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our life together, though we were a way off discussing politics or sharing our life stories – which suited me, in fact.
    The first time she felt the baby move, a look of astonishment came across her face and she gabbled in her tongue and put my hand on her stomach, but I couldn’t feel a darn thing, even though she was tapping my arm with her finger, trying to let me know what I was supposed to be feeling for. Six or eight weeks later, I was able to feel something stirring in that little melon belly of hers, and by April, I could make out distinct shapes, but I was never too sure if it was a foot, or a buttock, or a tiny head that I was feeling.
    Ping was sure it was a girl. I don’t know how. She spent evenings cutting patterns for her tiny dresses. That little thing seemed to like the pianola. She got very lively after I had played one of my rolls. I hoped she’d be musical and maybe figure out how to tune it, because the songs didn’t sound much like they’d used to sound.
    That whole spring was one of the great times in my life. Ping bloomed and she let her hair grow, and her belly swelled and swelled. I spent some happy hours in the farmers’ supply choosing seeds for the garden. They gave me a great feeling of hope for the future, those little brown packets: beans and corn, spinach, squash, and rutabaga, radish, melons, peas, tomatoes, zucchini, cabbage and chard. I started turning the soil with ash and horseshit as soon as the thaw began, and I thought, hell, let’s plant some flowers as well, so I got a whole bunch of them: cotoneasters, candytuft, marigolds, pansies. Waking early every day to that chorus of birdsong and planning my garden, it really felt to me that some sanity and colour and orderliness had come back into my world.

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    Late in April I was up the lookout again with a spyglass and I caught something moving out on the roadway far to the east: first dust, then a column of people moving out of the horizon and towards us. It’s eerie the silence when you look at a thing like that from far off through the glass. You know there are sounds: horses labouring under a heavy load, whips and sticks, chains clanking, men cussing out the stragglers, but you can’t hear them. And the spyglass flattens it all out like a tableau in a picture book.
    The thing it called to mind as it came into view was the big colour picture of Moses parting the Red Sea in my Children’s Bible. It showed how the walls of water on either side were smooth lie glass, and between them, on the dry seabed, fish lay flapping and dying under the feet of the fleeing Israelites. Way in back, Pharaoh’s army was just about preparing to go between those high blue walls. Pharaoh’s chariot was pulled by a pair of big snorting black horses, and I had nightmares where I could hear their hooves as they gained on me, and I’d fall on my knees among the gasping fish, thinking ‘Let it be quick, let it be quick,’ before I woke up to the sound of Charlo’s open-mouthed breathing and the room still filled with that watery early morning light.
    I wouldn’t normally have put myself in the way of trouble, but since Ping came with her baby, I felt less careful about my own life. I was, after all, the sole representative of the law in the municipality, and it didn’t feel right for me to be skulking round like a thief at a wedding while this huge caravan of people moved past right outside my city.
    The highway skirted the north side of the town. A metalled road ran up to it, but ten years of freezing and thawing had broken it into rubble. I didn’t like to risk the mare’s legs on it, so I galloped across the open ground instead. The whole column must have had close to two hundred souls in it, and the whole thing slowed to a halt as they saw me coming. I wasn’t minded to get too close, so I stopped short about fifty yards away from them and waited to see if anybody would come.
    My horse pawed at the dirt while I waited. I could feel hot