Desert Trilogy

By Eliam Kraiem

 

The American Sahara

Fifteen-year-old Emer Ahern is standing a foot away from her father when he is struck dead by Zeus's lightning. Xylon, a hitherto unknown god stands in the bolt's way and absorbs Zeus's fire on her behalf. Her life is spared, but before she is returned to her family's farm in Oklahoma, Xylon whispers stori

• Language: English
• Publisher: Calle Pez Studios
• Release date: Mar 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781087947273

Eliam Kraiem

Eliam Kraiem comes to novels by way of playwriting. His most visible play, Sixteen Wounded was seen on Broadway starring two-time Tony winner Judd Hirsch, and directed by Tony winner Garry Hynes. There have been sellout productions in Germany, Italy and Austria and most recently at the New National Theater of Japan, Tokyo. He produced Sarah-Jane Drummey's short Róisín Dubh as well as her award-winning film 134.

Book preview

The American Sahara

1

June 1st, 1930

Seamus wasn’t even looking for it but was just walking along the side of the creek thinking about that photograph of the hairy vagina that Thomas Bert had produced from his vest pocket while they were waiting for Randal’s Feed and Seed to open. He did not know where the picture had come from, but he knew that he wanted to possess it, perhaps worse than he had ever wanted anything. In his mind the vagina had dark black hair but beneath the hair were tantalizing bits of pink and then a hard to describe depth. The picture exuded a slick wetness he could not turn his mind from. If for nothing but the hope of some future peace he had to have it. Seamus needed something to offer in trade and had set to thinking just what that might be when he saw it glinting in the late afternoon sun, a perfect triangle of obsidian in the water along the creek’s edge. He had seen a few arrowheads before this one, but this was the only one he had ever seen that was perfect. Sharp as any white man’s blade, its carver had honed it to an impossible edge. It was an object that belonged to another world entirely. Seamus held the arrowhead in his palm, and knew that it was far too valuable to trade and also he knew that he would trade it and without hesitation because the photograph of the vagina had a power that was beyond value.

Seamus found his father dead and his sister appearing to be so; their hands touching, they lay side by side in a ray of post thunderstorm sun. Seamus shook his father’s body. His mind balked at the facts so suddenly before him. Uncomprehending, he tried to reanimate his father’s limbs with his own but it was of no use. He turned to Emer, a person whom he had secretly and not-so-secretly hated. He saw his sister’s chest rise and fall and rise again and Seamus knew that his sister was living and he closed his eyes and wished that when he reopened them he would find that it was the other way, that it would be Eamonn’s chest that rose and fell and that it would be Emer who had mysteriously departed taking with her her cloying perfection which so readily invited others to compare them always to find himself, the son, wanting. Wishing did not make it so.

Seamus shook his sister to standing.

What the hell happened?

Emer did not answer but instead she flashed a wide and toothy grin and it was so incongruous to the circumstance that fourteen years later, on an island in the South Pacific with his guts spilling from his uniform, surrounded by death and the stench of burning bodies, Seamus would recall his sister’s wide bucktoothed smile and it would offer him some measure of hope.

I think Pa’s dead.

Emer turned and saw their father lying on the ground bloodied and burnt. Emer’s mind wheeled and she remembered how just before the lightning struck she decided to push the plow for one more row. An extra row. A decision born of spite, a sister’s act meant to cement in the mind of her father her superiority over her brother. Emer stumbled to her knees and she touched her father’s cold face. After a time Seamus pulled Emer to her feet.

Can ya talk?

Emer nodded but said nothing in the way of confirmation. Seamus looked down at their dead father and shook his head.

Come on, let’s go back to the house.

Seamus put out his hand for Emer to hold. A thing he had never done before and would not do again. The two of them walked the better part of a mile along the fence line to the house. If either of them had thoughts they did not share them but their hands remained clasped.

When they reached the house, it smelled of heaven as their mother had been baking soda bread and had cooked a stew with the rabbits they had shot that morning. She did not look up, as it was not her habit.

Seamus, I do not know what you are doing back here, but I know that the sun has at least an hour in the sky and there ain’t nothing for you to do in this house but make devilry and if I was you I would march back out to the squash patch and get to….

