Free A Hard Witching by Jacqueline Baker

figured out.”
    He pulled a cigarette from the pack on the table, tapped it. Lavinia sipped her beer, thinking, He has the bluest eyes, blue like the lakes in the Wheat Pool calendars—photographs she’d clipped and Scotch-taped to the walls and ceiling of her bedroom when she was a girl, loving both the scenery and the names: Jackfish, Witchekan, Big Quill. She’d lie across her bed on hot summer afternoons and stare into all that blue, running the names cooly through her head, like a chant. Pelletier, Candle, Old Wives.
    “Tell me,” he said, pointing his cigarette at her, “tell me you don’t miss it. All that open space. Those fields. The light there. Some days you can see ten, twelve miles.”
    That reminded Lavinia, briefly, of another joke, something about watching your dog run away for three days. But she did not tell it. She was listening to Jack, thinking, Maybe I wasn’t looking, all those years. Maybe it was there. All that time. Maybe it was me.
    Thinking, Bigstick, Manito, Willow Bunch.
    Jack leaned toward her across the table, so close she could see those lakes had little yellowish pockets of light, shifting like water lilies. Like trout. “Tell me,” he said again, “tell me you don’t miss it.”
    Two weeks after the wedding, she packed up the few dishes and odd bits of furniture she’d collected, helped Jack load it all into his truck and they headed east, making a quick stop at the pancake house so Lavinia could drop off her uniform and pick up her final cheque.
    “Never thought I’d see the day,” one of the girls said.
    “Yeah,” Lavinia said. “Well.”
    She spent the first few months setting the old farmhouse in order—rearranging kitchen cupboards, sweeping out closets, even putting a row of petunias and marigolds in the freshly weeded patch beneath the south kitchen windows, carrying water to them in an old ice cream pail every evening.
    Her mother was thrilled. “My daughter,” she said, “come back to the fold.”
    Her father simply gloated. “Got yourself a nice place here,” he’d say, looking around. “View of the Sand Hills.” He’d say it each time they came.
    And at first she kind of thought so, too. It was a nice place. The red-painted outbuildings, the neat white farmhouse which, though small, was bright and had a tiny veranda roundthe back where she could imagine them sitting on rare windless evenings, sipping coffee, listening to the crickets and watching the light slip off the land.
    Now, a little more than a year later, they had yet to sit there in the companionable silence she had imagined. Jack, she realized, never sat. He just moved from one task to the next, evenly. When he stopped, he slept. Determined to make the best of it and to entice him, too, she’d tried sitting there one evening on her own, pulling out two kitchen chairs. But she felt guilty and then angry, watching him cross and re-cross the yard well into dusk. Ignoring her. Making his point. And so she’d dragged the chairs back inside, sat instead looking out the kitchen window where at least he could not see her. Sat looking at those red buildings slowly darken and sag. Wondering why she hadn’t noticed before how they all seemed to tilt slightly in one direction from the constant assault of wind.
    Homestead, he’d called the farm when they first met, a place he could not possibly leave. “They can put me six-feet-under right back by the barn. Suit me fine.”
    Homestead.
    At the time, it had made sense to her. Such a beautiful word. Endearing. And she’d thought, quite stupidly, He could make me love it.
    The ringing of the hammer against the truck engine stopped, and in a moment Lavinia heard Jack’s heavy bootfalls coming across the yard. She wiped her face again, pulled on her coat and quickly slipped back through the leaves. But he was already standing there, her spade held loosely in his fingertips.
    “I had to pee,” she said, though there was no real reason why she should