He shakes his head. “You’re gonna stay here with me.”

I feel a flutter in my stomach and turn to leave.

He reaches out and grabs my arm. “I want you to stay, I said.”

I look at him in the gloom. Mr. Grote has never frightened me before, but something in his voice is different, and I know I need to be careful. His mouth is curled up at the edges into a funny smile.

He tugs the quilt. “We can warm each other up.”

I yank it tighter around my shoulders and turn away again, and then I am falling. I hit my elbow on the hard floor and feel a sharp pain as I land heavily on it, my nose to the floor. Twisting in the quilt, I look up to see what happened. I feel a rough hand on my head. I want to move, but am trapped in a cocoon.

“You do what I say.” I feel his stubbled face on my cheek, smell his gamy breath. I squirm again and he puts his foot on my back. “Be quiet.”

His big rough hand is inside the quilt, and then it’s under my sweater, under my dress. I try to pull away but I can’t. His hand roams up and down and I feel a jolt of shock as he probes the place between my legs, pushes at it with his fingers. His sandpaper face is still against mine, rubbing against my cheek, and his breathing is jagged.

“Yesss,” he gulps into my ear. He is hunched above me like a dog, one hand rubbing hard at my skin and the other unbuttoning his trousers. Hearing the rough snap of each button, I bend and squirm but am trapped in the quilt like a fly in a web. I see his pants open and low on his hips, the engorged penis between his legs, his hard white belly. I’ve seen enough animals in the yard to know what he’s trying to do. Though my arms are trapped, I rock my body to try to seal the quilt around me. He yanks at it roughly and I feel it giving way, and as it does he whispers in my ear, “Easy, now, you like this, don’t you,” and I start to whimper. When he sticks two fingers inside me, his jagged nails tear at my skin and I cry out. He slaps his other hand over my mouth and rams his fingers deeper, grinding against me, and I make noises like a horse, frantic guttural sounds from deep in my throat.

And then he lifts his hips and takes his hand off my mouth. I scream and feel the blinding shock of a slap across my face.

From the direction of the hallway comes a voice—“Gerald?”—and he freezes, just for a second, before slithering off me like a lizard, fumbling with his buttons, pulling himself off the floor.

“What in the name of Christ—” Mrs. Grote is leaning against the door frame, cupping her rounded stomach with one hand.

I yank my underpants up and my dress and sweater down, sit up and stumble to my feet, clutching the quilt around me.

“Not her!” she wails.

“Now, Wilma, it isn’t what it looks like—”

“You animal!” Her voice is deep and savage. She turns to me. “And you—you—I knew—” She points at the door. “Get out. Get out!”

It takes me a moment to understand what she means—that she wants me to leave, now, in the cold, in the middle of the night.

“Easy, Wilma, calm down,” Gerald—Mr. Grote—says.

“I want that girl—that filth—out of my house.”

“Let’s talk about this.”

“I want her out!”

“All right, all right.” He looks at me with dull eyes, and I can see that as bad as this situation is, it’s about to get worse. I don’t want to stay here, but how can I survive out there?

Mrs. Grote disappears down the hall. I hear a child crying in the back. She returns a moment later with my suitcase and heaves it across the room. It crashes against the wall, spilling its contents across the floor.

My boots and the mustard coat, with Fanny’s precious lined gloves in the pocket, are on a nail by the front door, and I’m wearing my only pair of threadbare socks. I make my way to the suitcase and grab what I can, open the door to a sharp blast of cold air and toss a few scattered pieces of clothing onto the porch, my breath a puff of smoke in front of me. As I put on my boots, fumbling with the laces, I hear Mr. Grote say, “What if something happens to her?” and Mrs. Grote’s reply: “If that stupid girl gets it in her head to run away, there’s nothing we can do, is there?”

And run I do, leaving almost everything I possess in the world behind me—my brown suitcase, the three dresses I made at the Byrnes’, the fingerless gloves and change of underwear and the navy sweater, my school-books and pencil, the composition book Miss Larsen gave me to write in. The sewing packet Fanny made for me, at least, is in the inner pocket of my coat. I leave four children I could not help and did not love. I leave a place of degradation and squalor, the likes of which I will never experience again. And I leave any last shred of my childhood on the rough planks of that living room floor.

Hemingford County, Minnesota, 1930

Trudging forward like a sleepwalker in the bitter cold, I make my way down the driveway, then turn left and plod up the rutted dirt road to the falling-down bridge. In places I have to crunch through the top layer of snow, thick as piecrust. The sharp edges lacerate my ankles. As I gaze up at the crystal stars glittering overhead, cold steals the breath from my mouth.

Once I’m out of the woods and on the main road, a full moon bathes the fields around me in a shimmering, pearly light. Gravel crunches loudly under my boots; I can feel its pebbly roughness through my thin soles. I stroke the soft wool inside my gloves, so warm that not even my fingertips are cold. I’m not afraid—it was more frightening in that shack than it is on the road, with moonlight all around. My coat is thin, but I’m wearing what clothing I could salvage underneath, and as I hurry along I begin to warm up. I make a plan: I will walk to school. It’s only four miles.

The dark line of the horizon is far in the distance, the sky above it lighter, like layers of sediment in rock. The schoolhouse is fixed in my mind. I just have to get there. Walking at a steady pace, my boots scuffing the gravel, I count a hundred steps and start again. My da used to say it’s good to test your limits now and then, learn what the body is capable of, what you can endure. He said this when we were in the throes of sickness on the Agnes Pauline, and again in the bitter first winter in New York, when four of us, including Mam, came down with pneumonia.

Test your limits. Learn what you can endure. I am doing that.

As I walk along I feel as weightless and insubstantial as a slip of paper, lifted by the wind and gliding down the road. I think about the many ways I ignored what was in front of me—how blind I was, how foolish not to be on my guard. I think of Dutchy, who knew enough to fear the worst.

Ahead on the horizon, the first pink light of dawn begins to show. And just before it, the white clapboard building becomes visible halfway up a small ridge. Now that the schoolhouse is within sight my energy drains, and all I want to do is sink down by the side of the road. My feet are leaden and aching. My face is numb; my nose feels frozen. I don’t know how I make it to the school, but somehow I do. When I get to the front door, I find that the building is locked. I go around to the back, to the porch where they keep wood for the stove, and I open the door and fall onto the floor. An old horse blanket is folded by the woodpile, and I wrap myself in it and fall into a fitful sleep.

I AM RUNNING IN A YELLOW FIELD, THROUGH A MAZE OF HAY BALES, unable to find my way . . .

“DOROTHY?” I FEEL A HAND ON MY SHOULDER, AND SPRING AWAKE. It’s Mr. Post. “What in God’s name . . . ?”

For a moment I’m not sure myself. I look up at Mr. Post, at his round red cheeks and puzzled expression. I look around at the pile of rough-cut wood, the wide whitewashed planks of the porch walls. The door to the schoolroom is ajar, and it’s clear that Mr. Post has come to get wood to start the fire, as he must do every morning before heading out to pick us up.