Mama.

Don’t you mama me, now get….

Mama….

He said it again, this time louder, not quite demanding her attention but more pleading, as if with that single repeated syllable he could save her from the embarrassment of being wrong and perhaps also spare her the discomfort of his news, which he too late realized he had in no way prepared to deliver.

Emer what in the name of…. Oh my lord, you are burned. Are you hurt… where is your father? Emer talk to me. Seamus, what happened? Somebody… for the love of God.

I think… They were struck by lightning, Mama.

What?

Father’s dead.

Doreen dropped her rolling pin and it clattered on the rough plank floor and then rolled under the table. The three of them stood in the kitchen enveloped in silence and the smell of fresh soda bread.

Put some fresh clothes on your sister and take her into town to see Dr. Barks.

She touched Emer on her head as if to simply verify her existence, and then she took a few steps and then ran as fast as the loamy ground allowed. Emer and Seamus watched her figure get smaller and Seamus squeezed the arrowhead he had found while dawdling by the creek and in so doing he gave its maker one last taste of white man’s blood to add to his fortune in the next world. Emer took off the remnants of her overalls, and put on her Sunday dress.

As they were walking out to the road they heard their mother’s lonesome wail. Not since the time of Andromache and Hector did the gods feast their ears on such a cry. Emer did not know the gods very well, but from what she had seen of them she knew that a woman’s keening in no way displeased them.

Neither Emer nor Seamus shed a tear for their father, although they both loved and respected him. Tears were not their inheritance. Eamonn would not have approved of them crying, even under such circumstances as these, and his children did him proud on that day as they walked on to the road in the setting sun, teeth set hard against the terror rising from within.

❖

Dr. Barks was not in his office although they’d not expect him to be. Seamus and Emer walked around the small front house that served as his office and examination rooms and around the side yard to the main house. The house had been oriented backward so that the front door faced the backyard and an unbroken wall faced the street. It was the only house in the town of Boise City that was built that way, maybe the only house in all of Oklahoma, but it allowed patients to come to the doctor’s office without disturbing his family.

Through the plate-glass window they could see the Barks family sitting down for supper. Six children ranging from fifteen to an infant sat at the table while Dr. Bark’s wife served them each a plate with beef and gravy and potatoes and green beans. When they had all been served they bowed their heads and while Emer and Seamus could not hear the words, they knew that Doctor Barks was delivering a prayer of thanks. The prayer went on for some time and it did not escape Emer’s notice that the eldest girl, whose name was Vera and whose age fell between Emer and Seamus’s and who was known to them both as a tomboy and a trouble maker, opened one eye, clocked that no one was looking and stole a green bean from her brother’s plate and munched it quietly.

When the doctor had finished praying, the family began to eat. Emer and Seamus watched the family silently through the window and they both knew that they would trade places with any member of that family if such an offer could be made. They stood there in the dark and watched them eat for a long time.

Maybe we should let `em finish.

It was the first utterance that Emer had made since her brother found her in the south field and it startled both of them.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s what Pa would’ve wanted, but Mama won’t take kindly to the delay. She’s prolly back at the house by now waiting for us to come home and tell her that the doc says you’re okay.

Why don’t we just go home and tell her that then?

Better not. She’ll be onto the doctor herself soon enough and our story better match his. Hey Eams, you think they’d feed us a bit of dinner?

No, and don’t you ask neither.

Emer went to the door and knocked, and they waited and it seemed to Emer that she could detect kindness and concern even in the doctor’s footfalls on the other side of the door. Doctor Elijah Barks was still holding a napkin, a clear reminder that he had been disturbed in the middle of his supper, but his eyes showed no annoyance.

Well hello, what brings you by this fine summer evening?

Seamus answered:

It’s my sister, sir.

Go on.

I think she was hit by lightning.

Doctor barks shifted his gaze from Seamus to Emer.

You were struck by lightning?

Emer nodded.

Huh…well, where’d it get ya?

I ain’t sure.

Usually when a person is struck by lightning, there is a pretty clear entrance wound and usually an exit wound too.

