Donald's parents blamed the girl because there only other option was to blame their son.  And they blamed the times.  They were concerned, and they tried to convince each other that time was the best medicine for Donald's ills.  They talked at the kitchen table while Donald walked in the woods or mooned in his old room.

       "A significant part of the problem."  Donald's father said, "lies in the vagueness of the situation.  For us, and for Donald as well.  This:  Situation, it doesn't even have a proper name, does it?  Had they been married, we naturally would have known her far better than we do, and we'd be more familiar with their problems.  And if Donald was going through a divorce, even a messy one, he'd at least be aware of the finality of it all."

       Donald's father sipped cool coffee and shook his head.  "But this."

       Donald's mother said "I suppose.  But I don't want to know her any better."

       After Libby left him, Donald dismantled his life.  That part was unders­tandable, his parents thought:  Donald had no further business living in the South, and to keep a job Libby's father had arranged would be demeaning.

            "I just wish we knew what was on his mind," his mother said.

            Donald's mind was on Libby's tooth.  On his back, on his old bed, Donald had been looking at Libby in his mind.  One of her two front teeth was chipped, a small triangle was missing from one corner.  He had found it an endearing flaw.

            In bed once, Donald had asked her about the tooth.  They were talking in the dark.  It was a long story.  They had just started sleeping together.

***

            When she was thirteen, Libby had gotten her first period, and she was delighted.  It had seemed overdue, but her impatience was washed away in a bright new calm of composure and forgiveness.  She allowed her younger brother the use of her English bicycle while she remained indoors, walking through the downstairs rooms with great care.  When she spoke her voice was finely subdued.  On the screened porch, Libby's father hid a smile behind the sports page when Libby found fault with an editorial's logic.  This was how her first day passed, Sunday.

            Upstairs, the air was less heady.  Libby closed the door to her room and turned the Beatles on.  She sat at her vanity for a while, comparing George and Paul and anticipating the public pleasure of skipping her shower after Monday's gym.  Then Libby opened her closet door, where there hung a full-length mirror, and she commenced to dance.  She'd been teaching herself for quite some time, and in the mirror Libby felt certain she saw a brand new grace.

            But then there was a knock.  Libby's mother came in, followed by Libby's older sister and their little brother.  The mother was crying.  She sat at Libby's vanity.  After she'd turned the record player off, Libby joined her brother and sister, the three in a row on Libby's bed.

            "Uncle Ernest just called.  Pappa Pearson had a heart attack this afternoon," the mother said.  "He was already gone by the time the ambulance got there.  Ernest said he didn't suffer at all."

            Their mother told them that their father would be in to talk to them shortly, that he'd gone for a walk to compose himself.  Then she left the room.  The children were still sitting on Libby's bed, silently, when they heard the father's steps on the stairs.  When he came into Libby's room, they saw that he had a lighted cigar in his mouth; their father never smoked inside the house.  Mr. Pearson told the children that his father had died; that they'd be leaving for Vicksburg shortly, after the car had been serviced and the family had gotten a little sleep.

            Libby told Donald she hadn't been able to sleep.  It was still daylight out.  And she was thinking about having to miss school.

            The father drove through the night and they arrived in Mississippi shortly after dawn on Monday.  Mr. Pearson's sister cooked breakfast for her three, and the Pearson children as well; her oldest was fourteen and he'd been seen the summer before with his hands on Libby.  Before breakfast, Mrs. Pearson took Libby aside and warned her to keep her distance from the cousin.

            Libby nodded, but felt resentful and somehow betrayed.  The silent, self-centered pleasure she'd felt at home was being smothered under events of greater import.  She was sullen.

            And there was a strange and ugly scene after breakfast.  Libby's grand­mother had been asleep, sedated, when the Pearsons arrived; after she awoke, she spent an hour alone with Libby's father and Libby's aunt in the back room.  Meanwhile, the children ate biscuits ladled over with thick grey sausage gravy, and Libby paid careful attention to whose thighs brushed hers beneath the table.  Then the father emerged, red-eyed, reaching for a cigar.  Mr. Pearson stepped over to the shiny red table and he spoke to his children.

            "Grandma wants to see you now," he said.

            They rose and headed for the back room.  The brother led the way, and Libby's sister took up the rear, prodding Libby along.  The old farmhouse had a long shotgun hallway, and the casing around the bedroom door composed their grandmother, huge and trembling and propped on pillows, in a tableau of grief.  Libby felt a quiver of revulsion, that old familiar worsening churn the old woman raised in her.

            At eight, Libby had first notice that her grandmother's face was becoming a fish; over the intervening five years the transformation had grown more complete.

            As her brother stepped in to the room, Libby paused in the doorway, and saw that the fish was nearly perfect.  Thyroid squabbles had bulged her eyes, and she seemed to blink with her lower lids alone.  And the eyes moved under no constraint of socket, seeming set in mere chilly flesh.  A hair-net covered her pail blue and silver head, and green skin showed through the iridescent scales of her make-up.  She had no neck.  Her thick, open lips were rheumy with grief.  Her gill fluttered beneath her jowls.  She was a sunfish, a shell-cracker.

