October
  

Cara knew the secrets: a certain tilt to the vine, distance from the mother plant, an early need for phosphorus. She hand-pollinated in May; her fruit was set by June. Now it was October and two dozen giant pumpkins waited in her fields, as surprising and tympanic as pregnant bellies. Two dozen was record and most of them were sold. Designers drove all the way from Atlanta to buy her pumpkins. She’d had one on the gold-domed capitol’s steps, another on the lawn of the governor’s mansion.

Giant pumpkins weren’t the only type she grew. She had rows of little Sugar Pies for baking and rows of sturdy Connecticut Fields for carving. She had Blue Lakotas as bright as the sky and Tigers striped like the cat. These pumpkins were for the families who came with plans—a scary jack-o-lantern, a pumpkin pie. Children yelped when they discovered the prickly vines. They strained to lift fruit that outweighed them.

On the dirt road where Cara lived and worked there were two farms, hers and her neighbors’, Tom and Martha. Tom and Martha had quit growing anything other than their kitchen garden, though there had been a time when they too were a pick-your-own. On clear October days they sat on Cara’s back porch. Martha manned the scales and collected payments. She shoved the crumpled bills, the rolls of quarters, the fistfuls of dimes into gallon Ziploc bags. Tom leaned back in a rocking chair with carrot fronds spilling from his pockets. When children gathered at the porch steps, he led them across the field to the fence line where his donkey waited. Tom snapped the carrots into chunks and lifted the children one by one, reminding them to hold their palms flat. To Cara he said, “You keep selling pumpkins, I’m gonna have to get that donkey a gym membership. He’s getting fat.”

In the evenings, Cara sat at her kitchen table and made notes in her journal about what sold well and what people requested. After this there was the daily work of October: washing and sorting; canning, freezing, and drying. She sometimes put up food well into the night. October was a bounteous month when the whole felt greater than the sum of its parts, but it was demanding. She developed a runny nose, then a little cough, and was unsurprised. She chewed horehound from the herb garden and carried lozenges in her pocket, drank extra fluids. She promised herself rest come winter.
  

November
  

The beds were mulched and beneath the mulch were the carrots plump and warm, the dormant strawberry vines, the flowers waiting for spring. Cara opened the windows of her spare bedroom and wore a sweater against the chill. She took the sweet potatoes from the drying screens and loosely packed them in barrels. She checked and sorted the onions and garlic. The yellow potatoes she hung in burlap bags and the tiny dried peppers she swept into a basket. Winter squash and pumpkins lined the walls. She pulled the windows down to a crack and dropped the heavy drapes. Everything that needed to sleep for winter slept. In her kitchen garden sturdy plants grew on, thick-leaved kale and fat turnips, purple cabbage that squeaked between the fingers.

Her cold symptoms passed and her cough deepened. She sat at her kitchen table with back issues of Farmer’s Monthly. On page five was an article entitled “Preventative Eating.” Cayenne clears congestion. Garlic is nature’s antibiotic. She picked a sack of mustard greens and simmered them with peppers and garlic. The greens cooked up spicy and sharp. Her eyes watered with the peppers’ heat. The next day she stank of garlic as she pulled up her coneflowers. The root of the common coneflower is a powerful antimicrobial. Following the magazine’s instructions, she boiled the hairy roots into a tea. She tried to sleep more.
  

December
  

Winter arrived. In the mornings, the chickens were fluffy and huddled close in their coop. Cara pruned the blueberries and allowed herself the nostalgia of this task. Blueberries were her first commercial venture after buying the farm. It had been a wasteland when she bought it, 20 acres of upturned soil as red as torn flesh, offered to the highest bidder. She’d been the only bidder that day on the courthouse steps. The timber company rep had called out her bid, once, twice, three times. “Sold.”

