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deranged with religious excitement and then had grown afraid of everyone. She thought her husband and his friends were out to get her. Eventually, she attacked her children. She broke all the furniture and windows in the house.
    The window over the sink filled with steam. My mother rubbed at a spot on the table with the tip of her finger. She looked out the window. I tried to picture what our house would be like with all the windows and furniture broken. I wondered if the glass would fall inside or out, if it would be hard to tear the legs from the table. I imagined it would be difficult to do these things, to break everything inside a house into pieces.
    She rubbed the table again. She looked like someone trying to inscribe a circle with the tip of her finger, like she wanted to mark a place for everyone to see. Then she leaned over her lap in the way one does when one’s belly hurts and inhaled deeply and sobbed one single sob.
    I froze.
    Of course she gathered herself before she went any further. She straightened and caught her breath. She stood up. She went into the mudroom for the pail. She went down the steps and crossed the yard and levered the handle until the pump came to life. Then she stood in the shadow of the house as if she had forgotten what she had come to do. She let the water gush in a white froth onto the ground.
    I watched her. When you are only a child, you do not offer your mother a hand. She always stands beyond you, on the other side of a dividing line that you cannot cross. So I have to confess that I stood there dumb as a post while she wiped her eyes on the back of her sleeve. When the light moved across her face, she looked years younger, as if she was still a girl.
      
    Down by the brewery, two boys used a blue rubber hose to rinse brown bottles in the delivery yard. They stacked the crates of empties by a hatchway. Across the street, the plate glass window of a haberdasher’s shop, straw bowlers arranged like a landscape at the foot of a dummy who sat with a felt fedora on his head. The river out ahead then, in a wide space unmarked by trees.
    The road sloped down. I passed the post office with its American flag curled up like a chrysalis, and then I passed the train depot where a man in a wool flannel hat had drawn a map on a piece of newsprint and was showing the map to the stationmaster. The stationmaster kept shaking his head but this had no effect. The man with the map stayed fixed on his subject and his voice carried clear out into the road.
    Up ahead, a girl who looked like Hattie stepped along the railroad tracks. She was barefoot. A girl who must have been her older sister walked behind her with her feet swaddled in burlap bags tied off with twine. Every few feet, one or the other bent down and picked up a piece of coal and dropped the coal into her apron. Fires burned in the shanties below the railroad station and columns of blue smoke stood in the air. When I breathed out, I could see my breath as if my very soul kept escaping. I did not mind this at all.
    The railroad fell away behind me and then the river was only a smell in the air. The road turned and a tall house came up beside me. It sat apart from its neighbors and at one time must have been white but now was mostly bare wood. A rusty gate stood at the foot of the walkway. The gate was not hinged to the fence but leaned against the pickets like a bicycle someone had forgotten.
    I turned the bell and waited. When no one came, I walked up and down on the porch and watched my breath cloud in the cold air. The porch had seen better days, just like the house. It was littered with old webs and brown leaves, and the desiccated carcasses of last summer’s beetles dangled legless from the windowsills. I was just about to turn the bell again when a man in a worn black suit cracked the door. “Full up,” he barked. “Try Mendota.”
    I hesitated. I knew what everyone knew about Mendota. It was the name of a town and it was the name