Hazel's worn slippers whispered in the half-dark of evening as she shuffled across the mustard-colored linoleum to the ice-box in the far corner of the kitchen. Satisfied that the remaining ice was enough to keep the box cold through the night, she turned to clear the table of breakfast's coffee cups and her granddaughters' milk-curdled cornflake bowls and tossed them to the sink already piled high with unwashed dishes. She pushed a wisp of gray hair from her face, hooked it behind a hairpin and plunged her hands into the hot, soapy water.

Again, none of her sisters had been at the wedding, but she had no more tears for them. They'd been shed long ago. As a teenager, Hazel's body had filled out at an alarming pace with breasts and belly racing ahead of her toward an unseen finish line. Unexplained blotches and rashes had plagued her pale, dull skin, and her movements began to resemble those of old Sister Mary Agnes on a bad day.

"No man will ever marry you, Hazel 'cause you're not pretty enough," her sisters would tease until she'd run to her room and cry.

But her three daughters had all come home for their baby sister's wedding, and today's breakfast had been chaotic as all of them scurried to get ready. Hazel was relieved that they'd all gone home after the wedding.

"I sent Dad an invitation." Her daughter had come into the bedroom that morning to finish dressing for her wedding. "Do you think he'll come?"

Hazel had shrugged and shook her head. "I wouldn't even try to guess." She never could guess what Ted would do. He had come back to give away his oldest daughter, but had not shown up for the weddings of the next two.

Nor could Hazel guess what motivated Ted's infrequent visits, and she was never able to grasp how the girls felt about him. One year when the youngest was about three-years-old, he'd brought each girl a baby doll dressed in a pink. Their eyes flashed with excitement, but they had merely thanked him politely and left the room.

In 1944, when her oldest had just turned twelve, Ted had come home nearly every month, often enough that it gave Hazel hope that he would stay. He had even given her money that year. But during the next two years she had seen him only three times. When the girls would ask, "Why does Daddy go away? Does he just stay on the farm, all alone?" she'd tell them to shush and go play. There was nothing more to say. He just went away, that's all. They had finally quit asking.

Hazel dried her hands on a faded towel and gave a yank on the light-chain above her head. The ten steps to the front-room seemed more like fifty to her this night. She bent to peer under the shade at the window facing Maxwell Street. It was the street that ran directly from Ted's farm to the bars in downtown Whitewood. It would be dark soon. There's no reason to expect. . . . She sat heavily in the old rocker, took the wooden rosary from her pocket, and gave in to the melancholy the moan of the oak runners against the bare floor helped bring on.

"Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come thy will be done." Hazel did not have to be aware of the words. They just came.

At the wedding, in the little room in St. Aloysius's Rectory, Hazel had sat against the wall, her hips overflowing a delicate Queen Anne chair. Her glance wandered at times toward the door at the side of the room, hoping on one hand that Ted would not come, but wishing on the other that he could see her in the gray silk dress with the lace collar that the girls had bought her for the wedding. It slimmed down her forty-one-year-old figure that had been plump even when she was eighteen.

Ted had once told her, "You're not fat, Hazel, you're voluptuous," and Hazel had lowered her head, blushed, and stored the words away in her heart.

"Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee . . ." Hazel's fingers moved instinctively across the beads. Maybe she should take her vows -- say goodbye to him forever. "Pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death. Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace. . . ." Hazel was on the last decade of the rosary as she rocked in the darkening room, lighted only by the sunset, resplendent in the western sky.

It was in blackness, that she dropped the beads back into their pocket, folded her hands and prayed her own words. "Holy Mother, tell me what I must do. Give me a sign. Amen." Then she shuffled into her bedroom.

She blinked in the yellow light from the lamp in the corner and kicked the scattered laundry into a heap. Her reflection in the age-streaked mirror made her wince. This morning's neat pompadours were gone and gray strands of hair again lay limp on her cheeks. Despite the chubbiness of her face, the lines beside her mouth and eyes had deepened since this morning.

"I'm glad Ted can't see me now," she said as she switched off the lamp and crawled beneath the quilt.