She belonged to so little before buying the farm. She rented an efficiency apartment that smelled of a dog she didn’t own. Her earth science degree had landed her a monitoring job, meaning she worked odd hours in an office overlooking dual rivers of piped municipal water. Once an hour she tested a sample, then ticked a box in a notebook. Her grandmother had died and with her death the family farm, where she had raised Cara, went to the bank. Besides Cara, there were no other grandchildren, no other children. A tendency toward reclusiveness, coupled with a string of simple, early deaths and Cara was orphaned from the world, left as unattached as a loosed helium balloon. She sought a limb to snag her.

The timber company had left no trees standing on her farm. The horizon was exposed to a line. Unwanted cedars decomposed in the field. Topsoil moldered in gray-brown strips. A heavy rain came the first week she lived in the house and she went out in her rainboots. She wanted to see her purchase in this new state, damp and glistening. She imagined a line of water coursing from a bright leaf, a round-eyed frog startled from a puddle. She found a viscous, red-clay sea. Half way across her field her boots were so caked she knelt in the rain and watched rusty water run over her feet, burying them ever deeper.

“Do you need help?” It was Tom. She’d seen his trailer, tucked in the only stand of hardwoods left standing for miles around. He’d kept his land and outlasted the timber company.

“It’s easier if you walk fast,” he said. “Stop and you’ll mire down.” Her boots squelched free and she jogged to match Tom’s long stride. She followed him to his home, though she could have parted ways in favor of her own house. Martha met them at the backdoor with towels.

In the first year, Cara cleaned her sharecropper’s cabin of the muddy footprints and cigarette butts left by the timber workers. She painted the walls and waxed the floors. She burned the brush pile in her front yard. The topsoil she transported to her garden plots, borrowing Tom’s tractor. The cedars she split into fenceposts. At the edge of her land she found the ruins of an old home site: four lines of granite foundation blocks outlining lost walls and six stone steps, three at the space where the front door had been, three at the space where the back door had been. Cara borrowed Tom’s tractor to take the steps back to her house and replace her rotting wooden ones. She’d planned to use the foundation stones as well, but beneath the first one she moved she found an infant’s skeleton. There was nothing else in the grave, no worm-eaten gown or silver rattle, no single leather shoe—such items would’ve been saved for the next. The discovery halted her piracy. She left the homestead to return to the earth, allowed invasive vines, briars and all manner of weedy flowers to overtake the stones. It became a wild plot between the fledgling fuzz of the young planted pines and the colors of her fields.

She planted 40 blueberry bushes. Her blueberry bushes thrived.

Cara forged an easy, sensible relationship with Martha and Tom. The third year she owned her farm, Tom scribbled “blueberries” on the Pick Your Own signs he posted along the highway. People came. Now she pruned a second generation of bushes that stood eight feet tall. Now a second generation, only knee-high, came to pick. Tom and Martha had passed their peach orchard on to her, the second generation. They’d let their strawberry plots go fallow and gifted her the daughter plants. Her acreage was rich with cultivation and the horizon line was clothed in the timber company’s neat evergreens.

Cara clipped the largest canes from each blueberry bush. She hauled the debris to the brush pile, then scattered pecans and black walnuts around the brush pile. Later in the winter, when the woods would be quieter still, she’d visit and seek out the teeth marks on the shell halves, the shallowly buried nut caches.

After the blueberries, she turned her attention to the lump in her chest, just above her heart, a lump that rattled but that no amount of coughing dislodged. Her cough was wet and painful, erratic at midday but ceaseless at dusk and dawn. She’d coughed so much the tender connective muscles of her ribs ached. Beneath the kitchen floorboard she kept a fireproof cash box. She tugged it out one evening and slipped $50 from an envelope labeled “Emergencies.”

The next day, in town at the county health clinic, the young nurse listened to her lungs.

“Pneumonia, most likely,” said the nurse. “You ever had it before?”

“No.”

“An x-ray would diagnose.”

“How much is an x-ray?”

