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terror, wouldn’t the preacher have been eager to reassure? Wouldn’t he have said, “My children, my children, God means you no harm!”?
    “She’s not fit,” Martha said, meaning Sarah.
    I said, “She’s very fit, a very fine young woman who happens to have the gumption to help her family. I honor her for it.”
    “There’s fit ways and unfit ways,” Martha said. She was so agitated she forgot she was sick and she took the children away from me and dressed them herself.
    I didn’t mind. It’s trying to dress children, especially shoes. They deliberately hold their feet odd, and I don’t feel they should be slapped just for that.
    Edward was ready, dark-blue and white and stiff and dignified, standing by the fire. I went over to get some coals for my own fire.
    I said, “She’s coming to talk about our plans for going out to Genesee.” I squatted down and heaped some coals together.
    “That nonsense again?” he said, but he wasn’t surprised or even as gruff as he intended to be, so I knew he’d been thinking.
    “Can you lend me a map of York State?”
    “No sense in it.”
    “Please, Brother.”
    “What would folks think of me if I let you go off?”
    I laughed. “They’d think it couldn’t be so bad after all, if Edward White did it. Please lend me a map. Just for today.”
    He walked off. I felt the cold wind when he opened his parlor door. I had hopes for the map, but no certainty. Maybe he himself didn’t know until he handed it to me that he was going to. Besides the map, he handed me a small book entitled A Description of the Genesee Country, in the State of New York .
    “Edward!” I began, but then I could only smile.
    “Don’t carry these with coals,” he said. “They’re dear.”

     
    Sarah wore a dress. “Don’t say nothing,” she said. She would have looked all right in it except that it made her so miserable that she hung her head and scowled and stooped. She reminded me of a dog we’d clipped once to help him against the summer heat, and he hid until his coat grew back. I must admit we drove him to it by laughing at him. He did look so comical. And so did Sarah, but I had the memory of the dog to guide me and I pretended she looked just the same as always.
    “I have a map of York State,” I said. “I’m copying it for us. And wait till you see what else.”
    “Ma said it would look better for Sunday,” Sarah said.
    “Listen to me!”
    “I can’t. I’ve got this cussed dress on.”
    Since I’d been wanting to laugh anyway, that set me off, and her too, not very happily at first but she warmed into it.
    “Why, I just don’t see how you stand it. My skirt’s all chunks of snow where it dragged. Like a sheep full of burrs. And where do you put your hands?”
    “Here,” I said, holding mine out to her. “Now that you’re a woman I can treat you like one.”
    She looked at my hands and then my face and then in confusion everywhere but at me, groping all the while for her breeches-top to hook her thumbs in.
    I reached out and firmly took her hand. “Now,” I said, “would you rather get warmed up or see the map or see the book? Everything at once, I think.” I led her to the bench by the fire and then went over to the table where the treasures were. She began to pick snow pellets off the hem of her skirt and toss them slowly, one at a time, into the fire. They hissed and sputtered.
    “There’s several things to say,” she said.
    “Hundreds of things.”
    “I told Pa I’m going.”
    She stopped. To help her, I said, “I told Edward. He wants me to go. So much so that he feels duty-bound to stop me. He can’t help feeling that anything that tempts him so much must be wrong. I suppose your father feels he can’t spare you.”
    “Well, but he won’t stop me. He can make another boy. The trouble is, when Rachel heard, she wanted to come too.”
    “ Who’s Rachel ?” I shouted, and heard myself, and said again (fair decently), “Who’s