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Europe. The troopship was torpedoed and went down with all hands. Only Crazy Dancer wasn’t on that ship. He came back at the end of the war to find Mum married to my father.
    It was hard for Mum to explain two loves. “The war destroyed so much. What was left, we destroyed. None of us knew how to pick up the pieces.”
    When she told me, “Your father and I were happy,” I believed her. Then in the next breath, “I’d try to wake myself out of dreams, because it was Crazy Dancer standing by the bed, looking at me. Sometimes he would be sitting in a chair, fixing something, he liked to fix things. He especially liked motors, carburetors, housings, and fittings of all kinds. Weusually had an old car or motorcycle but no transportation, because it would be in pieces on the sidewalk, and Crazy Dancer would be joyously greasing or filing away at some part. Very few of these parts belonged to the original engine but were swapped, traded, and on rare occasions bought from the owner of another vehicle, never from a store.
    “You were a year old when he came back. The first thing he did, before saying ‘hello’ or ‘I love you,’ was help carry the buggy with you in it up two flights of stairs. He was the old Crazy Dancer, full of high jinks and wild imagination. But, though he tried to conceal it, his health was gone.”
    As a nurse, Mum knew the signs: chronic bronchitis, then emphysema. She saw that he got proper medical attention. It was too late. Too much scarred lung tissue, too few active cilia, too frequent respiratory infections.
    “Double pneumonia,” Mum said, reliving her last desperate effort to save Crazy Dancer. With a paring knife, she performed what she called a “lay tracheotomy.”
    “I didn’t do it as skillfully as a surgeon would, but there’s a place under a man’s Adam’s apple where the membrane is thin. With a paring knife and a drinking straw I was able to keep him alive. I got him in the car, threw you in the backseat, and drove to the hospital. He held the straw in place himself and tried not to pass out. And you know what that crazy Indian did? He patted me on the knee to show he approved of my driving. He’d taught me, you see. And…”
    Her lips still moved, but I could no longer make out the words. I folded the story away with that of the young Austrianofficer in Hitler’s navy who had gray eyes. And the one about a girl who married a Mountie and passed her name on to me. These were the tales I recounted to myself. Like the castle in the Austrian Alps, dream and daydream, their fabric was a lost reality in which I could no longer hide.

Chapter Four
    T WO nights later I had to accept another reality; with Jellet at the pub, Morrie tumbling around in the living room, me singing, Elk Woman sitting unblinkingly beside her, and Jas lolling against the wall, Mum died. She died without a word, without a sound.
    I didn’t know. I was still singing when Elk Woman took crushed rosemary leaves from her pocket and began sprinkling them over the bed.
    I put down the guitar. “What are you doing?” It was a question I didn’t need to ask.
    “She had an easy passing, just slipped the moorings.”
    I stared at my mother, a slight figure who was no longer there.
    “Where is she now, Elk Woman?”
    “There aren’t words, little one. She is weaving herself into the great design.”
    “Then she hasn’t just ended?”
    Elk Woman smiled, “She has just begun.”
    With a great cry Jason threw himself at the bed and, grabbing Mum by the shoulders, tried to shake her alive.

    E LK Woman went to the Eight Bells and told Jellet. He closed the pub and brought a couple of cronies home for moral support: Hubert, who weighed three hundred pounds all muscle but wouldn’t hurt a fly, and Black Douglas, the only cardsharp our little community could support.
    They brought two bottles of Irish whiskey. At the house Hubert made a great fuss about adding it to coffee. Getting out the percolator and