I know it, sir. That’s exactly how it was for Papa. Came in the top of his head and left through his side.

Well… I didn’t know your daddy had been struck by lightning, although I don’t doubt it for a second. A man with stories of the caliber he tells, you gotta figure he’s got one in his back pocket that he’s been saving.

Yes sir.

And they do say lightning-attraction runs in the family, although I ain’t sure I believe that. Anyhow, if you don’t have an entrance wound it could have been that the lightning just struck near you and kind of stunned–

No sir, I don’t think Emer is telling it right. Our daddy was struck by lightning today and Emer was standing right next to him. I found them there in our south field and the ground was pretty well scorched and there had definitely been lightning.

And where is Eamonn now?

Emer shook her head slowly and met the doctor’s gaze and an understanding passed between them. What would be the first of many.

Why don’t you kids come inside for a minute?

They followed the doctor into the house which was warm from the oven and also from the day’s heat. The children looked at them and only Vera kept eating. She knew her father well enough to know what was coming next.

Tammy, I am going to walk over to Gary’s house for a minute and then I’ll be back. In the meantime fix these children a plate.

I hadn’t planned on guests and so…

The look the doctor gave his wife silenced her. He put on his coat even though it was too warm for a coat.

You can split mine up and I’m sure that the kids will be happy to contribute as well.

The doctor did not wait to hear the mumbled yes sirs, but they were given. Emer and Seamus both managed to get heaping plates of dinner and they were grateful for it and said so. After the dinner was finished, Tammy took the younger kids to bed and Vera cleaned up around Emer and Seamus, and she looked at Seamus in a way that seemed to contain a question. Seamus silently answered her and he answered in the affirmative, his eyes even more insistent than hers and although no words were uttered, an understanding was reached between them and days later consummated, and months and years after that Emer would wonder how her life would’ve been different if she had just had the courage to dissuade her brother from his baser instincts.

The Doctor came back with Gary Mongelo and the four of them got into Gary’s pick up and they drove back out to the Ahern farm. The house was empty and dark and silent and so they all four walked out almost a mile along the fence line where they found Doreen with her head on Eamonn’s chest. When the men pulled her away she kicked and screamed and cried and Gary carried her back most of the way to the house but finally she asked to be put down, and she smoothed her dress and dried her eyes and if she cried for her husband again, no one ever heard it.

2

July 19th 1930

During the first months of summer, the winter wheat of Cimarron County had all been harvested and taken on trucks to the grain elevators for storage and sale. Thousands of pounds of yellow chaff freed from the weight of its grain had escaped from the open tops of trucks and settled on the side of the highway lending the twilight the strange illusion that along the humble blacktop a sidewalk of gold had been paved.

Emer and Seamus had spent the majority of the day out in the sorghum field trying to save what had somehow gone to seed during six weeks of neglect. They weren’t going to save much, and how they were going to feed the hogs in the winter was a question that plagued Emer’s mind. She knew now that she didn’t know anything at all. Working next to her father it seemed that every idea was her own, that she instinctively knew the work of farming like knowing how to breathe or swallow, but it had become clear in the last month that that was a trick her father had played on her. The second Eamonn was gone, Emer’s intuitions evaporated. Without a sentence of explanation; that was how Eamonn’s father had passed on the trade of farming, as did his grandfather before him, back and back and in the long run it might’ve made farmers of Emer and Seamus too but their lesson was cut short and they felt themselves thrashing from one half-done task to the next as the farm failed in what seemed like a thousand places at once.

When they came to the Kincaid’s drive Seamus stopped short as if he were held by invisible wire.

Well?

I never had no truck with Kincaid and don’t reckon I will now either.

You don’t have no truck?

Yep.

We walked all this way and now we ain’t going in?

I ain’t going in. You do what you want.

You ready to walk back and explain to Mama how you ain’t got no truck with Kinkaid?

Mama said I get to decide, and right today I’m thinking we’re better off to sell.

They stood on the blacktop for a long time looking at the farmhouse in the dying light.

I am gonna go to town.

What for?

To go somewheres. Besides I’m most of the way there already.

