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scruffy excuse for a lawn they had because you could see the dirt stains on what she carried, a sheet or maybe a couple of pillowcases.
    She was crying, really crying hard so that her whole body was shaking as she walked back toward Ruth standing rigid on the landing.
    It was pathetic—this little tiny girl moving slowly along with braces on her legs and braces on her arms trying to manage just this one small pile of whites tucked under her arm that she probably shouldn’t have had in the first place. I felt bad for her.
    And finally, so did Ruth I guess.
    Because she stepped down off the landing and took the stuff away from her and hesitated, watching her a moment as she sobbed and shook and stared down into the dirt. And then slowly you could see the tension go out of her as she raised her hand and rested it lightly, tentatively at first on Susan’s shoulder, then turned and walked back to the house.
    And at the very last moment just as they reached the top of the stairs Ruth looked in my direction so that I had to throw myself back fast and hard against the garage.
    But all the same I’d swear to what I saw before that.
    It’s become a little important to me, actually, in retrospect. I try to figure it out.
     
    Ruth’s face looked very tired. Like the burst of anger was so strong it had drained her. Or maybe what I was seeing was just a little piece of something—something bigger—something that had been going on unnoticed by me for quite a while now and this was just like a kind of crescendo on a long-playing record.
    But the other thing I saw was what strikes me to this day, what puzzles me.
    Even at the time it made me wonder.
    Just before I threw myself back, as Ruth turned looking skinny and tired with her hand on Susan’s shoulder. In just that instant as she turned.
    I’d swear that she was crying too.
     
    And my question is, for whom?

Chapter Ten

    The next thing was the tent worms.
    It seemed to happen practically overnight. One day the trees were clean and normal and the next day they were hung with these heavy white sacks of webbing. In the bottom of the sacks you could see something vaguely dark and unhealthy-looking and if you looked closely enough you could see them moving.
    “We’ll burn ’em out,” said Ruth.
    We were standing in her yard near the birch tree, Woofer, Donny and Willie, Meg and I, and Ruth, who had on her old blue housedress with the deep pockets. It was ten o’clock in the morning and Meg had just finished her chores. There was a little smudge of dirt beneath her left eye.
    “You boys gather up some sticks,” she said. “Long ones, thick. And be sure to cut them green so they won’t burn. Meg, get the rag bag out of the basement.”
    She stood squinting into the morning sunlight, surveying the damage. Virtually half the trees in their yard including the birch were already strung with sacks, some just the size of baseballs but others wide and deep as a shopping bag. The woods was full of them.
    “Little bastards. They’ll strip these trees in no time.”
    Meg went into the house and the rest of us headed for the woods to find some sticks. Donny had his hatchet so we cut some saplings and stripped them and cut them roughly in half. It didn’t take long.
    When we came back Ruth and Meg were in the garage soaking the rags in kerosene. We wrapped them over the saplings and Ruth tied them off with clothesline and then we soaked them again.
    She handed one to each of us.
    “I’ll show you how it goes,” she said. “Then you can do it by yourselves. Just don’t set the goddamn woods on fire.”
    It felt incredibly adult.
    Ruth trusting us ith fire, with torches.
    My mother never would have.
    We followed her into the yard looking, I guess, like a bunch of peasants heading out after Frankenstein’s monster, our unlit torches aloft. But we didn’t act so adult—we acted like we were going to a party—all of us silly and excited except Meg, who was taking it very