In the Old Country in 1913, in my tenth year, I saw my mother's ghost three times.

  When Mother died, we were packed off to our grandmother's farm half a day's journey away on the back roads of Lietuva. We would have gone to our aunt's house but the midwife had told her to rest and stay in bed, or she might lose this baby like the other.

  My first glimpse of Grandmother from the cart was of a brown shadow that looked like a horse against an empty horizon. I rubbed my eyes. What I thought was the head of the horse turned out to be an ax she was lifting over a tree stump. When she saw our cart drive up, she paused, raised her arms, let the ax bite one more time.

  The cart creaked to a stop in front of her leaning, one-story farmhouse, and the driver handed down my brother and me. I smoothed my skirt. Vytas and I stood in the rutted, dusty road and watched her prop the ax against the tree stump and trudge past a well with a bucket swaying loosely at the top. We tramped over the brown weeds and pebbles toward the farmhouse. We walked past the ax, its handle against the tree stump. I saw a yellow and scarlet chicken head no bigger than my fist lying on that stump, the body on the ground still twitching and stretching. I grasped Vytas' hand to make sure he was not frightened. I had the courage because Vytas was younger and depended on me.

  "With death taking so much, you have to hold on to what you can." Grandmother's voice was matter-of-fact.

  My hand closed more tightly around my brother's.

  She swatted her hands on her stained apron to wipe them and peered down at us, drawing her brambly eyebrows together. She had wide hips and shoulders and two heavy braids of hair, still skillet-black, that she could whip into lariats if she wanted to. "Well, my little peeps, poor babies, poor orphans." She patted Vytas' head. "Tonight we'll eat chicken."

  Children, I thought she said, and flinched.

  "And you, Ruta, be strong," she said, "be strong." She stared at me with her storm-dark eyes and gripped my shoulders--hard--as if she could press strength into me. I felt as if I were falling into the well.

  The door clicked shut and we were inside her house. I was accustomed to snowy-white tablecloths, embroidered pillows, lace curtains. This was an unpainted room that smelled of boiling potatoes and vinegar. Through the window I could see the raw sun setting, blood-red. "Come here," she commanded, crooking one long finger and holding up a lantern, even though there was still light. "You've grown, you're not babies anymore." She hugged Vytas, who was only four (I was almost eleven), and then me.

  "You have my son's eyes," she said to me approvingly. The sleeves of her gray blouse were rolled up. She had large hands and wrists and dark hair on her forearms. She picked up my right hand around which I had tied the green silk kerchief given me by my departed angel mother. "And her small lady-hands." She snorted, turned away, and tossed a piece of wood into the belly of the iron stove. "I'll go get the chicken." A cauldron of soup simmered on top, the steam writhing into the air.

  "You must eat," she said. "Don't pine for your mother. It's late." She set a place for the hired boy, a slouching adolescent with slow wits and a large, mobile jaw thrust forward. "This one has no harm in him," she announced to us. "He's left alone in the world." Algirdas ate heartily and then went outside.

  That evening after supper (I didn't eat any chicken), we heard a buggy in the driveway. Grandmother pulled aside the yellowish muslin that served as a window curtain. "Viper!" she said under her breath.

  There was a knock on the door and a man strutted in, paunch first, then pale pudding-face, the wily eyes sunk deep in tunnels of flesh, the jaw fringed with a thin gray-brown beard. He removed his homburg. His hair tonic had the sweet effervescence of apples on the edge of rotting. He surveyed the room familiarly and said, "Good evening to you, Madam." He fixed his eyes on Vytas and me as if he knew and owned us. "You have little guests, I see."

  "My son's children," she said, rigid, only her eyes moving.

  "Charming." He sniffed and wrinkled his nose. "Charming. It's been the sorrow of my life that I never fathered children."

  "You can't do it here. What do you want?"

  "To be friendly." His voice was smooth, theatrically offended. "Our farms are side by side. We should be friends."