Emer shook her head and started down the long drive toward the farmhouse. She was tempted to turn around and look to see if her brother was following. The electrical lines buzzed and snapped above her head. They were suspended on high poles spread out along the highway and then down the drive and into the house. Warm yellow light spilled from the windows and she heard the wind moving through the now bare wheat fields and knew that there was a connection between the two. Wheat brought money, and money brought electricity. Emer wondered if her father had ever made the connection between wheat and electricity, or if electricity was even a thing Eamonn cared about.

Emer knocked on the door and waited and heard Mr. Kincaid’s steps and there seemed to be little kindness in them.

Emer.

Mr. Kincaid. I’m sorry to bother you.

You ain’t bothering me.

The Kincaid boys, of which there were only two, were sat in front of a dark oak Westinghouse. They were listening to a broadcast Emer would later learn was called Mythos.

Emer had heard a radio before but had never conceived of sitting and listening to a program in its entirety. The brothers each stole a glance at her but then quickly looked back at the radio as if by looking away they may miss some crucial segment of the story and never be able to recover it.

The story, told in low and serious tones, would become an important tale to Emer as it described a reality she had witnessed firsthand but was at pains to be able to articulate.

…But Gaea recoiled with horror, though her sons were greater than the mountains she had piled up to serve as their nursery. They were hideous. Each with only a single red eye, unblinking in the middle of his forehead. They were the Cyclops. They were born with all the knowledge of metallurgy in their bones and when their hammers fell the earth shook with the force of their blows, and sparks flew across the heavens and the clang of metal on metal rose from their underground forge and filled the world with the sound of despair. When Mother Earth gave birth again, it was to even more heinous offspring, each with fifty heads and one hundred arms….

You got a wireless at your house?

No sir.

It’s the devil in a box I tell ya, I got half a mind to get rid of this one, but truth be told, I’m afraid the savages would set fire to the house if I did.

Emer had the strong feeling that Mr. Kincaid meant it. His sons wore a kind of glassed-over look as if they were dreaming with their eyes open, but their dreams were being fed to them invisibly through the air with a kind of sorcery just then in its infancy.

Mr. Kincaid allowed Emer to listen to the show for a time. She would’ve stood there until summer turned to autumn, so amazed was she by the story being told.

So, what can I do for you?

One time you had said to my Pa that you thought we ought to be using our land to grow wheat.

Okay.

Well, I had some questions about that.

What kind of questions?

Well, just…

Bout farming?

Yes sir.

Where’s your brother at?

He had other engagements, I guess.

So he left his little sister to do his work for him.

I guess so.

Doesn’t bode very well, does it?

I ain’t sure sir but I just had a couple of questions and thought, maybe…

Kinkade looked at Emer a long time as if trying to parse what type of matter he was faced with.

Let’s go into the kitchen. We’ve supped already but I’m sure Mrs. Kincaid can give you a slice of pie and we can jaw a minute about farming and best practices and so on.

In the kitchen Mrs. Kincaid was washing dishes and was surprised to see Emer.

Poor girl. I am so sorry.

You didn’t do nothing.

I know. Nobody did. Just a bad accident is all. I’m just sorry you got to go through it is all.

Thank you ma’am. That’s very nice of you to say.

Mattie, I want you to give Emer here a piece of pie and then I want you to leave us be so we can talk.

Talk about what?

Wheat.

Wheat?

Wheat.

Mrs. Kinkaid gave her husband a sidewise glance that seemed to contain a whole conversation within, maybe more than one. A look that held disagreement and resentment and broken promises and stained honor. Mrs. Kincaid went into the larder and returned with a whole rhubarb pie from which she cut two pieces. She brought her husband the first piece on a plate and then returned with Emer’s piece and two forks.

Wheat.

She curtsied in a subservient gesture, overly formal for modern times, and as the hem of her dress swept the floor she looked her husband in the eye and imagined cutting his throat from ear to ear. She rose and passed through the swinging door that led to the living room and joined her sons to hear about the ancient and petulant gods and their fight with their parents.

