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soak and took a plate of food and a cup of coffee upstairs to the old woman. They found that she was awake now, smoking one of her scarred briar pipes. She had raised the blinds again, and the blue pipe smoke drifted out the opened east window. She didn’t want the food. Beside her, Ada still lay silent in the bed, like a thin wax child.
    “Did mother say anything?” Edith asked.
    “No.”
    “Did she wake again?”
    “No. She’s resting. She’s getting ready.”
    “I believe she does feel cooler now, don’t you think? Maybe the fever’s broken.”
    “It hasn’t.”
    The old woman put her pipe away in her apron pocket and they went on waiting. Gradually it grew darker in the room, but Edith says she remembers there wasn’t muchof a sunset that evening. She had hoped there would be; she thought her mother might like to see one, that it might make her feel better. There wasn’t, though. There weren’t any clouds to make a sunset. It was just hot.
    When it was completely dark in the room, so dark they could barely distinguish the yellow face from the white pillow, Roy fumbled over to the chest of drawers in the corner and lit a lamp on top of it. The lamplight cast wavering shadows, and then the millers, those small dusty moths this country has more millions of than it needs, came out from the cracks in the wall and fluttered around the lamp, bumping against the hot globe and singeing themselves. One of the millers landed on Ada’s forehead and left its smudge of dust there, so it must have been that, when Edith brushed it off, that woke her again.
    Ada seemed to rouse for a minute then and to look dimly around her. When she seemed to have each person in place, her thin lips moved.
    “You make him. Tell him.”
    “What?” Edith said. “Would you like some water?” “I want him to take me to Johnson County. I want to sleep beside my mother.”
    “Yes. All right.”
    “You make him.”
    “Yes.”
    She didn’t say anything more. She went back to sleep, as if she hadn’t said anything at all, or as if she had said all there was to say. Sometime before midnight she died. Edith says they didn’t know for sure what time it was she died; they couldn’t set the exact minute. They weren’t able to tell when she stopped breathing, because her breath was so soft at the last anyway. They just knew for certain that she was dead when Hannah Roscoe put Ada’s hand under the sheet again and then went downstairs and walked home by herself.
    By the lamplight, Edith washed the child-sized body, combed the hair into place, and put on the Sunday dress. The next day Roy buried her in the Holt County Cemetery northeast of town.
    “You know what mother wanted,” Edith said. “You were there.”
    “No,” he said. “She was sick then.”
    “You heard her say so.”
    “I want her here.”
    “But mother didn’t like it here. She hated it. This wasn’t her home.”
    “Your mother’s dead. You’re the mother now.”
    “What do you mean? I can’t replace mother.”
    “You will.”
    Ada’s was the first of the three Goodnough graves that have been dug so far, over there in the brown grass beside the fence line that separates the cemetery and Otis Murray’s cornfield. Ada lived to be forty-two.

•3•
    E DITH was seventeen when her mother died. Lyman was fifteen. They were a year older when the next thing happened that fixed it for them. It wasn’t enough that their father was Roy Goodnough or that their mother died early; there had to be at least one more thing to clinch matters, to fix them forever, to make Edith and Lyman end up the way they did—two old people, a sister and a brother, living alone out here in a yellow house surrounded by weeds.
    It was an accident that did it. It was during harvest, and Roy Goodnough must have hated harvesttime.
    No—that’s not quite right. Like the rest of us, he must have loved it too, because it meant the end; it meant the accomplishment of what had been started