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mother laugh, a careless, happy laugh, and he rolled over and pushed his face into the pillow. He was someone I could hardly imagine, a boy who loved home.

    I know from the minute I see my mother making coffee in the morning what sort of day we will have. Some days sadness and anger come off her like a smell, and something in my chest begins to hurt. My jobs are spelled out and I do them: I pick and peel vegetables, dry the dishes and set the table for the next meal, haul wood and water, clean the outhouse and carry ashes from the stove to pour down the holes, feed the chickens and gather the eggs. I do my work properly as an act of resistance: if she’s wanting to punish me, she won’t have a chance. Then I do extra things — carve petals out of the sides of the radishes, put jars of brown-eyed Susans on the table, arrange flowers in the outhouse between the two holes.
    My mother finds the flowers in the outhouse and shoves them down a hole. Satan finds work for idle hands, she says. She puts me to work sifting through the milled oats to pick out grasshopper legs, which are not welcome when they turn up boiled in our porridge. She sits me down on the veranda to do it so she can keep an eye on me while she does the laundry. It’s Monday and her hands are spongy and reeking of bleach. I strain the oats through my fingers, picking out the desiccated legs, shapely like miniature frogs’ legs, or women’s legs. Why are there legs and no bodies? I call down the veranda. What happened to their bodies? My mother, bent over a tub of grey wrung-out clothes, doesn’t answer. She moves hunched from the washtubs to the wringer, not bothering to straighten her back. Someone might imagine that we’ve been taken prisoner by the same ogre.
    Days he’s not plowing or seeding or mowing my father cuts wood down by the river — that’s how he uses his spare time. One night at supper he says suddenly, Saw a lynx today. Up in a spruce.
    In a tree? Phillip says. Lynx don’t climb trees.
    My father doesn’t answer. We’re eating cold chicken, a laying hen that stopped laying. My father’s working at taking the bones apart. Could the lynx have been up in the tree when he arrived with his axe? Strange it didn’t take off! Could it have crept towards him as he worked? That would be stranger — lynx are very shy. While we pull his story apart, my father works on the hen, prying bits of tough flesh out from between its ribs. He never does explain.
    After supper I walk down to the riverbank. The land falls in three gentle, giant steps as though a carpet were laid over a huge staircase. The tallest trees are on the lowest bank. I can see where my father was working: he cut down seven or eight poplars, and he started skinning the branches off them. I can see the spruce tree where the lynx must have lain. There’s a bed of pine needles under it, and wood chips and shattered bark littered around. I picture the lynx on the lowest spruce branch, up near the trunk, its secretive, ornate face tipped to watch my father.
    Where exactly was my father? Suddenly I understand. My father was sleeping. He lay down to sleep in that fragrant bed, and so there was no movement or noise to alert the lynx. I think of him lying drowsily under the tree, slowly opening his eyes and seeing the lynx, my father’s grey eyes and the knowing eyes of the lynx connecting for an electric second before the lynx clenched its muscles and sprang away. He didn’t tell us because he’s ashamed to have been sleeping in the middle of the day. This happened in
Pilgrim’s Progress:
Christian was overtaken by slothfulness and lay down to sleep and got into no end of trouble because of it.
    I walk back filled with intention. In the shade of the granary, King and Dolly stand nose to tail swishing each other’s flies. My father will be in the barn milking. I walk down the aisle to where he’s perched on an