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bloody, understand?”

    Ree crossed the schoolyard snow toward the scraped hard road that led north. She saw pregnant girls she knew huddled by their special side entrance holding textbooks and bumping bellies. She saw boys she knew sharing smoke, crouched beside their pickup trucks. She saw lovers she knew kissing back and forth with enough wet kisses to hold each sated and faithful until the lunch hour. She saw teachers she knew watching with sad eyes as she left the schoolyard alone to stand beside the north road with her thumb out. She waved once to Mrs. Prothero and Mr. Feltz, but wouldn’t look toward the school again.

    The landscape of freeze framed her so pitifully that she had a lift within minutes. A Schwan’s food delivery truck stopped for her, and the driver said several times he wasn’t supposed to give rides but, jeez, that wind, that wind sort of blows the rules away, don’t it? He carried her past the ramshackle wide spots of Bawbee, Heaney Cross and Chaunk, past the turn to Haslam Springs, and on to the y-fork above Hawkfall. His route and hers split there, and Ree climbed down and watched the truck drive away north.

    The Hawkfall road had not been plowed below the crest. Ree came down the great steep hill, walking in the lone set of swerving wheel ruts pressed into the snow. The houses of the village sat in the bottomland and perched low or high on surrounding slopes and ridges. The new part of Hawkfall was old to most folks, but the old part of Hawkfall seemed ancient and a creepy sort of sacred. The old and new places had mainly been made of Ozark stone. The walls of the old places had been pulled apart, the stones torn asunder and tossed furiously about the meadow during the bitter reckoning of long ago. The stones had ever since been left lay where they fell and now raised scattered white humps across three acres. The new places had smoke churning from chimneys and footprints in their yards.

    Keening blue wind was bringing weather back into the sky, dark clouds gathering at the edge of sight, carrying frosty wet for later. A fat brown dog came waddling through tummy-deep snow to investigate Ree, sniffed and barked his findings until three more dogs came springing across the road to bounce around her. She was escorted by frisky mutts as she walked past the meadow of the old fallen walls and into the village. The low stone houses had short front porches and tall skinny windows. Most places still had two front doors in accordance with certain readings of Scripture, one door for men, the other for women, though nobody much used them strictly that way anymore. At the first house a woman came out the man door onto the porch and said, “Who’re you?”

    Ree stood on the road in a drift that touched her knees. “My name’s Dolly. I’m a Dolly. Ree Dolly.”

    The woman was young, maybe twenty-five, wearing a tie-dyed bathrobe over a gray fuzzy sweater, black jeans, and boots. Her hair was nearly black, cut short and smart-looking, and she wore sort of burly eyeglasses that made smartness look cute on her. A stereo played behind her, a song with guitars strumming jangly and wild horses running free in the words. She said, “I don’t guess I know you.”

    “I’m from Rathlin Valley? Down on Bromont Creek? You know where that is?”

    “Might just about as well be Timbuktu to us,” she said. “What’s your business here?”

    “My dad, Jessup, he’s pals with Little Arthur, and I got to find him. I been here before. I know which house is where Little Arthur lives.”

    The woman lit a crooked yellow cigarette, flicked the match into the snow. She kept her eyes on Ree and her breath and the smoke spun white into the air. The dogs had climbed the steps to sniff her feet and she nudged them back with her boots. She said, “You stand right there ’til I get my hat. Don’t go nosin’ ’round anywhere.”

    Houses above looked caught on the scraggly hillsides like crumbs in a beard and apt