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Luce stanched it with a press of pigeon moss. Then, as if bleeding were a contest, the boy cut a triangular gash at his hairline on the edge of the smokehouse tin roof. He stood hollering, with blood running down his face and dripping off his chin onto his white shirt. Blood on the point of the roof, which was ten feet above the ground and the boy was not much better than three feet high. The only ladder on the place was six feet tall. None of the arithmetic worked out. You could drive yourself crazy trying to figure the angles. What a damn needy world Luce suddenly occupied. A pair of suicidal old men would be easier to caretake than these two youngsters.
    Still, Luce held firm to the belief that quiet and solitude were good for you, offering peace, or at least hope for peace. Mainly because people were what they were and you couldn’t change them. Most of the time, they couldn’t change themselves, even if they were desperate to be somebody different from who they were. So, best keep your distance. Nevertheless, here were these little children who didn’t remind her in any helpful nostalgic way of sweet Lily.
    Most nights Luce couldn’t even be sure they would sleep until daylight. They wandered, part nocturnal in their comings and goings, sharing the habits of raccoons and house cats. By morning she’d have to hunt for them like hen eggs. Find one balled up in a nest of quilts on the sleeping porch and the other laid out like a corpse at a viewing beneath a hunt board in the dining room. Had to start locking the doors at night instead of only latching the screens.
    It was hard not to think about giving the children back to the State. Luce wondered sometimes if they would even notice. As long as they had things to tear up or set afire and nobody to disagree with them, they seemed content. They particularly liked being outdoors. It was one of their major opinions. On stormy afternoons, when lightning forked from black clouds, they would sit together and look out a window, their gloom about Luce keeping them inside expressed by the droop of their posture.
    They had come with names. Dolores and Frank. Luce had probably once known that but had forgotten, since in letters Lily always referred to them simply as her babies. And, yes, Luce owned, they were pretty messed up. But to put matters in perspective, she thought back to people she’d had to share her daily world with. In comparison, how messed up were the children really? Lots of human beings got through the day a bunch more messed up than Dolores and Frank. They weren’t criminals or drunks. Being uncommunicative and taking an interest in fire were neither crimes nor sins, just inconvenient. And Luce didn’t have to love them. She just had to take care of them.
    These days, around noon, Luce began counting the hours until bedtime. Lights out, children asleep. Think your own thoughts and listen to WLAC. John R. and Gene Nobles with their wondrous music and offers of a hundred baby chicks delivered C.O.D. to the P.O. in no more than a few days at a price too low to be believed. Luce had been tempted to order a boxful of chickens, but pictured a hundred yellow fluffs of life packed like ping-pong balls, dying one by one, hour by hour, waiting for her to come pick them up. Open the lid, and the survivors would be looking up into the light, necks stretched and yearning, and sort of treading water above the dead ones, whose nearly whole view of life on earth was the black inside of a cardboard box. So she had taken a pass on the fabulous and depressing chicken deal.
    The music, though, was brilliant and beautiful, bright and wild, opening deep into her heart. It strove upward toward some indefinable, or perhaps unmentionable, light. Even exhausted from a long day with the kids, Luce would stay up late as she could, listening until she finally fell asleep.
    WHEN SHE AND LILY were little girls, not quite a year apart, Luce was the wanderer. At six, her last year of perfect