
Dale stayed quiet. He could see her hand creeping toward him across the rock.
“I mean, I like it,” she went on. “It’s just … It’s different.” Then leaning closer to Dale, “We’re in love—you know that, don’t you?” She leaned a little farther, her head nearly landing in Dale’s lap, so she could look up at his eyes.
“I killed your brother,” Dale said suddenly. He could hardly believe he’d said it out loud.
“Peter? Peter’s not dead, he’s fine. My parents said we just have to shun him for a while.”
“What?”
“It means you act like he isn’t there,” June said. “It’s a punishment.” She rolled up the leg of her shorts a few more inches and leaned away, showing a bruise on the back of her thigh, teeth marks. “He bit me.”
Dale was standing now, scratching his elbow.
“He only comes out to use the bathroom,” June said. “He has to knock first and get permission before he comes out.”
“What about food?”
“He eats whatever we eat. He just has to do it in his room. He’s fine,” she said again. “It’s just for a while longer.”
“He doesn’t have a fever?”
“Not anymore.” She stepped over. She kept following Dale until he stopped turning away. “You are so cute,” she said.
The next day, back at the creek bed, June was sitting on the ground, giving directions—this rock goes here, that one over there—and Dale was moving the rocks where she pointed. There hadn’t been rain, serious rain, in a month or more, but if it came, if the creek got going, the rocks they’d arranged would form a dam. Then they’d have a lake, or at least a pond, June had said, a secret, and Dale could carve them a canoe, she’d also said, he could hollow out a tree trunk.
Dale quietly kept gathering rocks.
“You’re gonna hurt your back doing it like that,” June told him.
A minute later she said, “Hey—look at me.”
Then when Dale didn’t look, she reached over for a stick and threw it spinning at his back. “Hey.”
He lasted one more day without saying anything. Later he would remember how he’d wished someone would take him away, load him up and drive him blindfolded somewhere he didn’t know. The wishing was always vague—a locked room, himself inside it, lying there on a cot. Somehow it never occurred to him that he could run away, or that he could stay indoors, in his bed, and tell his grandmother he was sick. Or that he could just stay quiet, like he had before. Instead he found June back at the creek bed and told her everything.
When he finished, she said, “But Peter isn’t dead.”
“Not yet,” Dale said.
She tried holding his hand, but Dale pulled away, so she stood clasping her own. When Dale looked over, she was smiling. He couldn’t understand it. He told her she might die—she could be dying right now, he could be killing her so slowly, she wouldn’t even notice.
But June kept smiling.
Soon she grabbed hold of his shirt, the bottom of it, and started pulling.
They walked fast, headed toward the feather tree, Dale was thinking, his shirt was stretching, but she wouldn’t slow down. Then she changed direction.
Where they stopped was a tall oak. They’d piled acorns here once before, with Peter, but the pile had disappeared overnight. From the ground, the oak seemed like the tallest tree in the woods.
“Watch,” June said. “Stand over there.”
She jumped for a branch, out near the end where it dipped toward the ground, then tried again, then on the third try she got ahold of it with both hands. She inched her way toward the trunk. Where the branch got thick, she swung her legs up and pulled her body over the top. At the trunk she stood, pressing her palms together for a moment, then started climbing—faster than Dale had seen her climb before—no stopping, no glancing down, feet following hands. She circled behind the trunk and back around three times, the branches like a spiral staircase, until she was high enough that Dale could raise a hand and pinch her body between two fingers.
“Stay back,” she called down. Dale stayed where he was.
For a moment it seemed the air would hold her, her left foot resting there, with nothing underneath—then it all happened quickly, the back foot stepping off, the branches tossing her back and forth a little on the way down, tilting her body so that she was falling headfirst, before the space opened up and she rotated back around and landed mostly on her side, her left arm bent backwards. Dale began breathing again, then threw up between his boots.
June was moaning, rocking slightly to one side, then the other. She coughed. “See?” she said. “I’m still alive.”
All she could do, though, was lie there. Dale came a few steps closer and stared down at her. Except for the arm, you could think she was napping. Then, reaching out with her good arm, she said she was ready, and Dale helped her up.
They walked side by side, their bodies almost touching, moving at June’s pace, which was slow, her feet shuffling. At the bottom of a rise, they stopped. They couldn’t see her house from here, but June said it was up there, it wasn’t far. This was as close as Dale had gotten. On the ground was a tire with moss growing on one side. Dale pushed at it with his boot—the tire was stiff. June turned then, quickly, wincing, and tried kissing him—she went up on her toes—but he twisted away, so she only got his shoulder.
June walked the rest of the way by herself, she hobbled. Dale stayed there at the tire, watching until she’d gotten over the hill. Then he ran.
Back at his grandmother’s house, he sprayed himself off with the hose—he’d thrown up on his shirt too, it turned out, and a little on his shorts. He stayed outside in the sun, tossing driveway gravel into a bucket, until his clothes were dry.
The next morning, he went back, then again in the afternoon. For a week he kept going, two, three, four times a day, never farther than the mossy tire. He tried climbing a tree nearby, but he still couldn’t see the house.
When June finally came out, she told him she was sorry.
“For what?”
“For making you worry,” she said. “Didn’t you worry about me?”
Dale nodded. She had scrapes he hadn’t noticed before, on her face, her legs, her hand.
“Well, you can stop,” she said. “I’m okay.”
For days after that, all they did was walk until they found a place to sit together, on the ground or on a stump, somewhere cool. Hours could pass with no talking. Sometimes they held hands. June’s left arm was in a cast, lime-green armor from her hand to her shoulder. Her thumb had its own hole. It smelled like sweat and mud, and a little like honey, when Dale put his nose close to the openings.
