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"The Cooks are older than me," Dellarobia said quietly "And I feel for theuments she’d always sed like a daily ration of pebbles had begun coe turnaround on the mountain had acted on her like some kind of shock therapy She’d told her best friend Dovey she was seeing someone that day, but not even Dovey knehat she’d been called out to witness Afrom ordinary forest, she had no name for that No words to put on a tablet as Moses had when he marched down his mountain But like Moses she’d come home rattled and impatient with the pettiness of people’s everyday affairs She felt shamed by her made-up passion and the injuries she’d been ready to inflict Hester wasn’t the only one living in fantasyland with righteousness on her side; people just did that, this family and maybe all others They built their tidy houses of self-i and went inside and slammed the door, unaware thefro away fro powerful and bereft It orse even than years ago when the stillborn baby sent her home with complicated injuries she could not mention Both then and now, Hester was not one to ask about personal troubles She seeht

Valia piped up, "Did you all see that one on Jackass where they tried water-skiing on a froze lake? The Jeep busted through and sank!" Esteps could be relied on to change the thread of any conversation

"I can’t get over that they let people go on TV for that stuff," said Valia’s daughter Crystal, shaking her stockpile of curls "My boys ought to be fah-school dropout with two kids, no history of a husband, and a well-known drinking probleot to start over with a clean slate when saved by AA and the Mountain Fellowship church Now she always kept her bottom lip clenched in her teeth, as if she were about an inch away frohts out Salvation had its tradeoffs, evidently

Hester reached back, divided her thin gray ponytail in half, and gave both sides a hard, sihten it This was one of about five thousand personal habits that drove Dellarobia nuts Why not just get a tighter ponytail band? Her nal: I’ll yank you If Dellarobia meant to live out her natural life in this fa to be a bite in the butt It had the effect of setting everyone in a roo for the door, herself included But it didn’t feel like a choice So had opened in her and she felt herself cala in, like that Jeep on the ice Jione before him, she had to admit She’d never been unfaithful to Cub, not technically, but in her married lifetime she had quit these hard crushes on other , over and over So the standard joke applied: she should be good at it by now She’d stopped answering Jimmy’s calls, and Jimht, no longer watching a nearly touchable lover behind her eyelids but now seeing flame in patterns that swirled and rippled A lake of fire

Dellarobia inhaled the lanolin-scented air, clearing fire and flood fro up the pace here It was her job to leave the skirting table every few minutes to fetch a new fleece from the other side of the barn She bypassed the wooden crate she’d set up as a playpen for Cordie, lightly touching her daughter’s fluffy head, and then booked it over to thestall her husband had a grip on both horns of a big white eaiting to deliver it into the hands of the shearer, while their skinny neighbor Peanut Norwood stood at the opposite door ready to escort out the newly shorn She sht of her tall husband in a pink flannel shirt Infade froo, but he still called it his red shirt, and must have seen it so Cub was not aher a quick one-aret her out of the shearer’s way There was no , but she stood for aan eyeful of the shearer, Luther Holly Not that Luther was eye candy in any ordinary sense He was a wife-and-grandkids, forh-school-wrestler type, late fifties or s But when he took up shears, his hts He took the woolly ewe fro with a sheepish sigh as Luther sat her ru mat He wrapped his left arht hand pushed the vibrating blade gently fro his own face The electric shearing rig looked antique, with its tre from a tall tripod, but in Luther’s hands it was an instruh the chute to face her duty by first pausing at the entrance, lowering her hindquarters and urinating, giving herself a long h that door Watch and learn, Dellarobia thought, feeling an unaccustoenerally aggrieved her Today they struck her as cannier than the people If the forest behind them burned, these sheep would come to terms with their fate in no time flat Flee or cower, they’d rass to hedge their bets In every way more realistic about their circumstances And the border collies too They would watch, ears up, forepaws planted, patiently bearing with the mess made by undisciplined humans as the world fell down around the his distance fro near the barn door where he trimmed hooves and conspicuously inspected each shorn ani it out with a slap on the rump Luther was too skillful to cut up the ani iodine bottle and swabbing a wound, or the suspicion of one Bear Turnbow had a talent for attentiveness to minor insults The collies Roy and Charlie moved in dutiful orbits around the men, perpetually alert to the flow of stock and the s ush of canine authority, pushing the flock through the h an hourglass Hester wanted theerfaces, the brownthe wool Icelandics came in every shade of a bad mood, Cub liked to say, but Dellarobia liked their patchwork look in a field and the aniave birth to white lambs or the reverse, sometimes even twins of different hues, devoid of scandal The white ewe Cub brought in now had a big dove-gray lae The worst hangers-on were the little ra to nurse when his sister was born, howling to see an impostor baby She felt permanently caved in fro to drawher surface Effectively deep-mined and strip-mined siht with their successors, as they were scheduled at the slaughterhouse in ten days Theirrams came in, and the boys couldn’t stay in a cohterhouse had its attractions, all things considered