“Let’s just do this,” said the nurse. She scribbled a prescription. Cara thanked her and drove to a drugstore. The prescription was thirty dollars to fill. This on top of the thirty dollar clinic visit. She had to drive home and revisit the cash box, then go back into town for her medication. Thirty dollars was bread, milk, cheese and coffee. Maybe a bar of chocolate. Thirty dollars was two families’ worth of pumpkins. Thirty dollars was gas for her truck or tractor. Thirty dollars was a brown bottle of twenty capsules. Cara put the first one in her mouth and swallowed it dry. It tasted of factories.

She spent Christmas Eve with Martha and Tom. Martha said, “Help me frost these cookies.” Cara spread green icing over pale cookies shaped like stockings. Martha added sprinkles. Tom sat at the kitchen table and drank eggnog. By the time Martha slid the third batch of cookies from the oven—two silver trays filled with doves of peace—Tom was giddy as a boy. He left the kitchen and put on Martha’s Bing Crosby Christmas record. “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” jumped and scratched, but the slow, warm feel of it was there, and Tom took Martha around the waist and shuffled her across the linoleum floor.

Cara poured herself more coffee and went into the living room. She sat in Tom’s recliner, facing the window so that Tom and Martha could have their dance floor. When she drew a deep breath her lungs ached, but through the window she saw the light of her own front porch. Martha and Tom thought of her sometimes at dusk, and called to ask if she wanted some tomatoes, or they called to invite her for pie because the crust had browned nicely. Through the window, she saw herself as they must, a warm light through the woods, another spot of basic goodness in the middle of Rosebud’s trees. Behind her, Tom hummed and Martha’s house slippers shushed against the floor.
  

January
  

Many nights were below freezing. Cara turned on the heater in the chicken house and the warming light in the well house. She left the faucets to drip and filled her coffee pot with water in case the pipes froze anyway. She cleaned last spring’s nests from the migratory birdhouses and kept the feeders filled for the tough, little wintering birds. She mended the deer fence. She took her chainsaw and collected fire wood from the detritus of clearcuts. Wood ducks flew over her fields in their awkward, thrumming way. Turkeys waddled about in the neat lines of the planted pines.

The antibiotic altered the nature of her cough. It became productive and she carried tissues, considered it a good sign each time she loosened the lump in her chest. The cold air stung her bronchial passages, so she wound a scarf around her lower face when she went outside. On the coldest days she wore the scarf indoors too. The wood-burning stove was only capable of so much.

 A cold snap rolled through and daytime temperatures hovered near freezing. At night her bed was cold no matter how many blankets she layered. Her chest was a cavern of fire that kept her from sleep. The fourth night of the cold snap she took two quilts to the living room and hammered one over the door to the hall, one over the door to the kitchen. She stoked the fire high. By morning the stockpot of water that she put on top of the woodstove to moisten the air had simmered dry. The couch was her new bed.
  

February
  

The peach trees had never known a chainsaw. Tom had told her it would make the fruit mealy. When he passed the orchard to her she took this wisdom as part and parcel, but this pruning season her health demanded she scrimp on effort. Even with the chainsaw, it took her the morning to prune a single peach tree. She spent most of her time on the ground, coughing.

Cara climbed the ladder, picked a limb likely to block the sun come spring. From the top of the ladder, she saw Tom coming down the road on his green tractor. Behind him the sky was puffy and gray like soiled cotton. He wore the red flannel shirt he’d worn every winter she’d known him. He glowed like Christmas. He pulled into Cara’s yard and she climbed from the ladder and went to him.

They met mid-field. He handed her a plastic grocery sack. Inside were two jars of stewed okra. He said, “Martha thinks the slime’ll calm your lungs.”

Cara recognized the prescription from Farmer’s Monthly. “Tell her I already tried the garlic and the coneflowers.”

Tom nodded toward the orchard. “I’ll meet you out there.” He turned and walked back toward his tractor.

Tom met her with his chainsaw in hand. He mounted the ladder each time she returned to earth. They finished the orchard by sunset. He patted the last tree pruned. “These are good trees. Well-established. You’ll never have to worry about their fruit.”
  

