“No thanks. This is fine.”

I pick up a ham sandwich.

“So I open the door and try to persuade him to get outside where he can pass it.”

The kettle is whistling. She pours water on my instant coffee.

“Wait a minute, I’ll get you some real cream-but too late. Right on the mat there he passed it. A hunk like that.” She shows me her fists bunched together. “And hard. Oh boy. You should of seen it. Like rock.

“And I was right,” she says. “It was chock-full of turkey quills.”

I stir the muddy coffee.

“And after that whoosh, out with the soft stuff. Bust the dam, you did.” She says this to Buster, who has raised his head. “You went and stunk the place up something fierce, you did. But the most of it went on the mat so I took it outside and put the hose on it,” she said, turning back to me. “Then I took the soap and the scrub-brush and then I renched it with the hose all over again. Then scrubbed up the floor too and sprayed with Lysol and left the door open. You can’t smell it in here now, can you?”

“No.”

“I was sure good and happy to see him get relief. Poor old fellow. He’d be the age of ninety-four if he was human.”

During the first visit I made to my father and Irlma after I left my marriage and came east, I went to sleep in the room that used to be my parents’ bedroom. (My father and Irlma now sleep in the bedroom that used to be mine.) I dreamed that I had just entered this room where I was really sleeping, and I found my mother on her knees. She was painting the baseboard yellow. Don’t you know, I said, that Irlma is going to paint this room blue and white? Yes I do know, my mother said, but I thought if I hurried up and got it all done she would leave it alone, she wouldn’t go to the trouble of covering up fresh paint. But you will have to help me, she said. You will have to help me get it done because I have to do it while she’s asleep.

And that was exactly like her, in the old days-she would start something in a big burst of energy, then marshall everybody to help her, because of a sudden onslaught of fatigue and helplessness.

“I’m dead you know,” she said in explanation. “So I have to do this while she’s asleep.”

Irlma’s got the jump on you and me.

What did my father mean by that?

That she knows only the things which are useful to her, but she knows those things very well? That she could be depended upon to take what she needs, under almost any circumstances? Being a person who doesn’t question her wants, doesn’t question that she is right in whatever she feels or says or does.

In describing her to a friend I have said, she’s a person who would take the boots off a dead body on the street. And then of course I said, what’s wrong with that?

… wonder. She’s a wonder.

Something happened that I am ashamed of. When Irlma said what she did about my father having wished he’d been with her all the time, about his having preferred her to my mother, I said to her in a cool judicious tone-that educated tone which in itself has power to hurt-that I didn’t doubt that he had said that. (Nor do I. My father and I share a habit-not too praiseworthy-of often saying to people more or less what we think they’d like to hear.) I said that I didn’t doubt that he had said it but I did not think it had been tactful of her to tell me. Tactful, yes. That was the word I used.

She was amazed that anybody could try to singe her so, when she was happy with herself, flowering. She said that if there was one thing she could not stand it was people who took her up wrong, people who were so touchy. And her eyes rilled up with tears. But then my father came downstairs and she forgot her own grievance-at least temporarily, she forgot it-in her anxiety to care for him, to provide him with something he could eat.

In her anxiety? 1 could say, in her love. Her face utterly softened, pink, tender, suffused with love.

I talk to Dr. Parakulam on the phone.

“Why do you think he is running this temperature?”

“He has an infection somewhere.” Obviously, is what he does not say.

“Is he on-well, I suppose he’s on antibiotics for that?”

“He is on everything.”

A silence.

“Where do you think the infection-”

“I’m having tests done on him today. Blood tests. Another electrocardiogram.”

“Do you think it’s his heart?”

“Yes. I think basically it is. That is the main trouble. His heart.”

On Monday afternoon, Irlma has gone to the hospital. I was going to take her-she does not drive-but Harry Crofton has shown up in his truck and she has decided to go with him, so that I can stay at home. Both she and my father are nervous about there being nobody on the place.

I go out to the barn. I put down a bale of hay and cut the twine around it and separate the hay and spread it.

When I come here I usually stay from Friday night until Sunday night, no longer, and now that I have stayed on into the next week something about my life seems to have slipped out of control. I don’t feel so sure that it is just a visit. The buses that run from place to place no longer seem so surely to connect with me.

I am wearing open sandals, cheap water-buffalo sandals. This type of footwear is worn by a lot of women I know and it is seen to indicate a preference for country life, a belief in what is simple and natural. It is not practical when you are doing the sort of job I am doing now. Bits of hay and sheep pellets, which are like big black raisins, get squashed between my toes.

The sheep come crowding at me. Since they were sheared in the summer, their wool has grown back, but it is not yet very long. Right after the shearing they look from a distance surprisingly like goats, and they are not soft and heavy even yet. The big hip bones stand out, the bunting foreheads. I talk to them rather self-consciously, spreading the hay. I give them oats in the long trough.

People I know say that work like this is restorative and has a peculiar dignity, but I was born to it and feel it differently. Time and place can close in on me, it can so easily seem as if I have never got away, that I have stayed here my whole life. As if my life as an adult was some kind of dream that never took hold of me. I see myself not like Harry and Irlma, who have to some extent flourished in this life, or like my father, who has trimmed himself to it, but more like one of those misfits, captives-nearly useless, celibate, rusting-who should have left but didn’t, couldn’t, and are now unfit for any place. I think of a man who let his cows starve to death one winter after his mother died, not because he was frozen in grief but because he couldn’t be bothered going out to the barn to feed them, and there was nobody to tell him he had to. I can believe that, I can imagine it. I can see myself as a middle-aged daughter who did her duty, stayed at home, thinking that someday her chance would come, until she woke up and knew it wouldn’t. Now she reads all night and doesn’t answer her door, and comes out in a surly trance to spread hay for the sheep.

What happens as I’m finishing with the sheep is that Irlma’s niece Connie drives into the barnyard. She has picked up her younger son from the high school and come to see how we are getting on.

Connie is a widow with two sons and a marginal farm a few miles away. She works as a nurse’s aide at the hospital. As well as being Irlma’s niece she is a second cousin of mine-it was through her, I think, that my father got better acquainted with Irlma. Her eyes are brown and sparkling, like Irlma’s, but they are more thoughtful, less demanding. Her body is capable, her skin dried, her arms hard muscled, her dark hair cropped and graying. There is a fitful charm in her voice and her expression and she still moves like a good dancer. She fixes her lipstick and makes up her eyes before she goes to work and again when work is over, she surfaces full of what you might describe inadequately as high spirits or good humor or human kindness, from a life whose choices have not been plentiful, whose luck has not been in good supply.