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overturned milk pail. His head is tipped against the cow.
    You were sleeping, I say. When the lynx crept up.
    He doesn’t answer for a minute. No, he says finally, over the sound of the milk thudding into the bottom of the pail. I was looking right at her the whole time. It just didn’t dawn on me what she were.
    I don’t understand how this could be. So what did you do? I finally ask. When you realized?
    I rolled out of the way, he says. She jumped down and took off.
    The cats are pacing around calling to him, switching their tails, furious with desire. He seems not to notice. Dad, I say. Finally he turns his head and sees them and then he stretches a tit in their direction and squirts out a white arc so they forget their dignity and rise up on their haunches, showing the crimson inside of their mouths.

    I sit beside him at the table. Joe Pye and Phillip are across from us, and my mother is at the end near the stove. My dad’s arm lies on the oilcloth beside mine. It looks darker because of the hair curling on it — but really, my arm is a darker tan.
    Smoked whitefish again. I position a chunk of it on the back of my tongue and wash it down untasted with a mouthful of milk. My mother can’t stand this performance. She swallows her last bite and stands up and goes out to the garden without stopping to pull her apron off — she’s trying to avoid evidence that a woman like her has raised a child like me. The porch door slams and I gag and regurgitate onto my plate, tears springing from my eyes. We’ve been eating smoked fish for a month — a man came through in a wagon and sold my mother a crate of it.
    Joe Pye looks at me with sympathy. You think that’s foul, he says. You shoulda tasted ling fish. Remember, eh, Willie? He leans back and plucks at his moustache, ferreting for crumbs.
    Ling fish?
I ask.
    Ling fish, says Joe. Yella. We et it every bloody meal on the ship. Eh, Willie? Remember ling fish? Just about caused a riot. They grabbed ahold of Isaac Barr one night and drug him down to steerage and held a flap a that stinkin’ fish up to his face. Wouldn’t open his mouth, the canny bugger. Remember, eh, Willie? Wouldn’t taste the fish. So a chap hucks a piece a hardtack at him. It clips him right on the beak and he claps his hand like this over his face and the blood’s leaking out from his fingers. And then he yells at us:
You’re a pack of goddamn savages! (Goddamn
— my mother has gone outside, but Joe Pye still swallows that word with an apologetic laugh, so it sounds like
gom savages).
    Were you there, Dad? I ask. When he called them gom savages? Phillip gives me a sharp kick under the table.
    I don’t rightly recall, my dad says. He ignores the
gom.
He sits there in his overalls drinking milky tea. His voice sounds rusty, as though those words have been sitting inside him for a long time. He has more of England in his voice than Joe Pye has. There, now, chuck, he says. Eat your fish. His eyes are fine and kind and evasive. Things happen to him, but he never speaks of them. I feel a fierce longing to pry him open and see what’s inside.

    He did not tell me about their journey. It was Joe Pye, our arthritic little hired man, who found a chance to talk about the Barr Colony in every small event that happened around the farm. I pretended ignorance to keep Joe Pye talking. I knew the stories, but I had to work at casting my father into them. The huge, resolute act of getting on the ship, that’s something I had trouble making him do.
    He fell under a spell
was my theory for a while, the spell of Isaac Barr. Isaac Barr, wearing a shiny beaver hat and a blackfrock coat over his neat, stout, proud body. A great soft moustache and a dapper head, a head like a badger’s, planted into a soft thick neck. The way I imagine him, he had at his centre a testiness that he tried to cover with civil speech. Rather like Mr. Dalrymple. The day they