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nods and I am on the road that leads to Lucious Wilson’s house. I run as fast as I can up that road and see that I am in Linus Lancaster’s field. I run past his horses and through his grasses and his daisies and find I am in Lucious Wilson’s barn. His barn has grown bigger than it ought to be and I run across it, past its pens and the hooks hanging sharp on its walls, and see that I am in Linus Lancaster’s shed. My ankle hurts but I run and find myself in Lucious Wilson’s barn. I run and find myself back in Linus Lancaster’s shed. The shed is big and I run across it. Then the shed fills with pigs and I have to run across their backs. They are wet from the slops they have been fighting over. I slip to the floor and Lucious Wilson throws me an axe to cut my way through. I catch it and see Linus Lancaster standing with his back to me and I swing. I swing and hit pig and the earth opens up and I drop and fall and am far below its surface. There is a way forward. Something is behind me but it is not a pig. It is not Linus Lancaster either. “Scary Sue, Scary Sue,” calls a voice I do not recognize. In this running dream I cannot turn my head.

On the fourth day of my parent’s Kentucky visit, Linus Lancaster got us all into his wagon and we went off to the fair. My father did not want to go to any fair, but Linus Lancaster encouraged him and showed him the big bag of tobacco he had at the ready, and in the end he came along. You had to ride a whole half a day and then some to get to that little cornbread crumb of a settlement. It was called Albatross. They were having their fair at the far side of it. They had it in a field that was next to nothing but a barn and a smoky-colored hill. When Horace had let us down, he took the wagon over and set with the other help at the base of the smoky-colored hill. The help weren’t let to come into the rows of tents where they had candy in buckets and colored strings hanging and men calling out to come in and see their show. My father took his look around and said he would just as soon clump up the hill and sit with Horace, but Linus Lancaster said that wasn’t the way of it here.
    “The way of it here,” my father said as he clumped alongside me. “I’ve been to a kind number of places they call ‘here’ the way your husband, Linus Lancaster, does, and I know something about the ways of it too.”
    My mother had Linus Lancaster’s arm. She had had it for most of their visit. She came about as high up on Linus Lancaster as I did. We followed them into a show about a fish man they’d had up from the bottom of a pond in China. The fish man didn’t have hands, he had flippers. He was blind on the top of it and had been born without a tongue. They kept him in a barrel filled with water. The water in the barrel looked black. It looked cold. My mother said, “Oh my,” and we walked back out.
    At one end of the fair they had a stage set up, but there wasn’t anything on it. Linus Lancaster asked a man what they had planned for the stage, but the man said that there wouldn’t be anything on that stage until the next day. Linus Lancaster stood for a long time looking at that stage. I thought about him looking at his pigs and reckoned he might step up and start singing. My mother asked him what he had in mind as he stood there, but he just laughed and galantried himself back on over to her and we all walked off. Every now and then as he was clumping next to me, my father would look up at the smoky hill then look over at Linus Lancaster and cluck his tongue. I said we ought to buy a sack of candy to take back to the girls, but Linus Lancaster opined to us all he’d as soon feed up some of the fine apples they had on sale to his pigs.
    “A pig is good people,” he said.
    “Now I’ve heard every last thing there is to hear,” my father said.
    “I doubt that.”
    “Then tell me some more.”
    But Linus Lancaster didn’t say another word.
    Late that night when we got