  "Fine, we're friends. What do you want?"

  "You are curt, Madam, not as cordial as you were wont to be."

  "I am not cordial to people who try to steal my farm."

  "Ts, ts, ts. What's this about 'steal'? Once again, I say that, rather than dealing with the bank, you should deal directly with me. I want to help you." His pale lips stretched in a smile over his teeth. "Let me take the loan over from you, eh? And I'll even present you with ten rubles now. You won't get this good a deal from the bank, just the grief of being thrown out in September." He rose on his toes in his polished, lace-up shoes. "Your late husband--may he rest in peace--would have agreed in a minute."

  "A coward, a foolish man."

  "It's not for me to judge," he said benignly. Tilting his head to one side, he contemplated her and spoke in creamy tones. "Such small white hands you have. Those of a lady. You should live in town."

  Why did he say her hands were ladylike? Her hands were in back of her, and she had made one into a fist, the knuckles prominent and red. "Thank you for instructing me in mannerly living, and I beg you to leave so I can study this lesson."

  He reminded her that a year ago he had lent her money for her payments to the bank because she was a good neighbor, but now he wanted her to repay his loan. He said he needed it for new equipment; he said some pale woman was walking the perimeter of the land, and he did not want the land sold to her. Nobody else had made Grandmother an offer, so this must have mystified her. He would buy the land from the bank in autumn so she might as well sell it to him now, and he would give her a little extra for the plow and other implements, the chickens, and two horses.

  "Why do you want both horses?" she asked.

  He cleared his throat, pushed closer, again rising on his toes. "I'll stake you to a new life. I'll give you a hundred rubles if you leave next week."

  She closed her fist tighter. "Why so much?"

  His large mouth with its whitish lips fell slack and uncertain for a moment. "There was a girl a long time ago. She lived on this very farm and rode a horse like your Gintaras." His fingers skittered over his forehead.

  Grandmother crossed her arms over her chest. "I never saw you in love with anybody."

  "She died. Your second husband bought the land when I was in Vilnius, in the sanatorium with tuberculosis. Never again will I let the land slip from my fingers."

  She looked at him sideways and hissed.

  For some reason he wanted her to believe and spoke louder. "She was real. This is true." He looked toward the window off into the dark. "She's dead."

  "Liar. It never happened."

  His shriveled eyes glittered, and he turned away. He dabbed at his eyes.

  Maybe she regretted her savagery. "And where am I to live?"

  He rose on his toes. "Madam, you are too old--it pains me to say this--too old to be roistering around the countryside."

  "It's the well you want. Yours is beginning to dry up."

  His white face reddened. "That's right. I must have the land!"

  "Pfft."

  "You owe me money!" A vein throbbed in his temple, a fat purple spider.

  "When my barley comes in, you'll get it."

  "I want it now. I'm taking a chicken for the interest you owe me." He pulled on his homburg. "You'll give me apoplexy."

  She flourished her fingers next to the lantern, and the fingertips glowed like candles.

  "Some say I have the power of the old ways." She nodded significantly. "My two husbands died."

  "Oh, yes." He laughed cruelly. "And your son."

  "Get out of here!" She picked up a broom and would have thrashed him if he had not been quick enough to retreat.

  Vytas and I had watched wide-eyed. I started to breathe again, for I had not been breathing the whole time the man was there.

  She paced back and forth across the floor of narrow pineboard, muttering. Vytas and I drew close to each other on the bench. I thought at the time that grown-ups had power. But Mother had died. Maybe only some had power.

  Grandmother twisted her apron. "What am I to do? The viper means to have everything. Nothing will be left for these orphans." Her eyes took us in fiercely, stabbed at us. "I don't like to give in to this devil."

  She raised her fist to the door." He thinks he can get something without working." I did not know at the time that she had inherited the farm from her dead husband. And of course, Grandmother was a worker, and of course, love is work too. "He thinks there's something valuable in the ground, but the only valuable thing is work. There is nothing valuable inside--only what is outside--work. Not gold but how gold works, not love but how love works." I did not understand what she meant.