She made it fresh today. I reckon she’s mad at me ‘cause she thought she was gonna take it to the church sale in the morning for the new roof, but I’m guessing that this pie ain’t gonna keep the rain off the pews anyway, and if ever a moment called for pie it’s this one.

They both ate their pie. Emer kept her eyes on her plate, but Mr. Kincaid kept his eyes on Emer. If Emer would’ve just looked up all the answers her heart sought were there as plain as the smirk on Thomas Kincaid’s face, but she did not have the strength to meet the man’s gaze, and in that failure the path her life would take would be forever altered from her intentions for it. A few minutes went by and the only sound in the kitchen was that of fork tines against china plates. When there was no pie left on Emer’s plate, Thomas Kincaid leaned into her, close enough for her to feel his breath on her face.

Okay, wheat.

Yes sir.

How much they offer you?

Two thousand dollars.

Two thousand dollars?

Yes sir.

Lord Jesus, help us.

Excuse me, sir?

Imagine your daddy lying dead on the ground and some hook-nosed Jew pulling his gold fillings out from his mouth with a pair of dykes.

I don’t follow, sir.

It’s the same damn thing.

Well, they did say we can stay in the house.

As in your family would still own the house?

Well, no sir, I think the bank would own the house but they said we could still live there.

For how long?

Long as we wanted.

It’s a damn lie. Soon as you sign them papers it don’t matter what they said. Sheriff Marks himself will be standing at your door making sure you and your brother and your mama clear off for good.

Emer kept her doubt to herself but Mr. Kincaid read it in her face.

It’s how the Jew-bank does its business.

So, you don’t think we ought to sell?

I didn’t say either way what I thought you ought to do.

Okay.

Now, what can I do for you?

Well, I was curious why you told our daddy he ought to be growing wheat?

Because you can make money growing wheat.

Me and my brother we don’t know the first thing about growing wheat.

You know the first thing about growing something else?

Just what we been growing, I guess.

So far as I can tell what you been growing is a garden, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that. You grow a garden and you can get some pretty darn good food at a pretty decent price, but since you came here and your brother didn’t, somebody’s gonna have to talk to you like a man or you goddamn micks are gonna starve out there. A garden something women do to entertain themselves while their children are at school.

I don’t follow.

Farming is a business, and a business by its very nature requires risk, and the greater that risk the greater the potential reward, you follow me?

I’m not sure, sir.

Well try and get sure missy because I ain’t in the habit of repeating myself.

Yes sir.

Now, I got fifty-three acres of wheat planted, and each acre should yield about fifty bushels of wheat. Let’s make it easy and say I have a thousand dollars I got to take off the top in operating costs, and I get a dollar a bushel for wheat, what’s my profit gonna be?

Both Emer and Thomas Kincaid knew that Emer did not have the capacity to answer the question but they let it sit a long time as if maybe the answer would materialize from the air.

It’s just north of sixteen hundred. Of course, that assumes it doesn’t rain too much, but that it rains enough, and there ain’t no wind storms or another goddamn run on the banks…. But if none of those things happen and I think they prolly won’t, well I stand to make sixteen hundred dollars profit, and am all set to do it again the next year and every year after that too. It means I can feed my family and put shoes on their feet and a roof over their ungrateful damned heads.

Emer stared at her own fallen-apart shoes, and knew for a fact that in a month’s time there would be nothing left of them at all, and that her brother’s shoes were no better.

How many acres can you grow wheat on? Mr. Kincaid asked.

Well we got forty all told, but the house takes up some of it and the…

And nothing, you got thirty-nine and a half acres to grow wheat on.

Okay, let’s say I do.

Well, I tell you what, you ain’t early. Clearing what you got and then turning forty acres is gonna take some time. You’re gonna have to get a tractor and a disc plow. And you’re gonna need some seed.

Well, we don’t got no tractor or no kinda plow and we don’t have no money for seed and even if we did, how to plant the stuff still seems a bit mysterious to me.

Right, so what you need is an investor and an advisor.

What’s that?

Someone who’s willing to take a bit of the risk in exchange for a bit of the reward and the more risk that person takes the more reward they are gonna expect.

