Vincent became a frequent visitor to our place. Dad hated him even more than he had disliked Daniel, but Vincent's approach was entirely different. He brought over all sorts of gourmet food for Eliyah. Eliyah loved the brie cheese, the delicacies....it was hard for him to snarl at a man bearing such gifts. Vincent would bring the food over and vanish outside to hang out with me while Dad was stuffing his face. When Eliyah was rude or yelled at him, or aimed a loaded pistol at him, Vincent just shrugged it off and kept being his eccentric, wacky self.

And then Vincent went back to his job in Post Falls, laying asphalt. He wrote frequently, and the writing was hard to read and the thoughts wandered around a lot, but I was happy to have a friend and to receive letters. Meanwhile, I kept busy on the farm. Dad ranted a lot about Vincent, and there were a few times when I suggested that I would still be interested in Daniel, a thought which he quickly jumped on but of course, never followed through with.

The goats numbered 15 now; I had acquired a Pygmy buck for free, along with Abraham and my three does. I spent a lot of time tethering them all out, checking on them vigilantly so that they would get enough to eat and to avoid any more strangulations like Cinderella's. We were still churning out the puppies and selling them. They were cute with good temperaments from a nice sire- Corky. And then the parvo virus hit..... The deaths were heartbreaking. The first symptom was a depressed puppy, followed by profuse, evil smelling diarrhea, far more of it than anyone would have guessed a small puppy could possibly produce. The puppies depression deepened into a hopeless look of despair as they went downhill. We tried everything we could think of, except for taking them to the vet, of course, but every single puppy that got sick died. Right about this time, we found Corky shot dead alongside the road. He'd never wandered, had never run deer....he was a homebody. Mom speculated that it was Buddy and Joyce from the business venture gone bad...because Corky had always hated Buddy....but of course there was no proof.

One of Dad's cop friends gave him a German Shepherd puppy. It was black with brown markings, and seeing her romp around took some of the ache out of all the deaths of the others, a pain that was compounded since there was nothing of Corky left except for Laddie and Toby, a gentle male from a subsequent litter that Mom kept.

One morning I went outside to do chores to find my kitten, Missy damp and half frozen to the late fall ground with the german shepherd puppy and the older dogs clustered around her. I thought she was dead, but she moaned or moved just the tiniest bit. I'd saved a lot of half frozen puppies and kittens already, so I rushed into action. I called for help, and spent the next hour or two submerging her in a 5 gallon bucket of the hottest water I could stand to put my hands in, massaging her body and moving her limbs. The first bucket went lukewarm right away- she was that cold- and my helpers changed out the water as soon as it wasn't hot anymore. We went through several buckets of water, lifting her from one bucket of merely warm water and quickly submerging all but her head into a fresh bucket of hot water. Soon her moans were more frequent and louder, and although she was still weak, she began to move more, too. When it seemed like she'd make it, I dried her thoroughly and rolled her up in a towel to conserve her body heat. I didn't want her to get cold from the water after all that work to warm her up. I sat with her by the woodstove, heating towels on the top of the woodstove and wrapping her up in them until she was thoroughly dry and still warm. She lived.

Eliyah blamed the little German Shepherd puppy for Missy's near demise. She was his puppy even though we all played with her, and she hadn't been trained to speak of at all; she just hung out with the other dogs. I don't think she necessarily meant to hurt Missy even if she had been the ringleader- probably she was just mouthing and harassing Missy, "playing" with her a little too roughly. She wasn't much bigger than the cat and had no one her own size to play with, having just left a litter of puppies. But Eliyah wasn't one to consider reasonable solutions or to try to look at something from an animal's point of view. I can still remember the shots. He was standing on the porch, aiming his .45 pistol. The German Shepherd puppy was yelping and running this way and that, some 40 or 50 feet away, under the big Ponderosa pine tree with the tree house platform. None of the shots were clean, and every time he happened to hit the puppy, she would scream and try to run away, until after several successful hits, she was dragging her mangled body around, still crying. When he was done, he turned calmly, ordered Raphah to pick up all the pieces and went inside. Raphah went silently, numbly, obediently, with a plastic bag, and gathered what was left of the puppy and threw her in the trash in the back of the truck, along with the rest of the trash and all the puppies who'd died of the parvo virus. Nobody ever said anything about it. I feared more than ever for Laddie and was relieved that he seemed to be afraid of men, always darting underneath the floor of the shop whenever Eliyah or my brother were outside.

Before I knew it, Vincent had proposed to me. It was late fall/early winter. We were going to be married, to travel to meet his family and then mine. He instructed me to bring only nice things to wear for traveling, that we'd return for the rest...and of course, for the goats and Laddie. Laddie never did warm up to him, always made himself scarce when Vince was around.

