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Johnny’s body was lifeless, and a chicken lay dead beside him. Rachel smelled skunk and looked up at her mother, then back at Johnny and the dead chicken. She couldn’t grab hold of what had just happened. She could only wonder what the hell that chicken had been doing so close.

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    ON THE MORNING OF OCTOBER 9, 1999, GEORGE WALKED down behind the oldest barn in the township, and around the little pasture adjoining the building’s lower level, to where a set of bedsprings was tied into the woven wire fence. He grabbed hold and shook the rusty metal bedsprings and found the repair stronger than the rest of the fence, the way scar tissue from a wound was usually tougher than the skin around it. The white-faced steer looked up from the hay pile on the barn’s dirt floor to see what the rattling was about. When the cattle had busted down the fence a few days ago, George wasn’t around, so Rachel, resourceful girl that she was, dragged some bedsprings over from the O Road dump and patched the fence herself. Thirty years ago, when George inherited his grandfather’s farm, it was orderly barnyards, freshly painted buildings, neat woodpiles, and taut fences. Today it was quick, cheap repairs and never mind cosmetics. Now that you could hardly buy a cup of coffee with themoney you got for a bushel of corn, George knew he had to give up those old ideas about mowed lawns and perfect fences. The bedsprings were an announcement to the world that farming was no longer a sensible way of making a living, and George couldn’t help but also see them as an admission that he himself was no longer a respectable man.
    George’s father had never liked farming, which is how George inherited one of the largest tracts of land in the county at the age of twenty-two. Neither George’s father (now living in Florida) nor Johnny should have been surprised at Old Harold’s decision, since five generations of tradition held that the land should be kept whole rather than being split among heirs. Johnny had claimed he wanted to be George’s partner, but he was bone lazy, often in jail, and George had seen neither hide nor hair of him since an argument they’d had three years ago September. In the last few years, George had been entertaining a hope that his nephew Todd—actually his ex-wife’s nephew—might have an inclination toward farming. That was seeming less likely, though, especially after the broken window this morning. The long and short of George’s life in Greenland Township was that he continually repaired his aging farm equipment, that between planting and harvesting he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the bank, and that until two and a half years ago, he’d farmed with the mindlessness of a woolly bear crawling toward hibernation. Two and a half years ago he’d come across Rachel Crane standing in a field near the river, dangling her .22.
    A few minutes before eight o’clock, George walked up the incline to his truck, to wait for David Retakker. He noticed that April May was still sitting on her front steps across the street. For her part, April May noticed David the neighbor boy approaching on his bicycle. Her back had loosened up fine, but the pain in her foot had gotten worse. This was not the usual ache; she must have clunked against something in the barn without realizing, must havehit the exact spot where sixty-five years ago a nail had gone into the bottom of her foot and come out the top.
    Harold Harland had been some sort of cousin to April May’s mother, and when April May was a little girl, the old man often reminded her she was special for being born half in one month and half in the next. Hurting her foot so dramatically the day of the big tornado made her special too, Harold said. The day of the 1934 tornado was the same day that April May’s beloved elementary teacher Mrs. O’Kearsy failed to show up at school, and even the little girls