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throbbed the disabled hand. I could not remember whether gangrene was still a real disease, or what its symptoms were. There would be a blackening, I imagined, a loss of feeling, cramps. I would know when it came.
    After a short time, the boy righted himself and slowly put on his skates. We started down the road toward the center of town, toward the meat towers.
    “Mother?”
    “Yes,” I answered.
    “Is Father right?”
    “Right? In what matter?”
    “Right in his head?” The boy looked up at me through the mask of the snowmobile suit, nothing but two distressingly large eyes peering through the embroidered eyeholes. It seemed a strange question. “You mean, is he safe?”
    “Yes. Is he safe, or is he getting ready to go away?”
    “Philip, why are you talking like this?”
    “Sometimes he crawls. On the floor, like a cat. He crawls all around the house and makes cramping noises, like he’s trying to poop. Does that mean he is getting ready to go away?”
    “Of course not. Perhaps he’s just looking for something. Perhaps he’s lost something, and he’s upset, rooting around in the carpet pile for it. You would be upset if you lost something in the carpet, wouldn’t you? I’ve heard you making some funny sounds, too, young man, down there on all fours, searching for so-and-so’s silver missile arm.” But even as I said these words I did not believe them — they seemed to appear in the air before us, wispy as tinfoil. I knew that my husband was getting ready to go.
    “You’re wrong,” Philip said, homing in on my carefully concealed doubt. “Cradio’s father did the same thing before he went away. He crawled around on the floor in circles, and the circles kept getting smaller and smaller until he was as little as a finger, and then he was gone.”
    The night before, I woke up to find my husband sitting at the corner of the bed, braiding long strands of the bedclothes into crude rag dolls. He set them on his lap, four in all. “No, I don’t want to,” he said to them. “I want to stay here.” He was holding up his end of a conversation with the stout, featureless figures. “You know I can’t stay here. Because you know. If I tell you, everyone will know.” In the long pauses between speech he sobbed faintly, jaggedly, shaking the mattress. Each time he shuddered I swear I saw him diminish just slightly in size.
    “It wasn’t the same. Your father is not going anywhere.” “You’re wrong.”
    To refute him would be to amplify the lie, to give it real weight, so I simply squeezed his hand and we continued on toward the meat towers, the enormous dorsal fins of which loomed ahead in the distance, casting deep, expressive shadows over the road.
    “I want him to go,” Philip said, huffing pale clouds of condensed breath. “I don’t like to have him in that room, always crawling and putting his mouth on my toys.”
    “I don’t want to hear that kind of talk, chief.”
    “But you tell me to tell you how I’m feeling, no matter what.”
    “That is not a feeling, chief.”
    We looked at the apples inside the fruit tent at the base of the meat tower. They were thick and hopeful in our hands; they felt healthy — as if in taking a bite, one could inch closer to some more wholesome state. I let Philip put the apples in the canvas sack, along with the taffy brick and the brittle husks of corn, all painstakingly prepared from various cured meats. Philip was quiet — he put the items into the bag without looking at them, as if to look would be to reveal some fragile, thinly guarded secret.
    I put the bag in the brushed aluminum bin of the scale. My finger hummed inside the bloody mitten. My husband — the man who withered away his days in our house, among our toys, our things, shamelessly, openly — had gray eyes, the grayest eyes I’d ever seen. They were like pencil sketches, crude approximations — they were vague and watery enough to take in the whole room at once, which was confusing