  She turned to us, her fury mostly spent. "Ruta, your name doesn't please me," she said. "I would have named you something soft and dainty--Rose, Lily--not a green herb." Then she banged around the shelves until she found a pot and boiled some tea with the herb. It was mild, and slightly bitter. Her hands smelled like a sour dishtowel; my mother had scented her hands with lotion.

  She put us to bed, and through the night I heard her wooden clogs clatter along the floor, I heard her sighs.

~

  My mother never liked her mother-in-law. "She doesn't go to church," my mother had whispered to me, struggling to raise her blond head from the pillow with its embroidered tulips and forget-me-nots. She lit candles to the little wooden statues on the dresser: St. Mary, St. Joseph, St. Anne. My angel mother died.

  I dreamed about her at night. There was a tall polished door, partly open, and a radiance inside a rushing wind. When I tilted my head, I glimpsed my mother on the other side. She held her hand in front of her, palm forward, as if to keep me away. She whispered softly but I could nevertheless hear, Don't follow me.

  In the cot beside me, Vytas let out a whimper. He rolled close and curled into the crook of my arm. He finally fell asleep.

~

  Grandmother blew her nose by clamping two fingers to the bridge and snorting out a loop of mucus. I had been raised in a town of five hundred and I had not lived on a farm before. "I'll show you how to work," she said. "You'll get nice and brown from the sun."

  In the distance I could see Algirdas leading Daisy in front of some kind of threshing machine. Daisy was a draft horse, large and docile. There was only one other horse, Gintaras, stalled in the same barn. Gintaras had delicate spindles of legs rising out of his earth-black fetlocks and curving to smooth flanks and a tight yellow drum of ribs; he was lovely, the color of amber and honey. I had whispered my secrets into his ear, told him I missed my angel mother.

  Grandmother had said Gintaras was unremarkable. Worse than unremarkable." A useless, impractical gift. A town horse, not a farm animal, the horse of a gentleman or highborn lady. He doesn't earn his keep, he won't work with other animals. What good is he if he's just pretty?"

  As we dug up potatoes and cut green onions and dillweed for supper, Vytas kept asking where was Mother, when would she take us back home. I was tired of his whining and shrieked, "She's dead, you're alive, forget her."

  He started to whimper and ran to Grandmother's arms. I stood up and rubbed my eyes.

  "You must be strong, Ruta," Grandmother said, embracing Vytas.

  "It's the onions. They make my eyes water."

  "If you stop crying, I'll hug you."

  "I don't want a hug. What I want is to be gone. I wish I had a horse to ride away. I wish I were a horse." I looked around the parched ground, the dusty, brown-leaved trees, the warped wood of the house. "I want to be a robin," I said, pouting, "a cloud, a wisp of a cloud." I expected Grandmother to counter with a reply of a dog or a cat.

  She hunkered down on the ground and performed an ungainly hop. "I'd like to be a toad, croaking and bathing in mucky scum-water, skin slick as slime. Or a pig snuffling around in slops." This absurd mountain of a woman crouched and leaped again. I let out a squeal of laughter. I wiped my eyes, squatted, and dug potatoes.

  She never stopped working. She boiled dirty linen on the stove, she weeded the garden, she fried bacon, she saved the fat to make soap, she saved the little lumps of soap for dirty linen. She was up in the morning before I woke and at night after I went to sleep; she worked, I think, to prove she was alive.

  Once she sat in an armchair, dressed in black as usual, not black of mourning, but of rich, damp earth. Unmoving for a moment, she gazed at the setting sun. Rose and gold light caught on her face, and I saw her as she must have been years ago, eyes half-shut in a dream of youth, light and bewitching. Not the sober, sly woman, but mysterious and gay before there was a need for cunning.