March
  

Jonquils were blooming and the peaches weren’t far behind. Cara needed to spread compost at the base of the fruit trees. The strawberries would soon want uncovering and it was time to start seedlings in the cold frame. She should sort through the seeds she’d stored and craft this year’s seed order. The blueberries needed feeding and if she wanted chicken this year the rooster had to be let loose to roam among the hens. Spring and its amplifications banged at her door, yet all she wanted to do was sleep and for that there wasn’t time.

She counted out money from the cash box beneath her floorboards again—a twenty, two tens, four fives. At the health clinic the same nurse listened to her lungs. “Neglected pneumonia. We’ll try an intravenous in conjunction with an oral antibiotic. And once we knock this out you should come back for the pneumonia vaccine. You’re a candidate.” The nurse was young enough to be a natural blonde. Cara nodded and rolled up her shirt sleeve. Once again, she drove home and back to cover her excursion—the injection was an unexpected cost.

It was roosting season, and that night the turkey buzzards came. They choose a pine growing at the dead center of the wild plot where she’d once unearthed an infant skeleton. Cara watched from her porch as the massive black birds soared home in groups of twos and threes, landing in the uppermost branches. They clung to the top: huge, black, and weighty as lead.
  

April
  

The smallest moon backlit the buzzards into the ominous paper images children clip for Halloween. Cara drove her tractor to the plot and cleared a path into the center, hoping the birds would leave if disturbed. The buzzards were off in their daytime search for carrion. Cara walked among the trees—streaked waste whitewashed the foundation ruins. Where the waste covered the ground, no grass sprouted. There was a terrible stench. Cara kicked at the earth. The single rectangle of land she had left untended had been taken over. She’d meant this as homage, as an altar. Now it was fouled.

She drove back to her house by way of the peach orchard where the trees bloomed bright pink. The pecan tree in the front yard peeked bright green above the roofline; the strawberry fields were scattered with blossoms, tiny and white like parade confetti. The wind carried the stench from the vulture roost. The smell followed her to her porch.

Her cough was gone but exhaustion lingered. Caffeine and sugar marked time in her day. She tilled under the clover on the spring beds, spread compost, set out the first of the spring garden. There was coffee before lunch and Coke after. She sketched designs for the pumpkin patch and shaped her beds. She set out her pumpkin plants. She drove into town and copied the strawberry recipe booklet she’d written in longhand 18 years before, went to the grocery for boxes of powdered doughnuts and the slick, tacky bars sold as sports fuel. She mailed postcards reminding her regulars of strawberry season. She called the company in North Carolina that printed her picking buckets and put in an order. She ate the pep pills found at gas stations, the ones wrapped in fluorescent foil and meant for truck drivers.

When night came, she sat on her back porch with a blanket across her legs. The buzzards flew in for the night. The moon crossed the sky or did not cross the sky, depending on its phase. She drank a beer, then another, sometimes a third, waiting for the day’s caffeine to wear off. She waited for her heart to stop pounding in her chest. Eventually, she went inside and tried to sleep. The dietary side effect that she could not wait out or quell was a soft panic. This panic followed her out of her nights and into her days, tapping at her shoulder, tugging at her shirtsleeve. She considered it the price of being awake.

The panic grew to terror and yanked her from sleep. She stood up, looked around the living room, looked out the window. Leaning against the other side of the glass were the smooth handles of her work tools. She saw this, and understood that the panic following her was not born of caffeine. Her fear had a name: compensation. She had developed habits of compensation. Not in the sodas and doughnuts, but in that she no longer wiped her tools clean and returned them to the barn each night. She fed the chickens once a day to eliminate a walk across the yard. She’d clustered all the houseplants beside the kitchen sink so she could water them when she washed the dishes. Small, significant changes. Cracks in the dam. Last month’s antibiotics had cleared her cough, but she was still broken.
  

