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patches of ice in the shady sections of the yard. The bears in the forest still slumbered in their dens. As she sat there, Minette felt her milk come in, even though her baby had been gone for weeks.
    In the morning everyone in town knew the Chapmans were there. They had made their camp in the patch of garden behind the house that had a peculiar red soil. People noticed the brothers down at the well in the center of town, pouring buckets of water to wash the soil from their bare feet, stained red from the dirt. Someone said only the devil had red feet. That sort of gossip traveled quickly. Minette’s father, Harry Partridge, came to hercottage soon after. Minette was baking a maple sugar pie. Her father took note of the knapsacks and blankets set against the garden gate.
    “You’re letting strangers into your house? Do you think that’s wise?”
    “They sleep outside.”
    Minette knew that the Chapmans were planting an orchard down in the meadow. They’d gone off early in the morning dark and were at work when most people were in their beds. They planned to do this all across the country so that the land would be a sea of apples, manna from heaven in a line leading west.
    “They’re just boys,” she told her father, who was hardly comforted by her words.
    That night Minette fed the Chapmans pie for supper, outside in the garden. The brothers had worked all day. They had walked past the burying ground in the meadow and had seen the stones for Minette’s husband and child and sister and mother. Before supper, they held hands and said a prayer for those no longer in the living world. As John spoke about meeting with angels in the world above their own, Minette cried for the first time since her sister’s passing. That night she slept with the window open. She slept better than she had in a month.
    The Jacobs began it, taking up the idle gossip, insisting that the devils with red feet were now at work in the meadow and needed to be stopped. Soon the town was in an uproar. The men joined together at the meetinghouse and decided to take action. But when they came for the boys, they found Minette outside with the brothers, meaning to sleep in the open air with the strangers. The Chapmans were given ten minutes to get out ofWilliam Jacob’s widow’s yard and twenty-four hours to leave Blackwell.
    The boys went as far as the meadow, where they set up their camp in the grass. It was a cool, dewy night, and the foxes in the hollow nearby bolted, surprised by the sudden intrusion. It made no difference to the Chapmans where they slept. It was Minette who cared. She packed a bag and followed them. She felt headstrong and light. She’d heard stories to the effect that her grandmother had disappeared one August night, and she wondered if she had felt the way Minette herself did now, not caring if she ever saw anyone in town ever again.
    Minette wore her old black skirt, one she didn’t mind ruining if burrs caught in the fabric. She had on a pair of her husband’s old boots. The brothers weren’t surprised to see her. They accepted all they were offered and considered every moment a blessing. They had their supper in the meadow that night. Fresh asparagus, fiddlehead ferns, the last of the maple sugar pie. That was the night Minette realized that John Chapman didn’t sleep. When she startled awake, surprised to find herself where she was, beneath the stars, she saw that he hadn’t yet lain down. He was hunched in the grass, on fire with ideas. He said he didn’t need sleep. It was a waste of time and he had too much to accomplish. Minette stayed beside him. They studied the sky, and she listened attentively when he told her that every set of stars told a story. There was a spider, there was a crab, there was the lion of the night.
    Her father came out to the meadow the next day to find that Minette was laboring with the men, planting seeds. There was soil on her hands and on her face. Her black skirt was hiked up out of