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then snow on Christmas, the coldest Josephine could remember, the wash freezing stiff on the line, Josephine holding the flat-out dresses and pants close as a dancing partner as she brought them into the house to thaw. The willow branches froze too, touching the crackling ice of the river in a solid crystal sweep. Lottie said the cold made the spirits irritable and prone to mischief, and she saw Missus’ troubles as play wreaked upon her by the babies and not-yet-babies Missus had lost. Sometimes a fit lashed long and hard, and Missus would sleep for hours afterward, a sleep so still and silent that Josephine would fear she had passed on and hold a mirror to her face to check for breath. But some mornings Missus woke up just right, speaking in her singsong voice of flowers that needed picking, mending that needed doing, where was that pillowcase I asked you to launder, the corncake I wanted for tea.
    It was the New Year when Missus started to forget the names of common things. Bread, fetch me that bread, she had called to Josephine on that first day of the year 1852, and pointed a finger at her wrap warming there before the fire. Other mistakes followed, thick as fleas. Apple, she said, instead of comb. Door for fire, rag for spoon, milk for chair. Josephine tried to interpret Missus’ requests, find a pattern in her new language, but none seemed to fit.
    Snow melted, the red mud of spring came, and with it planting time. Mister was out of the house most days, working alongside his men. Missus shook her head at the shame of it, but they all knew there weren’t enough to work the farm. With Hap dead and Louis sold off for money to buy seed, only Otis was young and strong enough to pull the plow, keep the pace from morning till night. Lottie and Winton and Therese worked slow with warped fingers and crooked backs. Papa Bo would have sold all three, bought just one more with the money and worked him dawn till midnight, but Mister didn’t think that way. He never looked to change things, just struggled along with what he had. Missus called it a weakness, said it was something she hadn’t seen coming until they were married and living already under the crumbling roof at Bell Creek.
    Finally last week, the day so hot, Mister came back from the fields for his dinner, and he found Missus on the floor, Josephine there holding her head to keep it from knocking against the floor or a table leg. He saw how her body jerked, the eyes nothing but empty white. After the fit ended, after she had slept, Missus insisted on Dr. Vickers, down in Claremont, thirty miles south at least. Josephine remembered, it seemed a long time ago, Missus Lu’s strong views on curtain colors, the names of her chickens, the way that Josephine wore her hair, a particular painting that must never be hung in the hall, only in the front parlor. “Dr. Vickers knew my daddy. He’s the only one I’ll consent to examine me,” she had said, a rare brief return of that stubborn insistence about small things.
    Always at the mention of Missus’ daddy, Mister’s mouth would set tight, his voice go low and strained. But on that day he had only nodded. “Tell Otis. Dr. Vickers in Claremont, and ride fast.”
    Now Josephine called again at the closed bedroom door: “Missus Lu, today’s the day for Dr. Vickers coming. This morning, Missus.”
    No sound from inside, no call or creak of steps on the floor. Josephine opened the door and surveyed the unmade bed, the closed windows. A sticky smell of sleep hung in the air. But no Missus.
    Josephine heard knocks from the room at the end of the hall, something heavy dragging—the easel, must be.
    The studio was at the front of the house, four long steps from the door of Missus’ room, with windows that looked west to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the low mounds sloping soft as though drawn with a crumbling crayon. Josephine didn’t know what the studio had been in brother Henry’s time, but Missus Lu and