            The grandmother began to cry again, her huge breasts heaving, as Libby's brother hugged her.  The old woman drew the boy close, kissed him, moaned.  Libby still stood in the doorway.  Refusing the sharp, silent prodding of her sister, Libby slipped aside, into the back room, allowing her mother and her sister past.  The sister approached the bed and knelt.  The grandmother's face bobbed, eyeing Libby over the sister's shoulder.

            And Libby would not go forward in her turn.

            She backed away resolutely, she paled, she stammered, she almost cried under mother's furious gaze, but she would not kiss the old woman.  "Come here, child," the grandmother said, through fish lips.  Libby shook her head.  From the doorway, Libby's father advised her through clenched teeth to go for a walk, and to keep walking until she'd gotten herself under control.  The grandmother moaned anew.

***

            Libby went to the car, rummaging through it in search of hiking shoes, and she took her sister's transistor radio for good measure.  She left without speaking, heading across the yard toward the cornfields below.  She jumped a drainage ditch and walked through the long, narrow pine branch that separated the upper fields.  Libby turned the radio on, found what she wanted, and fell into a quick pace.  She crossed another field, another pine stand, and then another of each.  When Libby broke through the trees, she saw something she didn't recognize at first; a barn green and blurry and soft, in the center of the clearing.  Kudzu had covered it.  Libby wondered for a moment why she'd never noticed it before; she tried to picture the barn before the vine captured it.

            Libby walked to the eastern face, the side of the old barn closest to the edge of the pinebreak, the side that stood in shade most of the day.  The vines seemed thinnest there.  Where the barn's doors and windows were grown over, the vine dipped bonelessly.  Libby poked through, tearing tendrils away and dropping them at her feet, where they rooted as the music played.  She felt a light sweat rise as she worked.  The sun bore down on her, and soon she had torn a hole she could crawl through.

            Inside, it was a mere barn.  The kudzu grew up and over, but not into the cool sunless shade of the abandoned barn.  But instead of the grey particulated light of a working barn, Libby found a living glow streaming down from a rotten and fallen spot in the roof high above the moist earthen floor; the hole was covered by vine and light filtered green through the odd fontanel.

            Libby stood up inside.  An old loft was empty, and mud daubers had crusted the joists and windstruts.  Libby found a five-gallon bucket and a hoe hanging from a nail.  She turned the radio up louder, but the shrouds of leaved damped the sound.  The announcer broke in with the weather and the time; at home, Libby thought, she would already have emerged proudly unbathed from gym.

            A slow song came on and Libby danced with the hoe, easily, gracefully across the breathing floor.  She laid her cheek against the smooth, bulging head of the hoe handle, where the shaft had gone black under years of her grand­father's grip.  Libby started to gain speed, dipping and spinning with the hoe in a widening spiral, her hiking shoes making small crunching sounds in the earth.  As the song ended, Libby allowed the hoe to bow in chivalric gratitude, and its blade brushed against a fallen, forgotten croker sack, nestled in the corner.

            The sack moved.  Burlap lumps shifted and a king snake emerged.  She screamed, or at least thought to, and then Libby raised the hoe high into the green light and brought the blade down hard, chopping just as she's seen her grandfather chop, and the blade struck the spot the snake had just left.  It vanished into the vine.

            But the hoe had been too long in the shroud:  the handle had gone to rot.  The shaft snapped, its blade wanging up and away.  Half the handle hummed in Libby's hands as the other half rose.

***

            When Libby heard he name called, she was sitting on the bucket where the radio had been.  The radio was at her feet, silent.  She dropped the splintered hoe handle and she hurried toward the hole she'd torn in the kudzu.  In the clearing, the sun had passed over the barn.

            She heard her father call her name, an edge of fear in his voice, and she shouted back.  Libby heard her father yell in turn to someone else, and Libby moved toward the path.  The father bounded from the pinebreak, his chest heaving.  He hugged the girl and then held her away to look at her; Libby's blouse and pants were daubed with blood.

            Her tooth was chipped.

***

            The father took the rest of the family aside, out in the yard.  In the bathroom, Libby's mother wrung rust-colored water from a washrag and helped her daughter into fresh slacks.  "You don't have to do anything you don't want to," the mother said.  Libby nodded.

            Her parents walked down the hall to the back room.  The grandmother was still propped on pillows, crying slightly, cooling herself with a cardboard funeral-home fan.

            "I'm sorry grandma," Libby said.  "I just had to think."  She hugged the grand­mother, kissed both cheeks.

            The grandmother's face swam away.

            "Wow," Donald said in the dark.  The sweat on them had dried and Libby pulled the sheet up.  Donald smoked another cigarette, without speaking.  He was thinking.  After he stubbed it out, he quietly cleared his throat.  "But about your tooth, I'm not so sure I get it," he said.  "Did the hoe hit you?"

            But by then Libby was asleep.

***

            Her hand was already drawn back to knock on the door when his mother heard Donald speak aloud inside his old room.

            "And I still don't get it," was what Donald said.

            But in his voice was more resolve than the mother had heard since Donald's return, so she turned, walked down the hall, and went back downstairs, smiling.