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When at last you wipe your hands on your apron, untie it, and hang it on the hook behind the pantry door, you can't imagine a transformation is going to be possible. You're tired and perspiring. Bits of dough from the baking are stuck under your nails. The dishes are done, the floor is swept, the table is laid for tomorrow's breakfast. The people are fed, dogs fed - kittens fed, too. You don't usually feed barn cats, but you found the mama dead, neck snapped, much of her gone to the belly of who knows which wild thing. And there they are, too big to drown, though perhaps your father wouldn't think so - if he found out that you were skimming the milk for them when you help with the cows and saving out a spot of gravy for them after the noon dinner. But so far he hasn't found out. One cat more or less in his barn makes no impression on him.

You go out to the pump for the pail of water you'll wash your face in.

When your Sunday dress slips over your damp head and shoulders, you tug it down over your hips and you smooth it against your thighs and straighten the hem. You are presentable, which is all that is required. He's not your beau, after all, he's Josephine's, and if you look as though you took too much pains with yourself, she'll be wondering what you're up to. So will your father, who'll barely let you out of the house of an evening as it is.

Then again, you're not certain you want to ride out with them. Even when it's your best friend and her beau and you're just there to chaperone, this keeping company feels strange to you. It's laden with unspoken things. Josephine would not behave indecently. And George Deacon would not encourage it, for that matter. But it's in the air among the three of you anyway, as you ride out in the buggy. It's in the spaces between the chatter, and in Josephine sitting so close to George, with you apart at the end of the seat. The buggy jiggles and squeals on its springs, making the air seem filled to overflowing with jiggling and squealing.

Keeping company is how you get to marriage and marriage is a perfectly respectable state. It's how a woman gets her children and her house - if she's not, like you, so unlucky as to have them already, the only legacy of a mother dead too young. It's the rutting part of it, though, that duty that men take up willingly, women not so much so, that you hear in the jiggles and squeals, feel in the tension between their shoulders. It's the rutting and pregnancy and death.

A full moon is displaying itself above the trees, splashing yellow light across the road and casting long shadows. The air is muggy and smells of hay and dung. George and Josephine are mumbling together now, so low you can't understand any of what they are saying. Their bare, throaty noises are irritating.

Your tiredness washes over you. You think of your father's socks that need darning yet tonight. It's on condition of darning those socks that you've been allowed to come out this evening and now you're wishing that you were at home getting them done so you could go to bed.

But George and Josephine seldom go home even a moment before they are required to. You think there will be an engagement to announce here soon. Another of your friends ready to take up her duties as wife and mother, another of the young boys ready to turn to the steady round of unending labour on a small farm.

No, that's not right when it comes to George. George was apprenticed out to a machinist at fourteen and he'll be doing something else to earn his bread and his wife's, he'll be living in the city. Imagine that, then, Josephine in the city, riding streetcars, eating in restaurants. Maybe she'll have running water in her house and a coal furnace and electrical lighting! Maybe she'll have an inside privy! Gracious, how will she cope with all that? It can be so hard to learn new things.

In some ways, that was the hardest part about losing your mother, that you had to learn so many new things all at once - the right amounts of ingredients to put in your baking or exactly how long to leave something in the oven, for example. You knew all about the stove itself, how much wood to put in, how long ahead of time you needed to start in order to have the oven at the right temperature. Your mother had taught you early on, and you had taken to it, too. You liked the feel of the sticks of kindling, bits of weed maple that you and your brothers gathered on summer days where they had crashed to the ground. You loved the glorious moment when your well-laid little fire had taken hold and was settling down to something that would last. You liked the dash of heat on your face and the red glow each time you peeked in - more in winter when it felt good on your cold skin, but even in summer, because it gave you a kind of reassurance. This was something you knew, this making the fire for the stove. The two of you had been a kind of team, each with her own tasks, each knowing just what to do so that you worked companionably in the kitchen without getting in each other's way. But the trickier things about the baking of pies and cakes she had left for later, and later never came.

