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before. For the first time in my life, I resented my body, my inheritance of my father’s frame and blunt features. For the first time I felt something for my mother other than adoration.

Chapter Eight
    â€˜W E WEREN’T POOR ,’ my mother often said about that time in our lives, ‘we just didn’t have any money.’
    Whenever we seemed to get a little ahead, according to her, my father went out and bought more cows or equipment. Still, the only thing I remember her complaining about back then was the lack of a ‘decent family photograph’.
    I keep the results of my father’s giving in to her lamentations in an old shoebox along with the stray snapshots that I keep promising myself I will someday put into an album.
    The family portrait was taken back in the sixties, by a travelling photographer. Every September or October, a large blue van, a mobile studio, showed up in the empty lot next to the Texaco station on Main Street. It drove Jeffrey Mann, the local photographer, crazy, to see people line up outside that van. Every year he would complain to anyone who would listen, how, ‘Those carpet-baggers come into town and pillage all my Christmas business.’
    One fall afternoon in 1965, the year before River arrived, my father returned from town and handed Mom a flyer. ‘What d’ya think, Nettie?’
    Mom took the glossy pamphlet and studied the prices. ‘Not bad,’ she mused. ‘They even have Christmas cards in these packages,’ sheadded wistfully. ‘But I just don’t feel right taking business away from Jeffrey.’
    â€˜It wouldn’t be like we were taking business from him if we can’t afford it in the first place,’ my father said. I watched my mother struggle with the temptation of finally having a family portrait done.
    Two days later, under the cover of darkness, we stood outside the parked van, waiting our turn to sit in front of the blue-sky and fluffy-cloud backdrop. Afterward, Mom was plagued with guilt over her perceived betrayal. Whenever the Manns came out for a visit, she snatched the portrait from the piano top and stashed it in her bedroom. But the ‘chickens came home to roost’, as Mom’s friend, Ma Cooper was fond of saying, because my mother, not being a calculating woman, sent out her Christmas cards as usual that year. She was horrified to realize, after she had signed and mailed that year’s unique cards, that one for Jeffrey and June Mann had gone along with the rest of them.
    Everyone was dressed in their Sunday best for that photograph. Yet every time I look at it I can visualize a scorch mark on the back of Boyer’s shirt. And I remember how he found me standing at the ironing board in tears before we went into town that evening.
    â€˜I burned your shirt,’ I wailed when he came into the kitchen after the milking. I couldn’t look at him. I wasn’t afraid Boyer would get angry. He was never angry with me. But I hated the thought of disappointing him, and I had just ruined his favourite shirt.
    â€˜It’s just a shirt, Natalie,’ Boyer said gently, ‘it’s not worth your tears.’ He lifted my chin and smiled at me. ‘An old shirt could never be as important to me as my girl is.’ He handed me his handkerchief.
    â€˜Besides,’ he added as he turned and picked up the scorched shirt, ‘they take the picture from the front.’
    Anyone looking at the finished portrait would smile at the hodgepodge of bodies that made up our family. We looked like we were thrown into a blender and came out in a menagerie of shapes and sizes. Mom and I sat on a bench with Dad and the three boys standing behind us. Boyer was twenty-two when the picture was taken. With his blond hair and blue eyes he was the only one of us who truly resembled Mom. Except for his height. He was six foot tall–two inches taller than Dad, who stood on his right.
    Dad was