******

One winter when Hazel was sixteen and Mama and the seven girls had moved from the ranch and into the house in Whitewood as they did every year to attend school, Hazel had taken a job with the nuns at St. Aloysius convent. She had been grateful for the opportunity and had slipped into the hushed tempo naturally. The nuns were pleased with the deliberate pace Hazel kept, never banging the mop against the chairs nor rattling the pots as she scrubbed them in the large metal sink.

Each evening, at the Angelus, she'd join them in their tiny chapel for the rosary, taking her place in the back on a low bench. With her eyes closed and hands folded around the beads in her lap, she had resembled a young, rosy-cheeked Buddha. "Hazel has a reserved place in heaven," the nuns would say. "She's an angel." Hazel had planned to go back to the convent to study for her vows the next year, after she turned seventeen. That was before Ted.

Ted's mother had died giving him birth, and he had been dragged by his father to the

Deadwood gold fields. He was left alone at age twelve after his father was killed in a gunfight.

After that, Ted had followed the honyockers from ranch to ranch at harvest time, worked the rodeos whenever he got a chance, and gambled some. He was twenty-six the first year he'd worked the harvest for Hazel's father. One evening as Hazel set a platter of chicken-fried steaks on the table for supper, Ted had touched her hand -- a gesture that changed Hazel's dreams forever.

He was about as good-looking as the threshers got. His brown hair waved away from his face, his big white teeth all gleamed beneath a pale mustache when he grinned, and he didn't chew tobacco. "Marry me," he had said to her one evening under the harvest moon during what had become their usual mile walk to the mailbox and back.

"Why me? My sisters are pretty. I'm not." Hazel had to know.

"I've known plenty a-pretty woman," Ted had answered. "You're different, Hazel. I need someone just like you to teach me to be a man like your father. I've made too many mistakes. I've not been a good person." Then he told her the story of his lonely life, and she had bowed her head and thanked Jesus for giving her a sign that He meant her for a more earthly marriage.

"Sir," Ted had said to her father after the harvest was in, "I've won a piece of land out on the alkali and have made a pact with God to settle down. I need Hazel's goodness and patience to help me." Her father had given his blessing, and they were married three weeks later, in the little room at the Rectory.

After their wedding, Ted had taken Hazel directly to his farm. The thirties' drought was two years old then, and in the South Dakota wheat fields, the stubble was crisp and brown under the summer sun. Dust stirred up by the buggy wheels clung to Hazel's damp skin and clogged her nostrils but the intake of her breath was nearly inaudible as she viewed the barn's roof sheathing which had long ago rotted off, and doors which hung on broken hinges. Only here and there, a hint of red paint suggested better days.

Her body eased a little at the sight of the house. It was somewhat better. The roof was intact, the doors and windows hung on to their proper fittings, but it too had long ago shed its last coat of paint, and several of the lapstrakes had loosened and threatened to drop onto the sagging porch.

"We'll fix it, Hazel," Ted had promised. "Nothing can stop the two of us. We'll make a good life out here." And he had opened the front door for her as if it were a palace.

Hazel hadn't much time to discover her new home before Ted led her to the bedroom, and made love to her. Then, without a word, he arose, dressed, and rode away in the direction of Whitewood, leaving Hazel to wonder what she had done wrong. Her prayer that night was simple. "Jesus, you sent Ted to me because he needs me. Now, show me how to help him. Holy Mother, pray for me. Amen."

When she crawled out of the strange bed at dawn, she had been horrified to find him sprawled on the old hooked rug at the front door. Dried spittle had streaked to his chin from the corner of his open mouth, and he smelled of vomit.

"Ted? Ted, you alive?" she had shaken his shoulder, afraid. She had never seen anyone drunk.

He had moaned, and she jumped back, not knowing what to do. She was too shy to touch him again, so she had simply stood and watched while he pushed himself up and staggered to the bedroom. After he washed and changed his clothes, he took her hand and pulled her to him. "Forgive me Hazel. Something crazy got into me," he'd said. "I'll get used to having a wife. It'll be better." And he had kissed her as they turned toward the kitchen to find some coffee.