She wasn't even showing yet when it happened. You hadn't known she was pregnant. After, you overheard Dr. Whitman telling your father that the baby was outside the womb. This made no sense to you. How did a baby get outside the womb? You knew about what the male and female farm animals did, but that didn't look to you like it would put the babies anywhere but squarely in the womb. What had your father done to her, to get the baby planted in the wrong place? This had puzzled you for a very long time now, all the ten years since your mother died of it. But of course it was not something you could possibly ask anyone. Certainly you couldn't ask your father. At the back of your mind, you have been nursing a vague idea that someday when the time is right, perhaps when you're married yourself, you'll ask Dr. Whitman.

Meanwhile, here you are, still raising the last of your mother's brood, competent to run a household by virtue of having no choice but to learn how. Kind hints, and some not so kind, from the pastor's wife and from Aunt Kate and from the farm wives, trial and error, harsh words from your father when you got things wrong - these have had to take the place of the training your mother would have given you. In your heart you blame your father, a hard man, for having animal needs and for putting that baby in the wrong place and costing your mother her life. But in your daily life you serve him well, as is your duty, without warmth but without surliness, either. You do the work of a farm wife for him and your brothers and sister, as you have been doing it since you were eight years old.

Sometimes, with people your own age at a church social, you have discovered a little spark of fun in yourself. You can make a joke and dance a jig. You've no time, though, for fanning such sparks into flames. Mostly, you are tired. Right now, for instance, the whispering having grown fainter, the rocking of the buggy more rhythmic, you could almost fall asleep sitting up.

Your eyes pop open as the buggy rounds the bend to your farmyard. The evening is over and you've slept through much of it. There is nothing but the squeak and jiggle now, no sounds at all from Josephine and George who, oddly enough, aren't even sitting very close together. There's a stiffness in George's silhouette, too. He's bolt upright, managing the reigns with much more attentiveness than this lazy ride seems to demand. Have they had an argument? But now he's pulling up in the yard, and he's out of the buggy and around to your side to hand you down. You place a reassuring hand on Josephine's shoulder before you get down, but she makes no response. His hand at your elbow, George walks you to your door.

It's not your business, but it'll be days before you can ask her yourself - "Is Josephine all right, George? What's happened?"

George takes you several more steps towards the door before he speaks. "She's a little annoyed with me, I guess. I told her that I wanted to ask you to come out with me."

"But I always come out with you two, why would she…" Did he just say what you think he said? Does he want to court you now, instead of Josephine? "What do you mean, George?"

"I mean that I'd like to call on you, if you'll have me?"

"But I thought you and Josephine were to be engaged."

You're at your door now. You can't stand here talking to George, not with Josephine in the buggy and your father behind that door. Suddenly, George takes you by the wrist and stands much too close to you. "I've thought about it for a long time."

He goes then. You stand listening to his footsteps and then his "giyyap."

Satisfied that you've come home early for once, your father goes off to bed and you are glad of it. When you darn his socks, you see that your hands are shaking. You finish quickly, put out the lamp, head for bed. Your sister is very soundly asleep. She lies next to you, putting her warm, even breaths onto the summer air, and you lie on your back, eyes wide, staring at the dark.

You have been friends with Josephine all your life. She will be unhappy. But you have done absolutely nothing to bring this on. Your own beau! You can have your own beau! Your heart skips. But how silly, how childish of it to do that. You don't need a beau. You don't want another round of raising children. Even with an indoor privy!

It's that or this, though, isn't it? George is young and strong, and his children would be your children, too. George is a good man. You like him. And, beyond all reason or expectation, it seems he likes you, too.

Your father won't be pleased. He may not let you go.

Like a great star, this hovers all night, and in the morning when the star at last fades, you rise. You are more tired than you have ever been, but you do your chores. Everything you do this morning is just what you have always done. Nothing has changed, not the farm, not your father's hard face, not, certainly, the cows who ache for milking. The day passes like all the days pass. The evening comes on.

Then you hear it, the squeak and jiggle. Your heart breaks open.