~

  I watched the pond shrink and dry around the edges. Lietuva was in the middle of a drought. The barley would die without rain. I finished pulling weeds and stood up; Grandmother knelt on the ground and sifted a handful of the dry dirt through her long, rough fingers. Her breath blew it away, leaving not the faintest trace of powder. "We're always changing. All of us, even you."

  I watched my hand curl into a fist involuntarily. I shook it out. I shaded my eyes against the brightness of the sun. "Look, look, my mother!"

  "Rub your eyes and the sight will vanish," Grandmother said. "That's your imagination."

  I narrowed my eyes and realized it was the hired boy leading the horse on the horizon.

  I went back to feeding the chickens, listless scrawny things. I did not mind scattering kernels, and I watched the scrawniest one feed last, but I did not eat chicken that summer. "You must eat for strength," Grandmother said. "Don't pine for the dead. Don't get attached to the chickens."

  I was not attached to them--but I would not eat chicken.

  I asked Grandmother, "What shall I do? I'm bored."

  "Go catch frogs," she would say. "I hear that some people cook their legs and eat them."

  That summer it seemed to me that everything was eating, eating, eating.

  I said I didn't like frogs.

  "Then catch rabbits."

~

  The man, Tomas, came again. He banged on the door and shouted, "I know you're in there. Your hired-boy told me."

  "That half-wit!" Plucking at her apron, Grandmother stepped out of the pantry, where she had been hiding, and pushed us toward a bench against the wall. She put on a brave smile, threw her shoulders back, and smoothed her black hair. "Watch how a woman handles this." I pressed myself into the wall as if to become invisible.

  He banged on the door again.

  She opened the door shakily. "I was chopping onions and didn't hear you."

  "Of course, your house is so big." His gaze traveled around the whole of the one room. "I saw that pale woman again, walking the boundary between our lands. Are you selling your land to her?"

  "I'm not selling to anybody. You have no right to badger a poor widow. I'll go to the authorities."

  He barked a laugh. "Let me accompany you."

  "I'll have your money next week," she said uneasily. "I plan to sell some...some jewelry from my mother, amber brooches and earrings." Her fingers went to her naked earlobes.

  "Let me see this jewelry. I can give you a good price."

  "It's not here." Her voice rose thinly as if she just remembered. "It's in town."

  "Pah," he said. "You expect me to believe such nonsense!" He gave a laugh that was soft and moist. Malice shone in his small eyes. "You don't have the money. You can't pay back the loan. What do you say to a race? A horse race between my stable boy on Queenie and your boy on Gintaras? Next Saturday, out on the mill road?" He stood there in his lordly manner waiting for her answer.

  "I...I...don't know." She slumped down to the bench beside Vytas and me.

  "My offer is too generous, but I like your roan. That's your only risk. The farm is virtually mine. You'll be out by autumn. I'll make a present of one hundred rubles if you're out by next month."

  Her hand reached for mine. "If I lose?"

  "The farm is mine, the roan is mine." His fingers stretched out. "Everything!"

  She squeezed my hand so hard that it hurt. "The roan was my son's bequest to me."

  "A pretty piece of horseflesh."

  "His wife told me he wanted me to have it. He insisted. He wasn't delirious then. "She let go of my hand and sighed. "I accept."

  She paced the floor that night after we were in bed and muttered, "Perhaps I'll win the race. Perhaps if I pray...perhaps if I get a charm...." I knew that my angel mother when she was ill caught her breath in loud, painful snatches, but this was harsher. Grandmother beat on her breast with her fists. "Delusions, delusions. Happiness is a lie."

  I curled up on my bed. I wept with my grandmother.

  The next morning Grandmother said, "I want you to learn. "She flicked her black braids back. In the dry heat we climbed onto Gintaras and, my hands clasped around Grandmother's waist, we rode into the forest, where the noonday sun stabbed through the shriveled leaves to a low hut where a gypsy woman lived. At least it was reputed she was a gypsy, but gypsies were rovers and this old woman seemed rooted into the ground. She was old, older than Grandmother. She had gold hoops in her earlobes, which were large, dragging, flapping almost, and I promised myself never to let my ears be pierced lest I come to this.