Then came a day in early August. From a distance, Dale thought June was leading a shrunken old man. Pale. Shoulders hunched. But when they got close, he stood up straight and smiled. Peter was fine. Where the spider had bitten him, he had flat, red circles, like coins. “Feel it,” he said. “It’s like a hot rock in there.”
But Dale wouldn’t touch.
“So you’re a fisherman now?”
“Don’t start,” June said.
“What?” Peter said. “I like it.”
Dale’s grandmother had bought him a vest. The first day he’d worn it, June tried counting the pockets—he held his arms out straight while June walked around—but each time she counted, the number was different: 17, 18, 20 … They still hadn’t figured it out.
Peter raised his arm then and brought it down gently on Dale’s shoulders. “My sister tells me you’re in love.”
Peter was set to perform the ceremony. He stood waiting now on the slanted rock, with a white collared shirt turned backwards. Dale had had to button it for him—June couldn’t do it one-handed.
The Miles brothers were witnesses across the creek bed. One had his hands behind his back, the other stood in salute.
June wore a long white T-shirt, stretched loose at the neck, the armpits dark—her father had thrown it out, she said, but she’d saved it, and now she knew why—and her father’s belt, cinched up over her stomach, the extra length hanging behind like a brown, braided tail.
Dale zipped up his vest as Peter began.
“Dear beloved,” he said. “Thank you. Thank you. What a day this is. You’re sinners, each and every one. But let us forget about that for now and rejoice in joy and happiness.” He went on like that for a while.
Dale and June exchanged bracelets. He gave her a black shoelace with a green glass bead, tied with a square knot. June gave him a squirrel tail she’d hot-glued end to end. Dale had to loop it around twice to keep it from sliding off his wrist.
“You stole that from me,” Peter said, staring at the squirrel tail. He held up a hand when it looked as though June would argue. “It’s okay,” he said. “You have my permission.”
Then he spoke a few words to the sky, asking for a blessing. To the couple, he said, “A bracelet is like a ring. It’s a circle. It’s round. It keeps going.”
He said, “We’ll bow our heads now, and you can do the kiss.”
But Peter did not bow his head, and neither did the Miles brothers. They all watched with eyes open wide as Dale leaned forward and June bent her head sideways, her ear down close to her shoulder. With his own eyes shut, Dale felt his bottom lip land somewhere in her hair. But then they got things situated—they got through it.
“That was very nice,” Peter said afterward. “Congratulations.” He yelled across the creek bed, “Thank you to our guests! If you had brought gifts, I would ask you to bring them forward now!”
Clearly Peter was excited. He couldn’t stand still. “I think I was born for this.” He sounded frantic. “Next time we’ll do better. We’ll get more people. We’ll find—”
“Peter, you did great,” June said. “Thank you.”
It seemed for a little while longer like Peter was lost in a dream. Then he drifted back. He shook Dale’s hand, gripping it with both of his own, and hugged June’s head to his chest.
They could hear him whistling, even in the distance, as he walked away.
And then Dale followed June, gathering sticks, nothing thinner or shorter than a broom handle. June held her good arm outstretched at the same angle as the cast, and Dale loaded the sticks. They crossed the creek bed. They had a place picked out beside the fence—branches overhead, but no roots sticking up through the dirt. Dale did the arranging, the sticks tightly side by side, a lean-to roof along the fence’s top wire. They gathered more. They worked for an hour. Then he took off the vest and made a pouch with his shirtfront and filled it with pine needles for the floor, soft moss for pillows.
When June needed to pee, Dale turned away. He considered where he should go, how far.
“It’s okay,” June told him. She picked her way carefully down the slope, down among the rocks, and squatted there. “You’re my husband,” she said.
Afterward they crawled into the house they’d built, June first, then Dale, and lay there on the ground listening to each other breathe. Dale scooted over closer, away from the barbed wire. The breeze was warm, dry—he could feel it moving up his shorts. He had no idea how clearly he would remember this later. Years from now, back in Missouri, the children would ask about their mother, and Dale would describe the jolt he felt that day when June finally spoke. How quiet it was, and then her voice coming hushed, fast, saying she’d never been so happy in her life, but at the same time she couldn’t wait to be older because then they could have a real house, with a yard, actual bedrooms with closets, a basement, a dining table. Dale thought of his grandmother’s house. She didn’t have a basement, she had a crawl space. But there wasn’t any rush, June said, because she wasn’t dying.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she told him. “I promise.”
As it turned out, though, his wife would die. The children were girls, 2 and 3 when it happened. Then 3 and 4, then 4 and 5, 5 and 6. They liked hearing stories about her, this mother they could barely remember. They had no one else to ask—their mother’s family was all gone, no siblings, the parents both dead.
What harm could it do, Dale wondered, if he told stories about June instead?
One day the older girl got confused. They were in the car, both girls in the back seat, on the way to a park where you could feed goats for a dollar. “Wait,” the older one said. “Mom had a brother?” Dale had mentioned Peter without thinking.
“No,” he told her. “Not a real brother. That was just a game.”
“Oh,” the daughter said.
All he had to do was change a few details. They’d been way out in the woods one day, climbing trees, as he’d told the girls, and they found him, this boy they pretended was her brother. “This is only the beginning,” June had told him. He could remember lying there, staring up at the roof he’d built. He could smell the pine needles, feel the wind on his legs. “We have the whole rest of our lives,” she had said. He remembers closing his eyes. He tried so hard to see it.
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