God take what He would, she said. And He did, and He did, and He did.

So he had said always, so she would not have to be afraid of the change—the falling away of skin, the drip and slide of blood, and the exposure of bones underneath. He had said always to convince her, assure her, of permanency.

When he was drifting, thinking only about the next meal and night's sleep, when everything was packed tight in his chest, he had no sense of failure, of things not working out. Anything that worked at all worked out.

THERE IS a loneliness that can be rocked.

They had become an occasional mutter, like the interior sounds a woman makes when she believes she is alone and unobserved at her work: a sth when she misses the needle's eye; a soft moan when she sees another chip in her one good platter; the low friendly argument with which she greets the hens.

It was as though he no longer needed to drink to forget whatever it was he could not remember. Now he could not remember that he had ever forgotten anything. Perhaps that was why for the first time after that old day in France he was beginning to miss the presence of other people. Shadrack had improved enough to feel lonely. If he was lonely before, he didn't know because the noise he kept up, the roaring, the busyness protected him from knowing it.

Other people went crazy, why couldn't she? Other people's brains stopped, turned around and went on to something new...

In that bower, closed off from the hurt of the hurt world, Denver's imagination produced its own hunger and its own food, which she badly needed because loneliness wore her out. Wore her out. Veiled and protected by the live green walls, she felt ripe and clear, and salvation was as easy as a wish.

One by fire, one by water, two of what he had so intensely loved gone, he thought. He couldn't lose a third.

Jumping from the roof of Mercy was the most interesting thing he had done.

Anna clung to him while he explained that the scorpion's tail was up because it was just as scared of her as she was of it. In Detroit, watching baby-faced police handling guns, she remembered the scorpion's rigid tail.

Now when his child falls and scrapes her knee, a loving father is certainly going to scoop her up in his arms, carry her into the house to treat the wound, and hold her close while she cries. That's what God does for us in our pain. But a wise father will also encourage his child to go back out and try it again, because that's the only way to learn to ride a bike.