  Grandmother explained she wanted to win a race and asked if she could buy a curse on her opponent.

  I thought the old gypsy was dozing on her stool, she was so quiet. Grandmother stood respectfully, her hands laced in front. The gypsy rose slowly, picked up the stool, and carried it to a tall cupboard. She motioned to my grandmother, who held her hand in support as she climbed on the stool. She pulled down a glass jar from the top shelf and, unscrewing it, put it to her nose and sniffed. It gave off a damp and earthy mustiness I could smell from where I stood across the room. "Hmm. Yes, this will do." She droned a song with words I did not understand in a voice as deep as a well. She offered it to Grandmother.

  Grandmother sighed in disappointment and suspicion. "I shouldn't have bothered to come here. You couldn't bring my first husband back to me. You couldn't help me when my son was dying. You can't even help yourself. If this is powerful, why are you so poor?"

  The gypsy stretched out her hand and showed that her little finger was missing. It was just a stump the length of one joint. "I have no prophecy into my own future, no magic over my own life." She hobbled to a curtained nook, and I heard the clink of pots and glass. The curtain fluttered and she emerged with a small vial in her hands. "But I have skill. To strengthen the power of the curse, give this to your roan one hour before the race. It will make him frisky."

  Grandmother leaned forward eagerly. "Will this work? I'll pay you well."

  "Good," the gypsy said, nodding. For the first time the gypsy took notice of me and I shivered. "You have a wild mind," she said. "Like me."

  "I do not," I said, but silently.

  "The power settled on me," she said. "Sometimes it comes, sometimes it goes. Would you want it?"

  I backed away and almost tripped over the stool. I thrust my hands in my pockets and crumpled my mother's green silk kerchief.

  She laughed. "You will."

  My grandmother placed a small, shining silver coin in the gypsy's cupped, claw-like hand, and then another. The gypsy's countenance opened like summer. "By the way, a man was here, a man with a white suet face." The gypsy was dark as a nut. "He wanted to win a horserace, but he didn't pay me. I told him to put a burr under the blanket. He said he knew that already and left." She cackled.

  For the whole week the hired boy Algirdas practiced riding Gintaras on the mill road. Grandmother had promised him a new suit of clothes if he won. I sat on the ground outside the shadow of the haunted mill, watching him. He hugged Gintaras's neck and braced himself with his knees tight and bent, slapping him on his haunch. Once, when we were leaving, we saw Tomas's boy ride up on Queenie; he was practicing too.

  Twenty people assembled on that wilting day by the dry creek bed. The sun lay behind waxy clouds, giving off a milky light. The leaves hung limp and flat in the unbreathing air.

  Gintaras snorted, pawed the ground, and strained forward. He was born for this race. His honey and amber coat glistened over muscles rippling with life.

  Queenie, a beautiful mare of palest smoke-gray with a dappling of lacy spots across her sides and back, was attended by Tomas's hired boy. She was quiet. Tomas brusquely waved the boy away and took off the blanket, shook it out, patted Queenie elaborately, and replaced the blanket.

  The course began at the wooden bridge, followed the dry creek bed past the haunted windmill, and ended at the lightning-riven oak tree. The large, metallic voice of the parish priest boomed, "Mark, set." His raised arm thrust downward. "Go!" Both horses bounded forward, their legs merely blurs in dust clouds. They bolted on the path. Amber and smoke. They were neck to neck in the middle as they ripped past the old windmill.

  I stood near the end of the course, between the windmill and the oak tree. I jumped up and down, I waved my arms high in the air for Gintaras. In the last few heartbeats of the race, it was Queenie who edged forward. By a nose.

  Queenie won.