Where we gonna find a person like that?

Mr. Kincaid rocked back so that his chair balanced on two legs.

The world is full of `em, You go into Oklahoma City or Enid or Denver and you’ll find `em without even looking. Question is, how much of what’s yours are they gonna take?

How much are they gonna take?

You won’t have nothing left. In fact, they’ll fix it so that a year from now you’ll owe them money, and two years from now you’ll owe them twice as much. You go that route you might as well sell the land to the Jews. You’d be two thousand dollars richer anyway.

I don’t get what we’re supposed to do then.

3

July 20

th

, 1930

Emer was in with the chickens when she heard the screen door slam and knew that her brother was home. It took everything in her not to stop what she was doing and run to Seamus and bury her head in Seamus’s chest. She wanted to beg her brother to fill the shoes he was left, to restore the natural order. Emer wanted to ask Seamus not to leave her alone to make the hard decisions and do the hard work. She was not under the illusion that her brother liked to work or that he had any talent in the field of farming, but she knew that her brother was better than no one and without him Emer feared that she would die of loneliness.

Emer did not run into the house to see her brother but continued to work inside the chicken coop. Emer had already collected what eggs there were and had shoveled the waste into the bin and laid down new straw for the hens to sit on. She admired each of them in turn and it did not matter that they regarded her as a slave who came to make them comfortable, cool and fat, and then disappeared to return the next day. She would eventually break each of their necks and pluck the feathers from them and drain the blood from their bodies, but on this day she did none of those things. Emer envied them their simple lives, picking grain and drinking cool clean water and enjoying each other’s company.

With her bucket of eggs she walked into the already too-warm house. Her brother was in the kitchen eating lard on stale bread, bread that normally would have been fed to the chickens.

Where’d you go?

Town.

What’d you do in town?

Nothing.

Well, you’re just coming back now so you musta been doing something.

Yep.

Well?

Seamus didn’t answer her but continued spreading lard on his bread. He wore a kind of irrepressible grin, as if in the night he had come upon some fountain of knowledge but was now choosing to keep its secrets rather than share its bounty. After a while, it became clear that Emer wasn’t going to get an answer from her brother and so they made their breakfasts and they ate in silence.

So what’d old Kincaid have to say?

Why should I tell you anything, when you ain’t telling me nothing?

Maybe it’s time to butcher one of the hogs. Least we’d have some bacon to eat.

And how you gonna keep the rest from spoiling?

We could cure it.

You know how to do that?

I’ll find out.

Well, go ahead.

The sun was higher in the sky than their father had ever sat at that table, and they were both uncomfortable with the idea that perhaps somewhere their father could see them and disapproved of their sloth, but they also knew that they could sit at the kitchen table until dark and nobody on earth would be any the wiser, or for that matter care.

I went and talked to Vera.

What for?

No reason.

What’d you talk about?

Lots of things.

You talked all night?

We walked around some, climbed to the top of the elevator, we did lots of things. What’d Kincaid say?

Said he thinks we ought to grow wheat.

Well we knew that. He tell you how?

Not really, but he said if that was what we were gonna do we’d better get after it.

They ain’t even done harvesting last year’s.

First off they is, or mostly is, and second the first time you plant it’s got a mess of extra steps.

Like what?

Like a lot of things. What it comes to is if we’re gonna do it we’re gonna need help and help ain’t free.

What the hell you driving at, Eams…

I’ll tell you what I’m driving at. While you were walking around, or something else with Vera Barks, I was trying to figure how we could maybe get something to eat besides beets and eggs.

Good for you.

Well, I could use some damn help.

I already told you my opinion. Let’s sell this damn farm.

Okay, then what?

Move to town.

Okay, then what?

Then I don’t know, maybe we could open a hotel.

4

November 15

th

, 1930

The vagina in Seamus’s mind grew to fill every nook and corner of it, and he found himself powerless against its magic. When he had spilled his seed inside of Vera and felt both emptied and also full, he would curl into her warmth and a profound sleep would overtake him. Seamus managed to perform the act almost every day for six weeks and with each repeated visit he felt himself becoming a kind of conductor, more in tune with the vagina’s cagey rhythms and less at the mercy of its mysterious power. Eventually he always lost control, but the sport of it was in trying not to. While his sister struggled to maintain the farm and move most of their land over to wheat, Seamus lost himself in the ancient and sometimes dark art of fucking.