Leaving was hard. I worried about the goats, because Rachel didn't milk her own doe regularly (I often did it for her, feeling sorry for Sylvia's distended udder) and Sarah just wasn't into goats much. I promised Laddie, Lily, Sannah, Snowdrop, and my cats that I'd be back for them before they knew it. Sarah cried as we left. And as I sat beside him as we pulled out of the drive, Vincent said gravely, "We are never coming back". And I never did return, at least, not while any of that was still there.

We didn't go to see his family. We spent the night in a hotel in Post Falls. As he slept beside me, I thought of Daniel and wept, not for the last time. I knew it was too late, though. I couldn't go back to him. If he hadn't wanted me when I was a virgin, he certainly wouldn't want me now. We wound up rambling around the country, vagabonds, gypsies....sleeping in the International Scout, and later on the side of the road or in a tent, or in homeless shelters. We went to see my dad, who begged me to leave my new husband. That would be adultery...I couldn't do that. We told him what things had been like, how Eliyah had molested us. He had me call CPS, and he left immediately and drove straight up there. When he came back, Sarah was with him. She was upset with me for telling, but seemed happy to be away from there. She stayed with my Dad and Marie, got her G.E.D., went to college, and went on to have a successful life. CPS did nothing about the abuse, because nobody who was under age would admit to what was going on. It later turned out that he had sexually abused every one of us.

I bore Vincent two children before I realized it wasn't going to work out, that my heart still pined for Daniel and would for decades. When I was pregnant with my second child, I was able to talk Vincent into taking me back to northern Idaho, and we found Daniel. He had remarried, too, and was dying of cancer. His wife and I became friends, and we caretook his little cabin while he sought out natural miracle cures for a melanoma gone wild, a weed that the surgeons had burrowed seven centimeters into his chest to try to dig out. I remembered my dream though...and I knew he would die. I wondered what had gone wrong between us, why, WHY....but I never had the courage to ask. His wife just complained a lot about how poor they were. I marveled at this, although I liked her. Daniel was hardly the man to marry if a woman wanted all the material perks in life! Nevertheless, we got along and talked often. Our sons were born within a month of one another that spring.

I found myself alone in time, raising my two children. Daniel died less than a year after the birth of his son. I never did get to talk with him....to find out what went wrong, the whole story. I have struggled since then with the sense that if I'd tried harder, if I'd fought, if only I'd told him about what Eliyah was doing, maybe things would have been different. Maybe he would have taken me home after all. Maybe I'd have seen that mole before it spread, and maybe I could have talked him into seeing a doctor. Maybe he'd still be alive. Maybe my children would have his blue eyes, his smile creasing from their eyes down into their cheeks.

Or...I think about the time we were working in the woods, after we were engaged. He told me that some day, I wouldn't have to pull the sled full of firewood or swing my maul to split it. Someday, I could stay in the house and wear dresses and live as a farmwife. He said it in such a comforting tone of voice, but it rattled me a little bit even then. Now, I wonder if he ever really knew me at all, to say something like that? I still swing my maul, and god help the man who tries to take it from me. I think about how young I was...just 17...it seems that at 35, he could have found ways to be more reliable, handle the thing more responsibly. I think of all the letters exhorting me to bear up under hardship without complaining, when he knew exactly how brutal some of that hardship was...and of him asking why I ran away, when there was ample and obvious cause, even without the sexual abuse. I think of how my role was to produce children, birthing them at home, and of how treacherous my births have been. I might not be alive today. It's easy to idealize someone who's gone; the reality might have been just as bad as the one I was fleeing.

What then? What else could I have done? By that time, phobic of people, unable to drive, hindered by elaborate and bizarre beliefs, trained to be paranoid of any outsiders, getting a job would have been next to impossible. With almost no skills for coping with the outside world, I couldn't have moved out on my own. Sometimes I've thought that I should have gone to work for a goat dairy on the West Coast. But...trained to be homophobic, unable to figure out why I was so fixated on Jaylene, why I missed her so badly when I was away from her..so much confusion, so many things just didn't make sense. Maybe I could have worked in Idaho as a farm intern somewhere. I didn't know such a thing existed, but that might have been a good introduction to gaining independence and getting a different perspective on life from other people. Above all, it's infuriating that marriage was the only option for getting my freedom, or rather, transferring it to someone else like a car title. I don't know what the answers are.

These thoughts haunt me daily. There are so many maybes, so many regrets, so many questions that will never be answered. I don't know. Nobody knows.