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loud.
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    THE FIRST TIME Murray McFarlane came over it was an October Sunday afternoon and they were all outside raking the leaves back to the creek to burn them. Bill found Murray an old, semi-retired rake up in the rafters of the garage, and while everyone else gathered the leaves into bigger and bigger mounds, Sylvia used a shovel to contain the fire, to over and over again scoop the red-hot ash back toward the centre of the fire. The still-burning leaves that drifted slowly in the updraught like charred butterflies or papery crows sometimes floated up out of sight and sometimes they dropped back down, either into the fire or into the creek, sizzling when they hit the water. Paul threw chestnuts into the burning piles, pitched them as hard as he could to sink them deep, and each time a hot chestnut exploded, Daphne jumped and someone else laughed, making light of her fear, which was new to her, and to them all.
    Hearing Patrick complain about a wasted Sunday, Sylvia had to stop herself from taking a strip off him. She thought it had been a good day. “Your reward is that smell in the air,” she said, nodding her head to the rusty, bittersweet smell of the fire.
    When it was almost done Bill and Sylvia left the kids to finish and went inside for one of their quick Sunday naps. Pulling the bedroom curtains shut, Sylvia thought about the coming winter, the snow that would drift across the backyard, the dirty ice that would crust the creek, and she began to describe for Bill the work they had ahead of them that year.
    â€œFirst we have to get her properly healed,” she said, closing the door. “Everyone’s spoiling her now but that’s all right. We’ll spoil her for a time and then we can toughen her up again.” She curled into him, her smoky clothes already discarded over the side of the bed. “And there will be some guilt to get rid of. It’s guilt I’m seeing in the boys.” She played with the drawstring of his boxer shorts, pulling it again and again but never quite hard enough to release the small looped bow. “What matters most is that we get her back to herself somehow,” she said. “I don’t want her changed by this. I want her to be exactly what she would have been without the fall.”
    â€œSign me up,” Bill said, pulling the drawstring open himself.
    â€œIt’s her nerve,” Sylvia said. “We’ll have to help her get her nerve back.”
    A little later when Sylvia came downstairs to start the meal Murray was still there, sitting with Patrick on the back steps, so she invited him to stay and eat with them. He phoned home immediately to let his mother know, and after this day of raking and burning and a supper of pancakes and the premium bacon Sylvia always got from her butcher father, Murray started to turn up regularly to sit around the kitchen and talk to whoever wanted to take the time to listen to him.

1955
    SYLVIA CHAMBERS GOT sick the year her kids were all in high school. She was forty. Miracle drugs, said to be on the horizon, were not readily available and, although she spent several weeks in hospital, surgery was thought to lack promise in her particular case, was thought finally to be too high a price for her to pay. Rescue was not anticipated. She just began to feel a little strange in January, got quickly worse through the spring, and died in late July.
    Bill didn’t put a name to his wife’s illness. He sat Patrick and Daphne and Paul down at the kitchen table and told them only that it was very serious. They heard their father’s word, serious, and they knew the word was meant to warn them, but they didn’t want warning. In these earliest months they put their faith in Doctor Cooper, who was old and lame and sure of himself, and in the strength of the prescriptions they picked up at the drugstore, and most of all in their mother’s resolute nature. They expected her