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free, as always, to occupy her time with reading and needlework, drawing and music.
    But now the hired people were gone. The man had been lukewarm toward secession and counted himself lucky to be too old to volunteer in the first years of the war. But that spring, with the armies in Virginia desperately shorthanded, he had begun to worry that he might soon be conscripted. So, shortly after Monroe died, he and his wife had taken off unannounced and headed over the mountains to cross the lines into territory held by the Federals, leaving Ada to make do on her own.
    Since then, she had discovered herself to be frighteningly ill-prepared in the craft of subsistence, living alone on a farm that her father had run rather as an idea than a livelihood. Monroe never developed much interest in the many tiresome areas of agriculture. He had held the opinion that if he could afford to buy feed corn and meal, why bother growing more than they could eat as roasting ears? If he could buy bacon and chops, why be drawn into the more inconvenient details of pork? Ada once heard him instruct the hired man to buy a dozen or so sheep and put them into the pasture below the front yard to mix in with the milk cow. The man had objected, pointing out to Monroe that cows and sheep do not do well pastured together. The man asked, Why do you want sheep? The wool? Meat?
    Monroe’s answer had been, For the atmosphere.
    But it was hard to live on atmosphere, and so the boxwood appeared to offer about all the feeling of protection Ada could soon expect. She decided she would not quit the shrub until she could count off, at minimum, three convincing reasons to do so. But after several minutes’ thought she could only come up with one: she did not particularly wish to die within the boxwood.
    At that moment, though, the red hen came bursting through the leaves, her wings partially opened and trailing in the dust. She hopped onto a limb near Ada’s head and sounded off with an agitated gabble. Immediately behind her came the big black-and-gold rooster that always frightened Ada a little with his ferocity. He was intent on treading the hen but pulled up short, startled when he saw Ada in so unexpected a place. The rooster cocked his head at an angle and fixed a shining black eye on her. He took a step back and scratched at the ground. He was close enough for Ada to note the dirt lodged between the scales on his yellow legs. The amber spurs looked long as a finger. The golden helmet of feathers at his head and neck fluffed and swelled and in their glossiness seemed almost macassared. He shook himself to settle them back into place. The black of his body had a blue-green sheen like oil on water. His yellow beak opened and closed.
    If he weighed a hundred and fifty pounds he’d kill me where I sit without a doubt, Ada thought.
    She shifted about onto her knees and waved her hands and said, Shoo! When she did, the rooster launched himself at her face, twisting in the air so that he arrived spurs first, wings flogging away. Ada threw up a hand to fend him off and was cut across the wrist by a spur. Her blow knocked the bird to the ground, but he rose and came at her again, wings fanning. As she scrambled crablike to get out from under the bush, the rooster dug at her with a spur and hung it up in the folds of her skirt. She burst from the bush with a great thrash and rose to run, the rooster still attached to her skirt at knee level. The bird pecked at her calves and struck again and again with the spur of his free leg and beat at her with his wings. Ada hit at it with open-handed blows until it fell away, and then she ran to the porch and into the house.
    She sank into an armchair and examined her wounds. There was a smear of blood at her wrist. She wiped it away and with relief saw that she was little more than scraped. She looked at her skirt and found it dusty and smeared with chicken droppings and rent in three places, and then she drewit up and looked to