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around animals anymore.”
    “You mean you’re not going to kick me off the premises?”
    “I’m going to let you stay.”
    Berkey shuddered.
    “If I hear of you harming an animal again, I’ll hang you from a locust tree on the River Road. If you lay a hand on your wife or your child, I’ll take an ax handle to you. And if it happens that Perses dies from the injuries you inflicted on him, I will run you off after all.”
    “Thank you, sir.”
    “You can thank whoever invented Christmas,” Bullock said. He looked across the room at his two trusted men and jerked his head.
    Michael Delson and Dick Lee steered Berkey out the door by his elbows.

F IVE
    Rick Stokes came home to his cottage in Mill Hollow to find the wood-fired cookstove stone-cold. The past two winters with the baby, he and Mandy had closed off the upstairs rooms and lived on the first floor, with their bed set up in the former sitting room and the baby’s crib near the stove in the kitchen. In recent weeks, his every homecoming from the long days at the Larmon farm filled him with dismay and not a little fear. Every week the house was in more and more disarray. There was something wrong with Mandy and really no place to take her now, no hospital, no facility, just Dr. Copeland, who could not explain her malady. How could she not be moved to light a fire on such a cold winter night, Rick wondered? They had plenty of stove billets and kindling and he regularly bought matches from Roger Hoad, who made them according to a formula that reputedly included his own dried urine.
    Rick found a candle stub on the kitchen counter and lit a match.
    “What the hell, Mandy?” he muttered, more to himself than to his wife. He set about starting the firebox on the cookstove, and when he got a few splints going he put in some oak billets and closed the iron door. He had been keeping watch at the farm on a colicky horse since two o’clock in the afternoon. The horse, a well-mannered Haflinger gelding named Duffy, had been in great pain, assuming tortured positions on its haunches in its stall, and sweating copiously. Around eight that evening, it shat out a bloody mass that looked like an afterbirth, but by nine o’clock it was back on its feet taking water and a few handfuls of grain. Ned Larmon and Rick concluded that Duffy was going to be all right. Rick was exhausted, having left the house before daylight that morning.
    Rick was losing confidence that Mandy was ever going to be all right again. She seemed to be straying deeper and deeper into a distant hinterland of the mind from which return was increasingly unlikely. It had begun to occur to him that they couldn’t go on like this. And now coming home to find the house like a cold storage locker, he realized the baby was no longer safe in her care. He would have to find a family with a competent adult female to look after Julian, at least during the days. However, Rick had no idea who might look after Mandy while he was off working on the farm. And what might she do then? Search desperately around town for her child? Throw herself in the river? These ruminations vexed and grieved Rick. He’d spent weeks thinking round and round about what to do. Now, he was ready to act. And all of this just as Christmas was coming, he thought, in what should have been the happiest time of year in these years of hardship and tribulation. It made him so heartsick he wobbled in his boots.
    He took the candle stub and moved quietly to the sitting room. Mandy lay under a heap of blankets and quilts with her back toward the kitchen. Her body was motionless. He padded back into the kitchen and held the candle high above the crib where Julian slept. The baby, too, lay motionless beneath a heap of quilts. Rick watched Julian a full minute. He had the impression in the flickering candlelight that the baby’s little body seemed unusually inert.
    “Hey little pup,” he said softly and reached under the quilts to get a grip on the