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shape.”
    The cast was due for removal in eight weeks but took ten because the local doctor had to import a special cutting tool. He was so impressed with the New York cast that he asked to keep it. My leg revealed itself pale, withered, and hairless. Every evening, I filled a purse with rocks, fastened it to my ankle, and lifted it from a sitting position. Between repetitions I plucked ticks from the dogs, watching night arrive. The black air seeped down the hills to fuse land and sky in a darkness absent from the city.
    My acting career had failed but I had been to all the museums, and many galleries. The paintings overpowered me. I often sat for hours before a single canvas, studying each nuance of brushstroke, seeking to understand not the painting, but the painter. Galleries had the effect of a swift cold shower. Museums left me exhausted. Limping in the womb of the hills, I decided to become a painter without ever having applied brush to canvas. First, I needed a job to finance the supplies. Second, I needed unusual clothes. Third and most important, I needed inspiration.
    I thought of Jahi offering herself as reward for violence. I had shunned the ritual as a petrifact. Becoming a grownup had to mean more than sex, needed to be independent of women. The traditional arena of sports had left me with a leg unable to tolerate the required pivots. I could stay at home and cut trees, dig the earth, and kill animals, but using nature as my testing ground would prove nothing. The woods were full of damaged men. Nature always won.

W illows are budding along the river, and young birds already sing from the nest. Rita’s had an easy first couple of months. She sleeps late, takes a daily nap, and has vomited only once. Until then, we were afraid that since she’d had no morning sickness, there might be something wrong, I was proud of her mess.
    Lately she has begun traipsing from the closet to the mirror.
    â€œDo I look pregnant?” she asks.
    â€œNo,” I say, believing that she’s trying to hide her weight. She curls on the bed and cries. I join her, stroking her hair, slowly realizing that she’s been choosing clothes to emphasize her belly, not conceal it. Rita wants everyone to know. Since becoming pregnant, she leans her shoulders back and rubs her stomach, resembling someone who just ate a fine meal, instead of a woman carrying a child. Now she’s finally showing.
    Barring outright violence, the worst move a man can make is abandoning a pregnant woman. The act, however, is not uncommon. I now understand the motivation as uncontrollable fear, rather than desire for freedom or a different mate. Male terror looms in tandem with the woman’s rising belly. She is changing; he is not. Her body and mind drastically alter day by day while he’s still the knucklehead he always was.
    The prospect of spending a life with Rita impels a scrutiny of her smallest traits that aggravate me like saddle burrs. In the woods I speculate on which habit will drive me to mania at age sixty—not screwing the lid on a ketchup bottle hard enough, or leaving her clothes scattered like pollen about the house. She would prefer that I answer the phone politely and change my clothes more often. The compromise of pair bonding is the acceptance of previously unacceptable personal traits.
    In Kentucky there are two clubs for young boys—4-H and Future Farmers of America. I joined both for the field trips, one of which was to the state fair. We were bused two hundred miles to the grounds—a vast spectacle, bigger than the nearest town in the hills. One exhibit was of a live cow with a plexiglas window in its side. The hide had been peeled back, the flesh removed, and I could watch the churning of its digestive system, the regurgitation and movement of food from one stomach to another. It turned me against milk for a year.
    If I could somehow see inside Rita, I’d feel less uneasy about the baby. The