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meant to ask him why the hell he never told her he was that way , to shout in his face or just wail miserably. But in the second before her voice left her lips, other words formed.
    “How do you balance?”
    Her voice was calm, curious, and once she asked the question she found that she really wanted to know the answer. Cyprian was also wide awake. He’d never really slept. He put his palms over his face and breathed through his fingers.
    It was not an easy question to answer. When he balanced, his whole body was a thought. He’d never put the balancing into words before, but perhaps because of the dark, and because she knew about him now, and because her voice wasn’t angry, he spoke, tentatively at first.
    “Some people think of it as a point, but it isn’t a point. There is no balancing point.”
    She lighted a cigarette and blew the smoke into a white cloud over them. “So?”
    Cyprian was as clumsy with words as he was agile in other ways. Attempting to describe what happened when he balanced caused an almost physical hurt. Still, he reached far in his thoughts and made a desperate effort.
    “Say you have a dream.” He spoke earnestly. “In that dream youknow that you are dreaming. If you become too aware of knowing you are dreaming, you wake up. But if you are just enough aware, you can influence your dream.”
    “So that’s balancing?”
    “Pretty much.”
    He breathed out, relieved and empty. She thought for a while.
    “And what is it,” she asked, at last, “when you fall?”
    Cyprian caught his breath back, almost despaired, but again—because, in spite of who he was, he loved Delphine—he dug for an answer. It took so long that Delphine almost fell asleep, but his mind was working furiously, shedding blue sparks.
    “When you fall,” he said, startling her awake, “you must forget that you exist. Strike the ground as a shadow strikes the ground. Weightless.”
    “I think I’ll leave you,” said Delphine.
    “Please don’t leave me,” said Cyprian.
    And so they lay balanced on that great wide bed.

THREE

The Bones
    T HE TOWN OF ARGUS was the creation of the railroad, and the railroad had no right to be there. Yet once it crossed the river there was no stopping it from going on into the emptiness. What was hauled into the Argus elevators left on the train, going east or west, and what stayed became the town. First, there were the stores to supply the farmers with equipment and food, and then the banks to hold their money, and then more stores where bankers and store owners, too, could shop. Houses for the town people to live in were constructed. One church was raised, another. A school. More houses for the teachers and the railroad workers and the people who built houses. Taverns for their vices. A drugstore for their pains, and so on, until Argus became the county seat. After the courthouse was built, it looked as though Argus was as up-and-coming a place as anywhere in North Dakota.
    Fidelis found work at once with the local butcher, Kozka, and he hired out as well to concerns in surrounding small towns. Not only that, buthe custom butchered right at people’s farms, as long as he was fetched. He hadn’t a car at first, though he was later to own a succession of delivery trucks. When he started working for the Kozkas, their trade increased, for Fidelis had his father’s talent for making sausage and he’d learned his father’s secrets. He was given them, in fact, on the eve before he left. The secret was extremely simple, said his father. There is no ingredient too humble. Use the finest of everything. Even the grade of salt matters. The garlic must be perfectly fresh, never dried out. The meat of course, and the casings, the transparent guts of sheep. Clean. They must be exquisitely fresh as well. Fidelis, following his father’s dictum when he made up his first batch of Swedish sausages for the Scandinavian trade, did not use just any potato in the filling,
but sought the finest in