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draggled trees looked best in this slanting light— burnished, bursting with foliage and fruit. Their battalions rode the gentle, down-trending slopes of the land. The whole spread sank towards its southern boundary. She saw it now ahead, down there near one end of the huge plastic-cocooned compost heap: Dad’s shed, his study and distillery in one.
    Maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe there was a worse place than the fruit cellar, though Dad had never taken her there in his shed. Karen had rarely even been inside it.
    For a while she rambled left and right down the harvesting lanes, dropping southward a lane at a time, glimpsing the shed now and then through breaks in the trees, until she found the nerve and the anger to take the next turn straight down to it.
    A faded plywood shed with a raked tar-paper roof. A big old ‘fifties Chevy pick-up crouched under a shelter built off its side. That gray brute of a truck… . With a shudder— of fear, of course, but also fascination— Karen walked to the bangy old screen door. She pulled it open a few inches and let its spring pull it back to the jamb with a soft clap.
    Way up there at the house on certain quiet summer afternoons, lying in the grassy yard where Dad’s personal fruit trees grew, Karen could hear this screen door bang from almost half a mile away. Flopped on the grass with some comic books, Karen might be absorbed, only half hearing the far faint summery stir of the ocean of leaves around her. Mom was gone into Gravenstein for shopping and the girl, restlessly trying to get at the gist of one of those encyclopedic Superman thought-balloons, might be only remotely aware of the wide-scattered outbursts of birds or the wandering hum of a bee.
    Then, far out across that sea of leaves, would come that remote tiny flap-clatter of this door. The minuscule distinctness of it, a micro-noise of wood clapping wood! This the child could hear as clear as thunder. Dad had gone down to the shed some hours ago. If he went down, he stayed drinking till dinnertime. Except some of those times when Mom was gone somewhere. Would she hear the microscopic truck next? Firing up to come up here?
    … Yes, there it went. So faint to be so unmistakable! But already that young girl knew how quick its roar would grow as big as life, its tires come clawing to a stop at the yard’s edge, Dad booming from the cab, “Karen, get over here to me! Double-time, girl!” And if she was not quick enough, he would grab her wrist and haul her up aboard… .
    Half-consciously Karen touched her wrist and found again last night’s tenderness, though lessened, it seemed. If only that memory of being gripped were fading, were not still so stark, like madness, in her brain. Of course, it was only memory she had felt in that mortuary room— the memory of what had happened here.
    Only? What was the difference between a delusion like that and the full-blown DTs? Oh please, please don’t let my brain already be that crippled by alcohol. Oh that son of a bitch. That cruel black boar.
    She yanked on the screen door and shouldered the inner door open.
    She was surprised by how well she remembered this interior, though it had all been so much neater, those few times she’d glimpsed it as a child. Dad’s desk-and-armchair corner, with all its miscellaneous freestanding shelves and files walling it in, was now snow-drifted with papers, magazines, and books in sagging stacks. The other half of the space was occupied by the still. The benches and sinks, the trellises of copper tubing, the domed copper cookers, the cooling fans stationed along the coils, the little bunged kegs of oak— all looked orderly as ever, but dust-heavy cobwebs extravagantly festooned them.
    She took a few steps towards the desk. Crowded with so much else, there was still a place on it for the brandy cannon, its muzzle aimed at a forty-five degree angle at the cobwebby roof-joists. A cut-glass howitzer that fired booze.
    She turned back and