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Kristina (he guessed she was the one who made the sound) could have lived through such a thing.
    But then, to his even deeper horror, the women went back to talking. One of them said in English, “She's starting to push now. Maybe it won't be long.”
    “First ones take forever,” another said. And thenadded, “Easy to make, hard to take,” and everybody laughed and they started talking again, but as though a change had happened they did not speak only in Norwegian but mixed the talk with English.
    The boy could not believe they were joking about that sound. He could not believe anybody would joke about the sound he heard coming out of that upstairs bedroom and he turned and started for the door, thinking he would rather be outside, walking, when the sound came again. Louder.
    “They're close together,” one woman said. “She's pushing. Very soon …”
    “Very soon,” another said, and they all nodded as though the sound, which cut the boy to the center, meant nothing. He ran from the kitchen out into the yard by the gate and sat there petting the dog, trying not to hear what came from the house.

He did not see his grandmother all day and when it came time for milking, two of the other women came out with the buckets and he went to the barn to help. They were both nice to him, but they carried their own stools and he spent most of the time chasing the cats from the cows' backs. On one of his runs after a cat, he got to the back door of the barn and came face to face with a team of workhorses.
    He had not seen them the day before, perhaps because they'd been back in the trees in the pasture. He stood transfixed, in awe of their size. He had seen the other teams bringing the women, but he'd beenwell off to the side of the yard. Now he was almost directly beneath them and it was like looking up at giants.
    He did not feel afraid. Something about them seemed gentle, peaceful, and he stood studying them, looking at their feet, which were a foot across, and their shoulders and the muscles in their sides …
    “She has good horses, Kristina,” one of the women said, standing next to him with a bucket of milk she had just filled. She was thin and had a little gray in her hair and small lines at the sides of her eyes from smiling. All the women seemed to have the lines from smiling. “Always the Jorgensons have had good horses. Good men and good horses.” She turned and said, “Come, the milking is done and we have to turn the cows out and get back to the house,” and walked to the other end of the barn while the other woman released the cows. The cows backed out of their stanchions and made their way carefully back to the pasture.
    It was evening and the boy was very tired—not so long ago he had been young enough to take afternoon naps. But it was still light, the sun well up.
    Maybe, he thought, he could stay out all night. Maybe he could sleep in the barn. Cowboys did it—in one of the Roy Rogers movies, he'd seen that cowboys slept in the barn. They ate from metal plates filled with brown beans and slept in the barn with their horses, and their hats over their faces, and their saddle for a pillow. He could try that—if he had a saddle and a hat to put over his face.
    The house didn't seem to be a place for him, but only meant for women. He'd never thought of it that way, about there being places for men or boys and women or girls. There had always been just his mother and sometimes his aunt Evelyn and of course his grandmother and him. Just all one thing.
    But if those women could sit and make jokes about the sound that came from the upstairs bedroom he wasn't sure he was supposed to be there. He walked with the dog toward the house, but slowly.
    The gray-haired woman turned and saw him stopping and seemed to know what he was thinking. “Come along. We have to eat supper and get some sleep to do chores tomorrow. Don't worry, Kristina isresting. She needs all the rest she can get because she has many hours of