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that was not exactly young. She didn’t marry for money, although she probably could have. But what made her accept John Hirschfelder, with his handsome wood-frame house and his large acreage west of town shot through with feathery cypress trees and sunburned grass, was not exactly love, either.
    She married two months after her twentieth birthday, in the second year of the century. She left her father’s immaculate brick house in town—the unused piano, the gas lamps, the heavy, severe parlor furniture, the lock of her mother’s hair—and moved to the new house that John Hirschfelder had inherited along with sixty acres of good land when his parents died. In the months leading up to the wedding it was said, and Rebecca herself often felt, that if her mother were still alive she might not have married a farmer.
    Why did she marry him then. Well. Rebecca and John had always known each other. They’d gone to school together in the stout brick schoolhouse in town. But she’d gone to school with other boys, too, whom she’d always known, who had annoyed her when she wasyounger, and who had grown into men who stopped by the house to try to impress their suitability on old Dr. Mueller and his daughter. At the time that Rebecca Mueller married him, she couldn’t articulate why she’d chosen John over the others. He had a handsome face, and a good sense of humor, and long, browned hands. She liked him. She’d always liked him. She wasn’t especially easy to please—oh, yes, some might say she was impossible—and she liked him.
    In fact John was generally well-liked among the few hundred Texans—mostly second-generation and immigrant Germans—who peopled their town, a thriving ten-road outpost in the lower-central latitude of the state. Even before he somehow managed to convince Rebecca Mueller to marry—and to marry him, of all people—the town loved to tell and retell how young Hirschfelder had lost both parents to influenza within days of each other. The town loved even better the story of how he, their only child, barely well enough to walk himself, had made sure his parents were buried properly. He was a favorite in town. He was a favorite of Dr. Mueller’s, and Rebecca’s, too.
    Rebecca knew that her old friend had seen a terrible year. The deaths of his mother and father had made him grave and intent. John’s father had purchased a new acreage the spring before his death, and John was now responsible for the improvement of that land, besides the acres that were already producing. He had two outbuildings to construct, and half of the upstairs rooms in the new house still weren’t finished. The farm’s prospects excited and terrified him at once, and John was smart enough, even at his age, to admit that. But not to just anyone.
    He admitted it to her, one soft evening early in the spring following the hard months in which he’d buried his mother and father. Hecame by the Doctor’s house to take Rebecca for a drive—or, rather, to steer them both out to where the town’s perimeter met the roads that led out toward the farms and then relinquish the reins to her so that she could drive, as she loved to do. Riding down these country lanes in his parents’ buggy was something they had done together since before they were teenagers. Better to do it in the evenings, when the earth seemed to give up in a long, slow gasp the heat it had collected all day.
    Now that they were older, of course, this kind of behavior actually meant something—it wasn’t the companionableness of childhood, or even the stormy friendship of their adolescence, but two grown people, a man and a woman, climbing into a buggy together to ride out into the country. In other, less wild and independent places, they would already be considered a scandal. They were no longer children.
    All this Rebecca knew. That night in the buggy, she wore a