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disputes, ducked into the kitchen
    while my father glowered. This was more than hackles raised. Some
    history, some secret Papa wanted untold, moved from a forgotten
    thing to one with substance. It spread to the corners and rose along
    the wal s.
    34
    I followed Mama and asked, “Why’s Papa so upset? Is it ’cause of
    what they said about how I can’t be May Queen?”
    She dropped the rosary working in her fingers, a remnant of
    growing up Catholic. I picked up the chain of freshwater pearls and
    lingered on the crucifix before handing it over. Mama tucked the
    rosary into her apron. “If that’s all it was, bonita. Señoras were so
    excited about May Day . . . I thought Timoteo would be too, but the
    past still hurts. I wasn’t here then. Sometimes, Ivy, it feels like no
    matter how long I live in the Glen, I’ll never belong.”
    The sadness in my mother’s face pained my chest, and I didn’t
    know what to say. Sometimes even silence felt like a falter.
    She patted her apron pocket. A loop from the rosary strand peeked
    out from the eyelet trim. “Jay called on your father today. Another
    dog, this one only bones.”
    The subject change wasn’t a relief. I prayed it wasn’t a dog from
    the clinic — maybe some farmer’s hunting hound — but if the poor
    beast was only bones, we wouldn’t know which owner to visit.
    “The skull was missing,” Mama went on, though the distant look
    on her face made me wonder if she was talking to me or speaking to
    rid her mind of the image. “Can’t imagine who’d do such a horrible
    thing. I don’t want you and Heather down by that water. Too much
    blood in it.”
    All the times I’d done laundry in the river, listening to Denial
    Mil ’s churning wheel, and the times Rook, Heather, and I went fish-
    ing, the water was clear when it skimmed through my fingers. Now
    my mind made it sludgy red, with bits of fur and meat clinging to my
    skin as the blood oozed past.
    35
    A sudden thump from the room above the kitchen shook the
    light. For a while after Mamie had gone silent, she sat with the family,
    taking in the clunky sounds only happy busyness made. She’d knit,
    a muted but steady presence. Not now. Perhaps her silence final y
    removed her from the living world.
    Footsteps gave way to the squeal of a door opening and a fork
    scraping a plate as she set it on the table outside her room. I started
    up the stairs between the kitchen and dining room. Mamie’s door
    was shut, and her plate was nearly full on the table.
    I let myself into the room. My grandmother sat in a rocker be-
    side a window overlooking the Glen’s fields. The kerosene lamp on
    her desk spread a gold glow across the dark. In the corner, Gramps’s
    shotgun was propped against the wal , unused since his death years
    ago but still within reach — ready for those nights if the screaming
    from the woods got too close. Some nights it sounded as if Birch
    came out of the woods and into the fields, but I’d always been too
    scared to look out my window because what if he was there?
    “Mamie, everything all right?” I asked. “You didn’t eat much.”
    She didn’t move from her rocking chair. Her profile split the win-
    dow, the sharp nose and high cheekbones common in Templetons
    — but not me. Blue lightning bloomed around Mamie. Some sandy
    wisps sprouted near the wings of her red hair, which she kept in a
    bun. She’d worked the land as a girl, and the once-creamy skin had
    ruddied under the sun. But in the few pictures that existed, ones
    where she was young, she looked like Heather.
    Mamie gave me a good study, her face a lattice of wrinkles. Her
    china-blue eyes narrowed as she assessed me, and then her hand shot
    36
    out, grabbing my wrist around the red thread bracelet. That grip was
    tough, no gentleness, while she flipped my hand from side to side
    and bent my fingers this way and that.
    Then for the first time in years, Mamie’s tongue loosened enough
    to make a