The following year was everything that Hazel dreamt about. They had fixed up the house, put a pump on the old well, and planted a garden. Ted gathered up the few chickens and pigs they had found loose on the place and fenced them in, and it began to look like a working farm in spite of the drought. In the summer evenings, after supper, they'd take their coffee to the porch and watch the day fall asleep in the sunset, and in the mornings, they'd ount the tiny heat-born whirlwinds that would come out of nowhere and dance to the horizon. One morning, they counted nine of them in the sunrise and joked that perhaps these were their ghost-children, anxious for birth.

They had their first daughter that year, and Hazel's happiness turned to bliss. She had prayed, "Thank you, Jesus, for showing me the way."

Hazel thought that Ted's contentment matched hers, but on the day she told him that she was expecting again, he had accused her, "Are you trying to hog-tie me so�s I don't have any life but yours?"

He's just scared, Hazel had thought, it will be all right. But as the weeks went by, he stopped talking to her altogether, and then one day, he went into Whitewood for some chicken feed and didn't come back for two weeks. Hazel had despaired as she prayed for guidance during his absence, then thanked Jesus for his return.

When their second daughter was two months old, he left again. This time he stayed away for three weeks. When the limit of his tolerance for the family lessened to one month, the ensuing absence stretched into months, until finally he was absent most of the time, and the visits lasted only one or two weeks. Each time he came home, he had held her, told her how much he needed her, and asked her to be patient with him. Then she'd gotten pregnant again, and again he had gone.

During his absences, she would run out of money, until it had become harder and harder for her to feed the babies, and they began to get skinnier and sicker on the small portions of corn mush and sowbelly that she had been able to afford. Then one day shortly after the birth of her fourth daughter, her father had come and moved them into a little house next to his own in Whitewood. Ted didn't ask her to come back to the farm, and his visits became even more rare.

Only once Hazel had begged him, "Please don't leave us again, Ted. I need you." But Ted had not given her an answer and left the next morning. It was six months before she saw him again. She'd tell herself, "Poor Ted, it's the way he grew up, with only a father. We frighten him."

Shortly after her move to town, Hazel had returned to the Church, and each morning she'd climbed the hill to attend Mass at St. Aloysius as she had done as a girl. During his absences, her body had stopped aching for him, and by the time her last child turned two, she felt the need for some independence and went again to the Sisters at the Academy to ask for her old job back.

"Hazel, it's so good to see you. Of course we welcome you back to our little fold. We've missed you," Mother Superior had said.

They were content at the return of their "angel", and in time, they helped make life more comfortable for Hazel and the girls. "Mrs. Bachand's looking for a place for her old ice-box," they'd said. "Perhaps you could get some use out of it, Hazel." And "Hazel, someone dropped by with this chair. The convent's full to the top with chairs. Could you take it?"

But as life got easier for Hazel, living seemed to wear her down. Each morning at seven o'clock, she'd get her daughters to school, struggle up the snowbound path to the Academy for Mass, and plod through her cleaning and cooking chores at the Convent. And each evening she'd slip and slide her way down the path to her daughters, feed them, help them with their homework, and put them to sleep. And in the hour before she fell into bed, exhausted, she'd rock, stare out toward Maxwell Street, and pray the rosary. The years slipped by, nearly unnoticed. Her pattern seldom varied, and she never laughed and rarely smiled. There were no friends. Other women had husbands.

Then one sunny summer day, Ted came home again. It was the day after VJ Day, in 1945, and the celebrations for the end of the War were not over. She had stood at her gate, hands on her hips while the crowd of returned servicemen in uniform marched down Maxwell Street, the townsfolk on their heels. She smiled as they threaded the air with their beer bottles, rocked the sky with song, and kissed the girls on their arms. And on the tail of the crowd, Ted had stumbled down Maxwell Street, the red dust shrouding his shuffle as he clutched the fences and trees for support. "You're as pretty as ever," he'd said as he fell into her arms. He hadn't the strength to say more. He was sick. His skin had a melon-yellow sheen so he resembled a greased goose, ready for the oven.

Hazel had said nothing but helped him to her bed, undressed him, and as she washed his broken body, she thought of the women of Nazareth. Afterwards, he slept for twenty-hours. She had told the nuns of her husband�s return and devoted her life to his care.

