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sweat that was already seeping from under the alpine pack Hugh carried high on his shoulders, of course I felt that his black sylvan whisper and all this hot rich ceramic desolation augured well for this our first photographic expedition together. And in sympathy if not complete understanding, my own whisper became as deep and eager as Hugh’s.
    “Perfect,” I said, “let’s hunt her down.”
    For a moment his fingers squeezed my arm in a fierce rippling peristaltic motion, and then his hand, that serpent’s head, drifted down to one of the cameras and rested. Together we stared at the field, I with one hand in a convenient pocket, Hugh with his curly black hair uncombed as usual and the long black sailor pants low on his hips. The mattock, wielded by our quarry in a nearby field, continued to rise and fall, to flash in that hot clear air, to ping on an occasional stone. The crumbling cottage, the crumbling stone lean-to, the haystack shrunken and propped in position with pieces of fossilized wood, the small well without visible rope or chain or bucket—at a glance the desolation of the farm was obvious, and already I knew that so much desolation aroused in Hugh at least a shade of my own crisp appreciation. It was all complete, down to the usual upright skeleton of a dog affixed to the tall stake driven through the center of the haystack. And shading my eyes with one dry hand and nudging Hugh, gesturing toward the white bones strung intact to the pole, I could not helpsmiling at this poignant evidence of their archaic ways, could not help thinking that the bones of the dead dog might serve some greater purpose than the bones of the child Fiona had discovered that distant day in the church.
    And nodding toward the field that looked like fired putty: “The haystack would make a pretty good picture. Don’t you think?”
    He waited. “Hold on now,” he whispered. “When she’s warmed up a little, I’ll wave.”
    Already I was beginning to see the afternoon through the eye of one of Hugh’s cameras. Sitting on a naturally sculpted boulder in the bend of our dirt road, smoking and clasping my knee, and with a certain mild intensity watching Catherine’s one-armed husband cross the field and in long cheerful strides approach the stooping figure, suddenly I began to smile at that total incongruity which must lie, I thought, at the center of what Hugh had several times referred to as his field trips into the old world of sex. At best a photograph could result in small satisfaction, I thought. Yet now even this small satisfaction was beginning to take shape in my mind, and for Hugh’s sake I welcomed it, breathed deeply of the scent of pepper on the hot air, made fish lips for myself and through them expelled a few thoughtful puffs of smoke, considered the artfulness my one-armed friend might yet display.
    Certainly Hugh was artful even now. Watching them from my place of comfort on the large hot boulder, I could see that he was talking, though he could no more speak
croak peonie
than I could, was demonstrating his cameras and displaying the contents of his alpine sack, which bynow he had unslung from the enormous bony construction of his shoulders. Already the mattock lay abandoned in the deep brown furrow, already the tall man and short girl were standing face to face, obviously Hugh was trying to use his pinned-up flipper to fence his way through the darkness and sullenness of her suspicion. In the distance and in the shade of my hand they faced each other, and already I knew that today the lone girl would farm no more.
    Hugh’s head was nodding. Once he squatted and reached his single all-purpose hand into the furrow and then extended that dark hand palm up to the girl. What lay cupped in the palm of his unquenchable hand? Was he admiring the soil? Was he admiring some scrap of root, some fibrous hooflike bulb that the girl had been attempting to cultivate with patience and the dull hand-crafted mattock? To myself