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his father took him to town, but it had rained on the way home and all the colours had run.
    That was the dress Anna herself was baptized in. The sunlight had fallen so brightly just where Joseph stood with her by the church window that she’d begun to laugh and try to catch it.
    “Grammie,” Anna said suddenly, “what is ‘dead’?”
    Ellen’s hook went slack for a minute in the loop of a rag. I don’t know. It isn’t sound or silence. It isn’t here or there; now or then. It isn’t laughing or crying. Or sleeping or waking. It isn’t any of the things we know or like any of them.
    “I can’t tell you, child,” she said. It wasn’t day or night. It wasn’t health or sickness.
    “Is it like old?”
    No. They were wrong, it wasn’t like old. You came nearer and nearer to it, but you could never touch it. It was as strange to the old as it was to the young.
    “No, it isn’t like ‘old,’ ” she said.
    “That man in the barn,” Anna said. “Is he dead?”
    “I think so,” she said: “I think he must have died when he was very young.” The picture of him had always gone blank whenever she tried to think of him as a man grown old.
    “If he died when he was young, would it be like ‘young’ then?”
    “Yes.” Yes, she thought, with him, death would be like “young.”
    “It will be like young when my husband dies too,” Anna said.
    “Hush, child!” Ellen said. “Hush.”

CHAPTER VII
    I n the country the day is the determinant. The work, the thoughts, the feelings, to match it, follow. Some years use only a few variants of the day. That year had them all; so that it was a sort of lifetime. If all the possible kinds of day are present, then too are all the possible feelings; if not in shape, in some sort of shadow.
    They would never need to see another spring than that, to know spring thoroughly. From the first day Martha left the kitchen door open, to dry the scrubbed floor … through all the days between: the day of the rushing sound in the dark spruce mountain (that husky, susurrant night Joseph looked down at his nakedness as he stood by the bed, and felt in one instant’s edification everything there was in the feel of man and woman and of having children), the day of the wild roses on the stone wall … until the last one, when dust first dulled the ploughshare’s moist gleam. That day the sun watermarked the red-ochred shop where Martha had hung out the hams. The children, coming home from school, carried their jackets like burdens. There was no hunger for food in them today; they were satiate with the heat returning, miraculously unchanged.
    All of summer they knew: the day of the daisy-trembling in the still hypnotic air (if the day had been enough otherwise to make the concatenations of the moment a hair’s-breadth different, Anna wouldn’t have seen a sudden undulance lick the grass and felt, in essence, all the things her heart would never actually find): the day the mowing machine dribbled the shocked clover between its chattering teeth, and spongy sprouts of last year’s potatoes, thrown behind the shop, grew sickly in the unwinking heat, almost to the eaves … until theday that was full of green to the last brimming: the white-green of the poplars and the oat field and the river: the storm-green of the orchard and the spruce mountain: the black-green of the potato tops: the green-green of the garden.
    Joseph walked back to the woodlot that day and blazed a road for the fall chopping; but not quite yet was there any yellow in the umbrella ferns. When Martha dug the mess of potatoes for dinner, their skin still chafed off under her fingers and root tendrils still clung to them like quills. She parted the green crepe folds on an ear of corn; but the kernels were not quite yellow. And when the children came up the road from the Baptizing Pool, they thought for the first time of an apple. They went to the orchard. The apples
looked
like apples now, the way green apples