  We would lose Gintaras. I wanted to dissolve into the ground, but there was a tight, zinging wire holding me in.

  Grandmother was applauding with stony joy on her face. Her actions bewildered me. She hiked up her skirt and hurried to be the first one to congratulate Tomas's rider. "Shake hands with me and give me luck next time."

  The boy hopped down to accept her good wishes. She extended her hand, stumbled, and leaned against the ribcage of the horse. She slid to the brown grass while clutching at the blanket that had been on Queenie. "What's this?" She spied a burr on the ground and brandished it in the air triumphantly. "For shame!"

  The boy was confused and red-faced. "I don't understand. I didn't--"

  Tomas pushed through a clump of people. "She threw it there!"

  "No, master, I saw it fall from the horse's blanket." The boy clapped his hand over his mouth when he realized what he had revealed. Voices were raised in a buzz.

  Tomas's eyes blazed with fury, but he pretended to be innocent. "A rematch, I want a rematch."

  The judge, a priest, was no friend to my irreligious grandmother, but he had been snubbed by Tomas too and said, "Tomas, you forfeit the race."

  We rejoiced that day--even little Vytas was permitted a thimble of brandy--and slept peacefully that night.

  The next morning, as I fed the chickens, I heard my grandmother wail, "It's never over, never over, no."

  Letting my pail fall, I ran into the barn, where eerie diagonals of light sliced through the shaded air. There were flecks of froth around Gintaras's mouth, bubbles of blood, and blood in the droppings.

  "He ran too hard," I said. "Poor horsey." I embraced the creature's neck.

  Grandmother stomped out of the barn and knelt, bending down, so her face was only inches from the soil. "He was here last night. That viper. He poisoned Gintaras. Look at his footprints."

  I studied the ground. Gray powdery dust, pebbles, yellow weeds. I could see nothing. But adults, I knew, were able to see more than children.

  This time we walked to the deep-rooted forest. "I might need your help carrying things," she said. The air, not moving, clung to us like gauze. The shrubs in the forest had closed their eyes, begging for rain. The gypsy stood outside, leaning against the door frame and fanning herself with a brown leaf. "I've been waiting for you."

  Grandmother explained she wanted medicine for a poisoned horse, an antidote.

  The gypsy shook her head gravely. "An act, once done, is difficult to undo." She shuffled into her hut. "We can, nevertheless, try." She went into the curtained nook and, after some minutes, emerged with two bottles. "This brown bottle is medicine for the horse. I don't know if it will work. I can't give a guarantee." Her face looked helpless and sorry. She raised the second bottle, a slender flask filled with a pearly liquid that captured the light like living silk, shifting and swirling and going under. "This is medicine for you. You seem distracted."

  The gypsy put the two bottles on the table, reached inside a drawer, and brought out a coil of rope. She whispered in Grandmother's ear.

  "That would be like murder." Grandmother jerked away. "No, no, I can't."

  The gypsy raised her eyebrows indifferently. "Well, then."

  The gypsy's indifference calmed my grandmother. They looked at each other profoundly, my grandmother drinking in the face of the gypsy.

  I had not thought my grandmother was sick, but she accepted both the bottle for the horse and the medicine for herself and paid the gypsy. I wondered if she had my angel mother's sickness, if she would become feverish and die.

  She stayed with Gintaras during the day, stroking his head, murmuring to him, and through the night too.

  In the morning Gintaras seemed weaker, almost unable to stand, almost ready to collapse into death.

  She sent the hired boy to Tomas with a note that Gintaras had been ill but was recovering nicely, and could she borrow a blanket.

  She nursed and pampered Gintaras, singing a lullaby, petting him, offering him morsels of apple, cubes of sugar, crumbs of rich white bread. Gintaras looked sorrowfully at the offerings, blinked, and pulled his head away; he would not eat.

  The hired boy brought the blanket from Tomas along with a note that wished the horse a speedy recovery.

  "Liar." She snorted.