It was in November, and as the nights became colder and Seamus and Vera’s meetings had started to become inconvenient, that Seamus and Vera noticed the same thing: Seemingly overnight, Vera’s breasts had grown large. Seamus had wished that Vera’s breasts were larger and he considered the possibility that his wishing had made them so. He immediately began to wish for other things; he wished for a motor car, and a white stallion and a Winchester rifle, but none of those came to be, and he contented himself with Vera’s now large breasts.

When her father came home and found her throwing up he began asking questions. It did not take him long to get to the bottom of her sudden nausea or the rapid physical changes that she’d undergone.

Vera did not need her father to tell her that her life would soon bear no relation to what it had been up until that point, that her childhood would be taken by another even more childish than she, and it was only because her adolescent petulance could not quite overwhelm her inborn kindness that she did not tell her father that her heart sang at the thought of childhood’s end. If she were feeling better she might have looked him in the eye and told him that what was growing in her belly was freedom, freedom from his endless rules about the way a person should be, freedom from her mother’s constant sadness, and more than any of it, freedom from her annoying brothers who seemed to live only to make her existence miserable.

She had grown tired of being one of six. Being the eldest had long since made her a kind of junior parent to her siblings, all responsibility, no privilege. At least now she would know the full measure of parenthood. Already, with a human being growing inside of her, no bigger yet than a pea, she felt a kind of largeness she had never known.

Though she walked behind her father she felt like she floated above him. Not once did he glance back to see if she was still with him and she considered the idea that if she turned and went home and crawled under her blanket as she wanted to do he would not notice her absence and he would go about his business, as if it were his business, as if it had anything to do with him at all.

Elijah Barks would confront Seamus Ahern as if his confrontation would turn Seamus into the man Elijah wanted him to be, as if mere words from the good doctor would confer grace upon the farmer, like the tip of a monarch’s sword could transform a mere soldier into a knight. Her father was a buffoon and the fact that no one in the town of Boise City saw it made it no less true. She saw it, she was humiliated by it, and hated him for being the cause of her humiliation.

Emer was digging a drainage ditch at the side of the house when Doctor Barks and Vera approached.

Doctor Barks. Vera. It’s kind of you to come visiting.

Is it?

Dr. Bark’s manner was colder than Emer expected as he had always been so kind.

Can I get you some water or something?

Water would be much appreciated, thank you Emer.

Emer fetched the Doctor and Vera a glass of water each and finally the doctor spoke.

I need to speak to your mother.

She’s taken to the bed, sir. I thought it was just for a spell, that it would eventually pass, but so far I’m afraid it ain’t.

I’m sorry to hear that. You have to see if you can encourage her.

How, sir?

Well, that’s hard to say exactly. Maybe you’re just going to have to try different things. Invite her to take a walk down to the mailbox with you, or see if you can get her to help with the milking, whatever it is, but you can’t just let her lie there.

Okay, I’ll try.

They sat at the table in silence for a long time. Vera wished that her father would just get on with it and say what he had dragged her there to say, so that she might walk the three miles back to town and go into her room and close the door and never open it.

Is there something else?

Where’s your brother?

Hard telling. After we’re done working he goes off on his own usually.

I see. Well I’m gonna haf’ta talk to him.

Okay, did he do something wrong?

Well, it ain’t for me to say whether he did something wrong or not. Let’s just say he didn’t do it right.

I’m not sure I follow, sir.

I would really have preferred to talk to your mother about this.

You want me to see if I can get her up?

No, I suppose that won’t be necessary. Just tell your brother that Vera and I were here and that I’ll be expecting his visit to my office first thing in the morning.

I’ll tell him.

It seems our families are gonna be tied up with one another for the foreseeable future and for what it’s worth I count you in the plus column.

Thank you, sir.

Dr. Barks and Vera left, and he put his arm