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composed that story, and now we had heard it and were the better, every last one.
    When we got back home my mother asked my father, “How was the show?”
    “That’s about what it was,” my father said. He put his hand a minute on my arm when he said this. Then he let it go.
    Often was the time in those early days in Kentucky that I thought about that story I had written and about that day in the school. I told Cleome and Zinnia about it and they made me tell it again and again for the several days after.
    “I’d like to live up on one of those clouds,” Cleome said.
    “And drink up that lemonade,” said Zinnia.
    “We could all live up there together,” I said.
    They had me tell it to Alcofibras, but he just shook his head and said clouds were cold places to live.
    I also told my husband, Linus Lancaster, who appreciated the delicacies of the mind even as he kept his hand always near a switch, as he was at his supper. He heard it and looked at me twice or thrice, then got up, walked to my trunk, fished the four or five books I had brought up out of it, and heaved them over into the stove.
    “No more clouds now, Ginny,” he said. Then he called for his bath, and I knew it was time for me to go and wait for him in the bedroom. When he came into the bedroom, fresh from his bath, my husband made himself ready before me. He liked to stand, at the ready, in his nothings. And he did this for a time that night. Then he drew the covers back and lay down.
    “We have the Bible for stories, Mrs. Lancaster,” he said to me after. “Look to those good words and to those good words alone now. There wasn’t any book but the good one for my dearly departed, and there won’t be any other for you.”
    But there was no book good or otherwise in that cabin with its long corridor. I looked all the next day for it. The girls said they had never seen any good book in Linus Lancaster’s house and wouldn’t speak a peep to whether or not his dearly departed had had one. When I inquired to him about it he said it was here somewhere, he’d had it out recently, and that if I was too rearward to find it that was none of his affair. Then he had me back into his bed.

When Linus Lancaster was in trade in Louisville and still sharing his table with his dearly departed, he made the money he did make in the barter of livestock, and that was when he started dreaming about his place in paradise that would take care of him like the ancient lands took care of the Israelites. He told me this the first time in his bed with his arms on my shoulders and his face over mine. He also told me that it was after he had started to conjuring this way that he had fallen asleep one night and seen a countryside covered in pigs. The land, he told me, was green and the pigs roamed the land and there in the middle of it stood the shining house he would tell his second cousin, my mother, about as my father listened.
    When I first arrived at his home he had not yet made good on his dream. There were chickens and cows and horses but no pigs. Then one afternoon he had a load of lumber and nails in, and the next morning he set Ulysses and Horace to building pens and sheds. One week later they all came, weeping and grunting like babies lost from heaven. The man who had driven them to us stayed for a week to show Linus Lancaster how it was done. They would rise early and go out to the pens and smoke and kick or coo at the pigs. The man ate at our table and winked at me, and one night after Linus Lancaster had retired with a poor tooth took Cleome by the waist and dandled her on his knee and would have done more than dandle, but he had drunk all we had and fell over onto the floor. The next day the man left the pigs he had brought to us behind and headed back down the road with his switch. On taking his leave he told Linus Lancaster that pigs never brought anything but peace to a man, and Linus Lancaster, who that very afternoon would have Ulysses yank that tooth from