  She sent the boy into town and told him to sleep at a friend's house if it got late and began to storm, for the sky was darkening. She brought out the long coil of thick, white rope and told me to rub it with soot from the lamp chimney. She went into the barn.

  The clouds trailed shreds across the moon. There would be a storm; I could smell the tang in the air.

  My soul was restless and knocking inside my heart. That night I dreamed about my angel mother, who explained she was leaving, and I must not try to go with her. She rose from her bed, floated through the doorway, and gave one pained glance back at me. I woke in a sweat. I pulled my mother's green silk kerchief from under my pillow. Terror was a hot stone on my heart. The room swam around me in blue streaks of lightning. Familiar then unfamiliar. Familiar then unfamiliar. My arms and legs tingled. I wanted Grandmother to rub them, to tell me I was not dying.

  I tiptoed to Grandmother's bed. She was gone. The covers had been turned back, but there was no depression on the pillow, no valley in the feather tick. On the other side of my cot, little Vytas was sleeping like a cherub, breathing regularly, with one loose fist on his pillow. A lightning flash blued him. Familiar, then unfamiliar.

  As I shuffled out into the dusty yard I saw towers of clouds swell and tumble in front of the moon. Whatever had contained them was unlatched. They unrolled and devoured the moon. The sky closed down on us, surrounding us.

  I turned to the barn. Grandmother stooped next to the oak tree beside the barn door and wound the rope I had blackened around the trunk near the base. She fastened the other end to a tree at the opposite side. I was confused: someone could trip over it if she left it there.

  She untied her babushka, letting it fall to the ground. The rising wind feathered her black hair, then whipped it straight out. She hurried into the barn.

  On the road past the barn, lightning outlined a man who, with one hand, was holding on to his homburg and with his other, jabbing his cane at the ground. I wanted to tell Grandmother, but I was rooted to the spot, a slight weed. You must be strong, she had said. Thunder cracked overhead and the earth trembled underfoot. In my nose was the sharp smell of lightning.

  Abruptly the waters poured down. First as needles on the flesh, stinging playfully, a mocking rash, then as sheets and finally ocean, with only an inch of air for me, poor fish. Walls of water gushed down, pushed in on all sides.

  I raced to the barn and jumped over the rope stretched above the ground at knee level. The barn was hot and dark except for the slits between the boards that showed the blue rips of lightning. She was nowhere.

  I whirled around. Daisy the draft horse was quiet; Gintaras, in another stall, was even quieter. In the darkest corner was a darker shadow sharpening an ax, the blade screeching. The shadow had my grandmother's mountain shape. She spoke out loud. "Not this time, old death, fat with corpses as you are. Eat stones and grass, not orphans."

  I desperately wanted her to succeed and closed my eyes, willing her to become invincible. Let her win, let her be strong, let her win, I prayed to the storm, to the sky, to my angel mother. I opened my eyes to grainy darkness and made out Grandmother's form. She lifted a slender flask to her mouth and drank from it. She spat on one palm, then the other, and wiped the hands along her ribs and hips and thighs. Where the hands touched, her shadow waved, melted. I blinked. The shadow became denser, became an animal, became a horse.

  Gintaras whinnied. Thunder cracked overhead. I squeezed my eyes shut and put my hands over my ears. I pressed myself against the rough-hewn wall. The boards smelled old.

  When I opened my eyes, by a lightning flash, in the dark corner next to Gintaras's stall, I saw a horse, black as my grandmother's hair.

  The hot zigzag of lightning outlined the man in the homburg approaching the barn door in quiet, careful steps. I could see the water drops like gems falling from his long coat. He paused and bent down. "Hah."

  He stepped over the rope and into the barn and hesitated as if to let his eyes adjust to the darkness. "My pretty horse, come here, I've got something sweet for you, something that will give you rest after your race, a lasting nap." He spoke in a caressing voice.