May
  

The strawberries ripened. Each one had to be lifted from the ground, rested on straw, checked for signs of rot. Cara moved through her days aware that she was waiting for night, when she did not have to move. The sensation of the lump above her heart was with her always. She didn’t cough, but her speech grew wet and her lungs clicked around her words. Families arrived to pick berries and the mothers, sensing contagion, clutched their toddlers to their hips. “It’s allergies,” said Cara.

“That’s not allergies,” said Martha. “You need to go to a real doctor. Not the quacks at the health clinic.”

The three sat in their places on the back porch. It was the first time Tom or Martha had mentioned Cara’s illness. Tom said, “It’s exhaustion. You’re outside all day, every day. There’s nothing wrong with you that a good rest won’t cure. Go into town for the weekend and stay in a hotel. Get you a room with a Jacuzzi tub.”

“A big screen TV,” said Cara.

“Go to the movies,” said Tom. “You don’t live but once.” He told of the last movie he’d seen in a theater. He’d forgotten the actors, forgotten the title, but he said he sat with his children and grandchildren and watched their faces glow in the screen’s reflection. “They didn’t even know they were sparkling,” he said. “Innocent as fish.”

The wind blew from the northeast, bringing the stench of the turkey vultures “Those birds stink,” said Cara.

“They’re foul creatures,” said Martha.

Tom said, “Turkey buzzards can’t even talk. They don’t make a sound. They only eat what’s already dead.”

A family came to the porch to pay. Cara leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes while Martha counted out change. She fell asleep against the warm porch wall and dreamed of vultures like fish, floating through a blue that could be sky or water, their ugly bald heads covered in shimmering scales.

At 3 a.m. she was in her fields with a flashlight, hand-pollinating the pumpkin patch. It was another task she hadn’t accomplished in the daytime.
  

June
  

Strawberry season ended and Tom died in his sleep. He was 82. Martha called Cara early on a Wednesday morning. Cara drove her tractor down the dirt road to Tom and Martha’s trailer. Martha made breakfast while Cara called the funeral home, the church pastor, the three daughters. Later, there was a knock at the door and Cara helped load Tom’s body onto the gurney.

The funeral was on Saturday. The day was bright and sweltering. Paper fans printed with the number for the funeral home were passed around; black umbrellas were popped open graveside as some protection from the sun. Once Tom was in the ground, a line of cars drove to Martha’s. Food was lifted from floorboards and backseats: casseroles, pies, a giant ham, lima beans, fried chicken, creamed corn, stewed tomatoes, collard greens, fruit cobblers, store-bought rolls, sweet tea in gallon jugs. Enough food to quell the fiercest grief, enough food to keep anyone alive. The women spread the food across the kitchen table and across the countertops. They opened the paper plates, the paper napkins and the boxes of plasticware. A black trash bag was hung from the doorknob.

Cara sat on the sofa next to Tom and Martha’s oldest child, a woman named Susan. Cara and Susan were the same age, but looked 20 years apart. Susan wore a smart black suit and had soft hands, a gently lined forehead, a neck as pale as flour. Cara had seen every photo taken of Susan over the past 25 years, knew where her children lived, her grandchildren, knew what churches those offspring did or did not attend. There was between the two women a kinship forged by Tom and Martha. Cara said, “Tom brought me okra in the winter. For my cough. The sky was gray like dirty cotton and he wore that red flannel shirt of his. He glowed like Santa Claus.”

Susan said, “I noticed you’ve lost weight. Your eyes look weak. Daddy was frugal to the point of meanness.”

Cara excused herself to the kitchen. She was so weary, specks danced in her peripheral vision. She wanted to go into the living room and nap in Tom’s recliner. It still faced the window as it had at Christmas, and though the room was filled with people nobody sat in that chair. Cara could make out the ghostly shape of Tom’s bald head poking up over the headrest. He’d been such a tall man. She lacked the nerve to sit in the lap of his ghost when the room was filled with his companions and distant relations.

