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you coming.”
    Neither of us said anything for a long moment. I knew I had gone to the literal heart of my silence. In that last, lost moment I needed more than anything on earth to be able to hear whatever was coming. So I would not, like my parents, die of my love.
    “Exactly,” Joe said quietly. “Exactly, my poor Cat.”
    After that he seemed content with my silence. In an odd way it seemed even to please him, to become erotic in and of itself. After that day we did things we had not done before; he moved in new ways, cried out new things. I was pleased and relieved but in some obscure way disturbed, too. It was as though he read in that strange, sad little inability of mine confirmation of that first seductive Gothic strangeness that had drawn him to me. I felt he was fucking a woman in an Appalachian ballad, the Cat Compton of the silly folk song, instead of the living, breathing, particular woman who was his wife. But I did not mention this to him. By then I had made my Eden and drawn him into it with me. I was not about to poke at its stones and mortar.
    For all my life with him, I have wondered about Joe’s fascination with the South, particularly with the dark and secret veins of the bizarre that run everywhere through this old tapestry. I have come to no firm conclusion, even all these years later. But I think it had its genesis in that stark, rock-spined farm outside St. Albans, in Franklin County, in the northwest corner of Vermont.
    Even in the light, Joe said, there was a kind of darkness on the land, not the rich, fecund green darkness of the 32 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
    Mountain and the South in general, but a shallow, flinty murkiness that did not nourish. The farm was not near a town of any size; his mother and her cousins and children tended their few placid New England cattle and raised some stunted New England potatoes wild miles from the cultivated coasts of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. It was not much of a farm ever, and his father’s early defection and death, added to his mother’s chronic illness and the advanced age of the two cousins, bled it into near poverty. Joe worked the farm before and after school and in the summers. There was enough to eat and hand-me-down clothes from Caleb to clothe, if badly, his weedy frame, but there was nothing in the long silences of the house and the rasping of his mother’s sick lungs and the dying crossroads villages to feed a soul. Joe worked in silence and studied with furious, focused concentration and remembered that the only music and laughter and dancing he had ever known had come from the South, with his dimly remembered father. His grades were awesome, despite his schedule of farmwork. His SATs struck his teachers into silence. A young guidance counselor, herself an outlander, had the wit to help him apply early to several Ivy League schools, and by the time he was a junior he had received acceptances from all of them.
    He chose Dartmouth, partly because it was essentially a village, and therefore within his limited ken, and partly because he had seen a cloyingly romantic movie long before about Winter Carnival that had enchanted him. When he said goodbye to his mother and Caleb and Sarah, everyone understood that it would be a long goodbye.
    His first year at Dartmouth he had drifted into a southern literature course and found there such nourishing richness and romantic grotesquerie and indolent beauty that his heart, suckled on granite and silence, flowered HILL TOWNS / 33
    like wild honeysuckle, and he was lost. He brought his new degree and his hunger for dark Faulknerian loam south, found the Mountain, and began to sink grateful roots almost before he cut off the motor of his old Volvo station wagon.
    By the time he met me, he was a perfect medium for such specialized cultivars as we produce here. He would have fallen in love with me, I think, if I had been built like Brünhilde and had a mustache and the mind of an Easter chick.
    The