  I wanted to shout to Gintaras not to eat it, but feared Tomas would turn on me, poison me.

  I shrank into the wall. I stopped breathing. I became a wooden slat.

  He sidled toward the stall where Gintaras waited, casting threatening murmurs at him. Outside the barn door, lightning fish-boned through the sky.

  Gintaras wheezed in his stall. In the corner the black mare that was my grandmother reared up on her hind legs and startled Tomas. He fell against the side of the stall. When he regained his balance, he raised his cane and thwacked the black mare across her front legs. Thunder crashed overhead. Hot light opened the barn but Tomas did not see me because I was wood. I edged toward the door by the width of a thread.

  The black mare paced protectively next to the stall where Gintaras was dying. Tomas tore aside his topcoat. Light glinted off the long scabbard hanging from a belt. Pulling a long knife out of the scabbard, he streaked it across the forelegs of the mare. She let out a cry. He bellowed a laugh. A horizontal line of blood, black in this darkness, appeared. Again he slashed at her. Beads of blood welled up. She whinnied. My eyes watered. She reared up on her hind legs. Nudging him with her right foreleg, she flick-flicked him toward the door.

  My angel mother in a glowing silk robe and kerchief glided into the barn, but Tomas did not see her. She put her finger to her lips to keep me silent and mouthed, Yes, now. She nodded to encourage me and put her hands together in a pushing gesture.

  I ran toward the barn door. Once I was outside, I got down on my hands and knees. I was strong, a tree rooted in the earth. I took the gypsy's power.

  On my hands and knees I crept toward Tomas. With his back to me, he was lashing out at the mare. I steeled myself for the jolt. I arched my spine and drew my head in like a turtle. When I felt the calves of his legs brush against the air around my shoulders, I shoved--hard. He toppled, tumbled to the ground as I rolled away to the side of the barn. I was a butterfly in a cocoon. I opened my eyes.

  He had no cocoon. The mare's legs came down on his chest, clack, his stomach, his head, crick-crick. One side of him was raw meat.

  The mare neighed and kicked up her back heels. She galloped away from the body, which sagged on the ground like a bloody feedbag. She galloped across the yard to the back of the house.

  I breathed in and out, in and out. The clouds seemed to weave together and pull back; their kerchief was tied on. The lightning laced itself up, the wind blew away, the storm stopped.

  Looking toward the house, I saw my grandmother shuffle out the door, holding her arms out at her sides as if they hurt, the hands limp. On this summer night she was wearing a nightgown with long sleeves. How could she have turned into a black horse? That was not possible. Her coarse black hair hung in its two thick, plaited ropes. She did not pay notice to the broken body on the ground. "You're not in bed."

  The green silk kerchief glowed on the ground between us. Trembling, I picked it up. "I dreamed about my mother."

  Grandmother brushed the hair off my forehead with her rough hands. "You won't die. Not this time. You can stay."

  We went into the barn to check Gintaras. Grandmother let out a low, dark moan. She covered her mouth, but I saw her shoulders heaving.

  I looked around for something to offer. I twisted and bunched the silk kerchief. "Maybe some medicine...."

  "None in the world." Her voice was soft and empty.

~

  Vytas and I stayed with Grandmother that summer until my aunt had her baby and could take us in. My aunt was a big, ruddy-faced woman. No one would have imagined she had to be confined to her bed the last months of her pregnancy. Grandmother traveled to my aunt's house for the christening on a sunny, airy day in autumn. Grandmother kissed and made much of the baby, a beautiful girl named for my aunt's sister, Grandmother's daughter-in-law, my angel mother.

  The authorities determined that Tomas had tried to steal Gintaras away and was trampled to death. Shortly afterward, Gintaras died. Tomas had no relatives, so Grandmother kept her farm. The rains fell, and the barley was harvested. Rumors passed around that Tomas had thought he found gold at the edge of Grandmother's property. But it was only pyrite, fool's gold, a will-o'-the-wisp.

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