Instead, she cut a piece of lemon meringue pie and ate it with her fingers, while standing over the kitchen sink. The dress she wore was one of two that hung in her closet, and was half as old as she was. The material strained at her hips and across the bulge of her belly. Cara wanted to give Susan some little piece of her father that she might not have otherwise, something more than a granite tombstone and a tractor in the shed, a red flannel shirt hanging in the closet. She rinsed her fingers clean, then went to the living room and squatted beside Susan. “Your father was the most generous man I knew. He planted a half-acre of corn just for those hound dogs he used to keep. Just so they could run through it baying and scare up the quail.”

“He made me work it as a child. He’d have done anything for those damn dogs. I swore I’d never have a garden.”

Cara stood and smoothed her dress. Her palms snagged the flowered material, pulled out a long loop of thread.

The next week, Cara sat with Martha at Martha’s kitchen table. Martha dipped rose cuttings into rooting powder. Arthritis had twisted her fingers and she used her left hand to close her right about each cutting. Cara watched her work, knowing how Martha bristled at offers of assistance. Martha said, “Susan is a busy attorney. She’s needed my help with the kids. They’re teenagers now, the worst age. She turned her garage into an apartment six months ago. It’s fate. Someone else will buy this farm. A young person like yourself.”

“I’m only young next to you,” said Cara.
  

July
  

There was no time for grief. Everything was green. There were tomatoes to cage and sucker, runner peas to plant at the base of the corn, aphids to blast from tender leaves with a hose set on high. The strawberry vines had to be crafted into mats with shiny hairclips. A corner of the deer fence hung loose. Weeds threatened. Days had been lost in June and Cara could no longer push harder to catch up.

It was blueberry season and the drought was the worst on record. Cara’s rain barrels were empty; her grass was dry; her water stank of bedrock because the well was so low. Tom’s donkey no longer waited at the fence line. It had been sold at auction along with the tractor and the recliner. Martha lived in town. Cara didn’t mail cards announcing blueberry season. She posted no signs on the highway.

A few families came to pick, anyway. They bickered among the blueberry bushes, angry in the heat. Cara picked her early fruit herself. She drove into town and sold berries to the natural food store, to the restaurants. She stored berries in her deep freezer in gallon Ziploc bags. She did this again, then a third time, then she quit picking, and she sat on her porch, and drank her evening beer, and watched the birds strip her bushes bare.

Cara took the box from beneath her floorboards a third time. She counted out a hundred, ready for serious intervention. Help was not something she was accustomed to seeking. On the way into town, Cara practiced her words, careful not to sound scared or pleading or vulnerable.
“It’s not pneumonia,” she told the nurse. “I’ve taken three antibiotics. What do you do after listening to my lungs doesn’t work? That’s what I need now. Please, Ma’am.”

The nurse was not the pretty young blonde of previous visits. She was a woman near Cara’s age, a woman as thin as a corpse with black hair tied back severely from her pale face. She slapped the cuff around Cara’s arm. “I read your record. This isn’t pneumonia. There’s something wrong with your heart.”

“It’s my lungs. I’m not breathing well.”

The nurse pressed the cold stethoscope to her back. “Sounds like a horse running across a pasture. Look at your hands.”

Cara held up her hands. They were the same hands she’d always had.

The nurse stepped around Cara, took her hands and squeezed them. “Thick, flattened fingers, beefy palms. And this.” The nurse leveled her shoulders and stuck out her chest. “You’re barrel-chested.”

“I’m strong.”

“The body compensates. Your heart is no longer pumping well enough to clear the fluid from your body. It’s heart failure. Start with one of these. You’ll need them all.” She handed Cara a stack of referrals: cardiologist, ENT, sleep clinic. The referrals were the proper kind that reproduced in pastel triplicate. Each was stamped with a doctor’s signature. They were referrals intended for an insurance company.