To her daughters, it was as if a new woman had taken Hazel's place. She had smoothed her thin hair into a bun and took to wearing a fresh apron every day. Her round body seemed to grow taller and straighter, and she kissed them when they came in from play and smiled at their stories. Except for the shushing, they wished it would last.

But within four weeks, he was gone. Hazel's shoulders curled forward once more, and her smile disappeared as she again trudged up the hill to the Academy each morning. She had returned to her rosary for solace, dragged through the nun's dirty dishes and dusty floors, and at night huddled alone under her quilt. Her days were what they had been before his coming.

******

Hazel opened one eye at a time in protest of the daylight on the morning after the wedding, but closed them again to summon back the nightmare which had forced her awake. Her tiny daughters were waving goodbye as she called to them over and over. "Come back, come back." But they ignored her pleas as they drifted further and further away until they disappeared altogether, and she was left alone on the porch of the old farmhouse that she and Ted had shared so many years ago. The house was littered with dirty laundry, unwashed dishes, and unmade beds, and rice covered the furniture and floors. No matter how hard and fast she worked, she could not clean it up � the mess got worse and worse, and now, awake, she was exhausted. She stretched hard to shove the nightmare back into the night.

She tried to remember if she had ever before awakened in the morning and had been alone. As she lay in the sunlight which filtered through the dusty curtains, she could not think of a single thing that she had to do today, after Mass. The house needed to be cleaned. But who would care? Cook? She was too fat anyway. There were no friends to visit, and her sisters don't come around now that Mama and Papa are dead. There's only Ted to wait for.

Ted. What about Ted? He could be dead now, lying in the street, his face again yellow with sick and stinking of vomit. Ted had always needed her. That was something that she had always known: something that nobody but she, and perhaps Jesus, had ever understood.

Last week, Mother Superior had again suggested that Hazel take her vows. "Of course Hazel, that would mean you could never again be with your husband. You'd be married to Jesus, a much more tranquil and happy union than you have ever known."

"Thank you for asking me Mother," Hazel had said. "I will give you my answer after the wedding." It was as if Jesus was saying, "It's up to you now, Hazel. Will it be Me or your earthly husband?"

She had ached to be a nun when she was a girl. And now, it would be so simple. To get up out of this bed, walk up the hill, and put her life into the hands of God. The only friends she'd ever had were there, with Him. The Sisters were her only real family. There would be no more decisions, no more pain in her heart, and no more lonely days. Only contentment in the loving arms of the Virgin Mary.

Hazel threw back the old quilt she had gotten from her mama on her wedding day, and when it fell to the floor, she ignored it. "Hail Mary, full of Grace," she almost sang the words as she pulled the pale blue, cotton dress over her brushed hair. "Perfect for meeting my new family," she whispered. Her steps were light as she pushed open the screen door to the back yard. No rain yet. The brown grass and withered leaves on the grape vines shivered in the wind that had just begun to blow from the west. "Please, God, don't let this be the thirties again," Hazel prayed.

From behind an old cottonwood tree across the street, a little wind spiral raced toward

Hazel's house, danced around the fence posts, then sped down the dry road toward the highway. On its path, it picked up the powdery red-clay dust and deposited it like rust, on the bushes and buildings, as it raced to spin itself out on the horizon. An unborn ghost-child, Hazel thought.

Then, as she followed the ghost-child's dance down Maxwell Street, its puff of red dust

merged with another rusty wisp rising from beneath the shuffling steps of a shadow. The dark form wavered like a death-flag in the breeze, wrapped its arms around an old pine stump, and slipped into the dirt.

Hazel gasped, and with a little cry, hurried into the bedroom to change. She tore off the blue cotton and slipped the gray silk dress with the lace collar over her head and attempted to salvage yesterday's pompadours. She took the rosary from the pocket of her apron, slipped it into the silk one, held it tightly, and said a quick prayer.

"Thank you, God."

The screen door squeaked, then slammed behind her. A gust of wind wrapped around her feet and gave her a gentle push down Maxwell Street, toward the fallen shadow in the red dust.