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mustard colors. Yet Violet and Olivia would often stare fondly into it, contemplating the likeness it had once contained.
    Happenings, friends, neighbors, relatives, and others who had long ceased filling their lungs with air had left indelible clues to finding their current hiding places, and anyone able to decipher them could at once begin solving the mystery of their seeming, habitual absence. The sisters were constantly surrounded by the presence of things not there.
    This was equally true of the village of Words. Like the Brasso sisters themselves, Words attached more firmly to the past than to the present, and only tentatively engaged the future. Named for the surveyor who had first donated land for the village, Elias Words, the community had little to contribute to the modern world, having already forfeited all of its inhabitants who entertained a keen interest in actually being somewhere. Indeed, the only residual relevance of Words remained
     more a subjective secret than an objective fact—a secret collectively shared with other small towns throughout the world.
    As three generations of rural people had migrated to cities like woodland creatures fleeing fire, the current denizens of Words remained stubbornly rooted in an outdated idea. Like people who refuse to update their wardrobes, they simply ignored all evidence that their manner of living had expired. Their fierce loyalties were often provoked but never progressed, and they clung to the particular, the vernacular, in the face of ever-encroaching generalities. Consequently, they were losing their habitat, and empty buildings accumulated—somber, withered monuments lacking inscriptions—memorializing a once-functioning cheese factory, school, post office, dry goods store, lumberyard, mill, grocery, furniture store, dress-maker, garage, wagon factory, implement dealer, and gas station.
    The town stood in its own shadow of better times, when families depended on agriculture for their livelihood, on work for exercise, on common sense for intelligence, on each other for entertainment, and on faith for health. Seasonal rhythms of nature had permeated every aspect of living and everyone, in one way or another, had danced to the same fiddler. Shared ethical standards fought crime, and inexorable obligations linked individuals together in a single, unbroken human chain.
    Violet helped settle her sister onto the living room sofa, tucking a quilt around her. She cleared the dishes from the table and packed away the leftover food. Placing water, pills, remote control, and telephone on the end table, she told Olivia she would be home before dark. In case there was more talk of the mountain lion that people kept hearing at night, she brought in the police scanner. On the chance that their young neighbor might be outdoors doing something interesting—like last week when she jumped up and down on her lawn mower—she pulled back the curtains on the south-facing window.
    More groceries were needed for the lunch following the burial service, as well as additional cleaning supplies. Mildred Fletcher, Rachel Wood, and four others were meeting Violet in the church
     basement at two o’clock. Their pastor might also come, but this was uncertain. Her movements had been unpredictable lately. The young woman was highly sensitive and overly intelligent—not stable traits in a pastor. Her heart was too full to be completely trusted with the customs of the church, and for some unknown reason she had asked the pastor of the Methodist church in Grange to conduct the funeral. She had done this with the permission of the family, of course, but it had been her suggestion, and no one knew why.
    Violet’s Buick started without hesitation and she drove slowly through town toward the highway.
    The golden years of Words, she speculated, must have begun sometime after the territory joined the Union in 1848 and then extended somewhere into the post-European War period. They did not, however,