There was nowhere to submit the pastel forms. Cara tried. The homeowner’s policy didn’t want them, nor did the liability policy, not even the limited medical—“Catastrophic only,” said the woman on the phone.

“This is catastrophic,” said Cara.

“Catastrophes are accidents.”

“This isn’t intentional.”

“It never is, Ma’am.”

Cara had covered everyone but herself. She’d never paid for general coverage. She’d passed most of her life on a farm. Hard work, good food, fresh air. There was no reason for her heart to break.

On her next trip to the grocery for coffee and sodas, sports bars and caffeine tablets, she stopped in front of the cigarette display. She waved at a manager to bring a key. If her body thought living hard she’d let it compensate against something real. She smoked two in the truck on the way home, the windows rolled down against the odor. The nicotine made her dizzy and she clipped her mailbox as she pulled into her driveway, adding one more item that needed attention to a list growing ever longer. Cara went into her kitchen and sat at her table feeling nauseated, dizzy, clammy. The referrals were stuck to her fridge with magnets and they fluttered in the breeze from the open door like foreign butterflies, as exotic, as unknowable. She threw the pack of cigarettes toward the trash.
  

August
  

When Martha moved to town with Susan, she gave her bees to Cara. Cara had been soothed by driving her tractor down the red dirt road and walking into the tree line at Tom and Martha’s, pretending Tom was alive, pretending Martha watched from a window, pretending the donkey was in the field. She saved her visits to the bees, treasured them, used them as medicine when loneliness threatened.

She hadn’t seen any of Martha’s bees in awhile. No scouts among the okra flowers. No workers with pollen-heavy thighs lighting on the gardenia. Cara left her gardens, climbed onto her tractor, and drove to Martha’s.

As she walked to the hives, no bees zoomed in to check her intentions. She hurried. The bees were crumpled on the ground around their boxes. Their hives stank of chemicals; the honey was poisoned. Cara collected a handful of the dead honeybees. Each one was tiny and perfect, as if it had never been real creature at all but only a miniature from a child’s toy farm set. She took them home and lined them on a windowsill. The next day a truck came and hauled away Tom and Martha’s trailer.

Strange trucks drove the red dirt road—small white Fords with the Rosebud Timber insignia and other, bigger trucks without logos. When the trucks met in the road, men got out and spread plans on their hoods, waved their hands about. Negotiations were taking place. Cara called Martha at Susan’s house.

“It’s good to hear your voice,” said Martha. “You sound tired.”

“I’m working hard. How’s city life?”

“One grandchild after another and even a great-gran on the way.”

“Who?”

“Mitchell’s wife. She’s due in April. There’s that and the roses. I’ve transplanted them all. I’ve joined the gardening club. It’s a bunch of old women like me. A lot of widows. One woman, Grace, is teaching me to play bridge. She pretends I’m not terrible. The girls tell me they’re taking care of the old place. They said they dealt with Tom’s clothes for me.”

“Everything is looking good around here,” said Cara. She felt again the kinship with Susan. Martha had roses and friends; she would have suffered unnecessarily from the truth.

That night, Cara wandered her house like Goldilocks, trying first one end of the sofa then the other, then the bed, then the bed with pillow bracings, then the floor beside the bed. She stopped at her recliner. It wasn’t as fine as Tom’s but was good enough. The recliner was in the living room, on the side of the house farthest from the sheltering oak. August heat pooled on Cara’s chest.

Cara tugged and pushed her recliner to the back porch. She couldn’t maneuver it down the porch steps, so she shoved it off the porch edge. The chair landed on its side and lost a leg. Cara pulled it away from the house, hoisted it to sitting, put two bricks where the leg had been. She hammered bamboo stakes into the ground and draped them with yellowed mosquito netting. On a clear night with a bright moon, Cara crawled into this cocoon. Moonflowers opened to scent the air. Garden vines stretched softly in the dark. Her body was tender and heavy, her breathing less labored. More earth had always been her answer. She’d hidden in her grandmother’s fields after her mother died and she’d bought her own fields after her grandmother died. Cara fell asleep.
  

