I was calm.

When he comes home, we’ll sit at this table. He’ll ask nothing. Father of infinite patience. He’ll wait for me to tell it all. When I stop speaking, we’ll drive to town. He’ll stay beside me. But he won’t hang on.

I was so grateful I had to lean against the wall to keep from falling down.

I thought, He loves me this much, to listen, to go with me, to give me up.

All these years I’d been wrong about the hunter. Now I saw the father’s grief, how he suffered with his wounds, how his passion surpassed the dead son’s. I saw the boy’s deception, that deer-colored coat. I understood it was the child’s silent stupidity that made the father turn the gun on himself.

I meant to say this as well.

But my father stayed in the orchard all day. At four, I put on dark glasses and went to the doctor’s house. I polished gold faucets and the copper bottoms of pots; I got down on my hands and knees to scrub each tile of the bathroom floor. The doctor’s wife stood in the doorway, watching me from behind.

She said, That’s nice, Ada.

She said, Don’t forget the tub.

When I came back to the cottage, I saw the paper stuffed in the trash, the mug washed. My father asked what I wanted for dinner, and I told him I was going to town. He said I could use the truck, and I said, I know.

I meant I knew there was nothing he’d refuse.

He saw me held tight in the dead Indian’s arms. He was afraid of me, the truth I could tell.

Sometimes when I dream, the night I met Vincent Blew is just a movie I’m watching. Every body is huge. Yellow Dog’s brilliant face fills the screen. He grins. He hangs on to that torch too long. I try to close my eyes, but the lids won’t come down. His body bursts, shards of light; his body tears the sky apart. Then everything’s on fire: pond, grass, hair — boy’s breath, red shirt.

But later he’s alive. He’s an angel rising above me. He’s Vincent Blew hovering over the road. The truck passes through him, no resistance, no jolt — no girl with black eyes, no body in the grass, no bloody nose. There’s a whisper instead, a ragged voice full of static coming up from the ground. It’s Vincent murmuring just to me: You’re drunk, little girl. Close your eyes. I’ll steer. I’ll get us home.

And these nights, when he takes the wheel, when he saves us, these nights are the worst of all.

Three days before the man was known. His cousin claimed him. She said she danced with him the night he died. In Ronan, at the Wild Horse Bar. Then he was Vincent Blew, and she was Simone Falling Bear. It amazed me to think of it, the dead man dancing, the dead man in another woman’s arms.

She said he died just a mile from her house. I knew then that her cousin Vincent was her lover too, that her house was a tarpaper shack at the end of a dirt road, that her refrigerator was a box of ice, her heater a woodstove. She’d have a bag of potatoes in a pail under the sink, a stack of cans with no labels on the shelf.

I saw that even in his stupor Vincent Blew knew the way home.

She said he’d been an altar boy, that he knew the words of the Latin mass by heart. She said he’d saved two men at la Drang and maybe more. She had his Medal of Honor as proof. She said he wanted to open a school on the reservation where the children would learn to speak in their own tongue.

But that was before the war, before he started to drink so much.

He had these dreams. He had a Purple Heart. Look at his chest. They had to staple his bones shut.

I don’t know what lies the reporter told to make Simone Falling Bear talk. Perhaps he said, We want people to understand your loss.

That reporter found Vincent’s wife in Yakima, living with another man. He asked her about Vietnam, and she said she never saw any medals. She said Vincent’s school was just some crazy talk, and that boy was drinking beer from his mama’s bottle when he was three years old. When the reporter asked if Vincent Blew was ever a Catholic, she laughed. She said, Everybody was.

In a dream I climb a hill to find Vincent’s mother. She lives in a cave, behind rocks. I have to move a stone to get her out. She points to three sticks stuck in the dirt. She says, This is my daughter; these are my sons.

September, and Vincent Blew was two months dead. I was supposed to go to school, ride the bus, drink milk. But I couldn’t be with those children. Couldn’t raise my hand or sit in the cafeteria and eat my lunch. I went to the lake instead, swam in the cold water till my chest hurt and my arms went numb. Fallen trees lay just below the surface; rocks lay deeper still. I knew what they were. I wasn’t afraid. Only my own shadow moved.

I came home at the usual time to make dinner for my father. Fried chicken, green beans. I remember snapping each one. He didn’t ask, How was school? I thought he knew, again, and didn’t want to know, didn’t want to risk the question, any question — my weeping, the truth sputtered out at last, those words so close: Daddy, I can’t.

The next day I lay on the beach for hours. I burned. My clothes hurt my skin. I thought, He’ll see this.

But again we ate our dinner in silence, only the clink of silverware, the strain of swallowing, his muttered Thank you when I cleared his plate. He sat on the porch while I washed the dishes, didn’t come back inside till he heard the safe click, my bedroom door closed.

I saw how it was between us now. He hated each sound: the match striking, my breath sucked back, the weight of me on the floor. He knew exactly where I was — every moment — by the creak of loose boards. I learned how words stung, even the most harmless ones: Rice tonight, or potatoes? He had to look away to answer. Rice, please.

His childhood wounds, his sister’s death — those sorrows couldn’t touch his faith. My mother, with all her lies, couldn’t break him. Only his daughter could do that. I was the occasion of sin. I was the road and the truck he was driving. He couldn’t turn back.

The third day, he said, They called from school.

I nodded. I’ll go, I said.

He nodded too, and that was the end of it.

But I didn’t go. I hitched to Kalispell, went to six restaurants, finally found a job at a truck stop west of town.

That night I told my father I needed the truck to get to work, eleven to seven, graveyard.

I knew he wouldn’t speak enough words to argue.

I married the first trucker who asked. I was eighteen. It didn’t last. He had a wife in Ellensburg already, five kids. After that I rented a room in Kalispell, a safe place with high, tiny windows. Even the most careless girl couldn’t fall.

Then it was March, the year I was twenty, and my father had his first heart attack. I quit my job and tried to go home. I thought he’d let me take care of him, that I could bear the silence between us.

Three weeks I slept in my father’s house, my old room, the little bed.

One morning I slept too long. Light filled the window, flooded across the floor. It terrified me, how bright it was.

I felt my father gone.

In his room, I saw the bed neatly made, covers pulled tight, corners tucked.

I found him outside the doctor’s house. He had his gun in one hand, the hose in the other. He’d flushed three rats from under the porch and shot them all.

He meant he could take care of himself.

He meant he wanted me to go.

I got a day job, south of Ronan this time, the Morning After Café. Seventeen years I’ve stayed. I live in a trailer not so many miles from the dirt road that leads to Simone Falling Bear’s shack.

Sometimes I see her in the bars — Buffalo Bill’s, Wild Horse, Lucy’s Chance. She recognizes me, a regular, like herself. She tips her beer, masking her face in a flash of green glass.