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building where the business was run, Tom asked, “What’s going on? Is she alive?”
    “Barely,” the marshal said.
    Once inside the foreman’s office, which was nothing more than a glorified shack, the marshal told him what had happened. He described the bedroom scene as Corrine had found it.
    Tom cried out in anger, pounding his right fist in his left palm. The marshal drove him over to the hospital in his patrol car, and Tom fought back tears the whole way. How did his well-ordered life and family fall into such a tragedy? He wondered what they’d done to bring on such a curse as he prayed for his wife.
    The Pickleyville hospital room was humid, almost water-damp. When Tom saw his wife, she was not dead but narrowly hanging on to life. Her face was drawn to one side as if stricken by a palsy. Sara was in a semi-coma, but she wasn’t placid or still. Instead, she was restless, appearing as though she was being assaulted in her sleep, often wide-eyed but focusing on nothing, constantly kicking off her sheets. She had to be restrained with leather straps at the wrists and feet.
    She was blinded by the darkness of her own mind, a war taking place in her soul that manifested itself in the current struggles. And the doctor had little conclusive information to tell the family, a prognosis as mysterious as the attack.
    Tom sat at her bedside for a few moments before the nurses made him leave. In the hallway outside of the ward, he offered his simple prayers, the same petitions of men through all time, the prayers of anyone traveling a dark wood, those who faced senseless damage and gratuitous evil. He tried to make sense of his broken world but the heavens were brass, and nothing came back from his petitions but the echo of his own voice.
    Sara, thirty-six years old, was a pretty woman. She was slim and strong with long auburn hair, and not one white strand in it. Now her hair was matted and stringy, her face swollen almost twice its normal size.
    The new preacher at Little Zion Methodist arrived at the hospital. Reverend Charlie Poole stood in the hallway, put his hand on Tom’s shoulder and hung his head, saying few words.
    Tom’s cousin’s wife, Martina, picked up Wesley from school. The boy did not know what happened other than his mother was in the hospital and that he could not go back home.
    James Luke had been off work on Monday from his job at the highway department, but nobody could find him, and Nelda was at the bank in Pickleyville where she worked as a teller. She’d heard the news within a half an hour of Sara’s admission to the hospital ER. Her boss allowed her to leave work early, and she went directly to the hospital.
    During the time Sara suffered at the Ninth Ward Hospital, Wesley worked with a handsaw and hammer, building a birdhouse out of scrap lumber in Martina and Sid Hardin’s backyard. He was always building something with wood, drawing sketches of things around the farm and forest, oftentimes helping his father with projects on the home place. He’d won a blue ribbon at the parish fair in Ruthberry for an oil painting of their barn. Now he sat beneath a Chinaberry tree and cut boards while holding them steady on the wooden table. After he was done sawing, he concentrated on keeping the boards secure while nailing together the sides of the little birdhouse with a rusty claw hammer. Boyhood was its own balm, its own natural protection against the blows and hardness of the surrounding adult world. When he looked at the finished birdhouse, he couldn’t wait to show his mother and father.
     
    At the hospital in Pickleyville, Tom longed for his wife’s healing. The only consolation to her injuries was that she was still alive and breathing on her own, which offered him some hope. She lay there broken, her body crippled by the attack. Tom sat outside the ward in the hallway. The smell of ammonia was in the air. Though he appreciated Nelda and the preacher’s presence, he could find little