September
  

It was September and the designers called from Atlanta with requests—tall and nicely seated, glossy skin. Cara told them to come and look for themselves. “It’s been a tough year for pumpkins.” She didn’t send out postcards or hammer signs up at the highway.

The sound of hardwoods toppling punctuated her days. Martha’s trees were hauled out on trucks and the clay was exposed and oozing. Bright pink flashing denoted the edges of square lots. Soon there would be huge houses on bare lawns, people who wanted to drive a long way into town and say they lived in the country.

Cara continued to sleep outside in her chair at night. She was drowning in increments. When her throat closed with the drowning, she stood from her chair and waited for gravity to help her breathe again. She looked at her gardens; she looked at her woods. She wasn’t lost. Her breath returned. She found her chair. She sat down and waited for night to pass.

Between the night’s drowning and the day’s clamor, there were the turkey vultures. Cara, outside in her chair, watched the birds awaken. They shook, held their wings out from their bodies, bobbed their heads, groomed or fought. Eventually, they set out from their home in small groups of two or three. A few birds flapped from the tree, then circled the roost together, slowly and silently, moving higher, climbing the thermals, gaining altitude. At a point Cara could not name, the birds split from this second group, one bird sailing into the night portion of the sky perhaps, a second into the day, the third into dawn’s dirty pink borderline.

Cara drove her tractor to the roost. As before, she found the stench and the streaked waste, her ruined altar. She kicked aside waste-stained soil until she turned up a pottery shard, dense and plainly glazed, unsurprising. She knew what existed beneath this dirt. She’d hauled the topsoil; she’d split the cedars. She’d found a skeleton, and thought it had dared her: This is a conquered land; nobody yet has survived upon it. She’d left the skeleton its ruins.

All these years, Cara had worked on her answer. She looked down the path she’d carved with her tractor. She saw the roof of her house and the peach orchard, the start of her fields, the top of the giant oak, its uppermost leaves gone to fall yellow. She’d misunderstood that infant skeleton. It wasn’t a dare, but an invitation. Or less: an open door. Open and unavoidable, all these years. Cara ground the pottery shard she’d unearthed back into the soil with her toe. It seemed that the only thing she’d learned in her life was the difference between loss and ruin.
  

October
  

Her lungs were full, her heart labored, the space between her organs was given over to something less conducive to corporeality than blood. She quit doughnuts and Cokes, caffeine tablets and power bars. She freed the chickens from their coop.

It was the first of the month and despite neglect pumpkins sat ripe in the fields. Cara picked Sugar Pies, baked them whole, ate what little she wanted and threw the rest on the compost. Mealy tomatoes she threw on her compost, ripe squash, anything with the potential to rot. She did no canning. Creatures came for the bounty: raccoons and mice, birds, deer, squirrel and opossums. Even the vultures came.

Cara passed time in her chair. The early fall weather was easy. No need for fires or worrisome sleeping arrangements. Some nights she watched the moon rise and set. Some nights she slept, and dreamed of small pleasures: the tart surprise of soured milk; a splinter caught from raw wood.

One morning, just before dawn, she was awakened by the construction project next door. The workers were racing against winter, starting earlier each day. Cara looked up past the noise to the sky. The sky was light to the east, dark to the west, and filled with buzzards. There were hundreds of them—many, many times more than lived in the roost. The birds amassed for their fall journey to milder grounds. Their kettle was a huge dark spiral that filled the sky as the sky went first fiery, then paled to morning’s tenderest blue.

When the vultures departed, they left from the top of the kettle, faint specks of two or three soaring south. There was a long time between departures. The soft color of the sky grew certain. Saws screamed from the construction site next door. Slowly, slowly, the vultures grew less. Then there was only one group left, three circling flecks, and then these were gone, too, and the sky was empty but for the clean blue of fall.