It is the third year of the Great War, and sixteen men and boys born in this village have fallen. Because their earthly remains are absent from the graveyard, Isabella of Bengat homestead keeps count of them in her head. It is not hard to do. In spite of her seventy years, Isabella can name every one of the three hundred sixty-three people who call Rosenau home. She can name their parents, their godparents, and their grandparents, with first names, family names, and clan names. She could tell some secrets, but she doesn't. Isabella has felt the bite of old age for some time now, but this war is worse. Day by day she feels its weight wearing her own secrets thin, transparent. Wringing them dry.

Three soldiers have come home from the battlefields for good, drifting in like ghosts set on retribution. Every Sunday, this Sunday, they put themselves on display at church. Fellele's Jodok coughs through the mass, his lungs giving way bit by bit like rotted cheesecloth. His brother Michel--born on the same day as her own son, forty-two years ago, the two of them the oldest to be sent away to fight--is all but deaf. He shows no other outward sign of injury, but his eyes have something small and sour about them; they put Isabella in mind of blighted apples. Cobbler's Manuel has lost the use of his right arm. After mass Isabella hears Manuel tell a neighbor that on his farmstead he is as useful as the tits on a boar. His tone, jovial and desperate, makes Isabella shudder.

There are three men still gone, one fighting in the South Tirol. Two others, including Isabella's Peter, are in Galicia. They have had no news of Peter in four months. Now the whole household-- Isabella, Alois, and their widowed daughter, Barbara, as well as Peter's wife and four children--lives with an ear turned toward the road. They wait for the sound of his step, or for word that he has fallen. The weight of this, all of them leaning toward the road, seems to have tipped the family out of balance and set them spinning haphazardly. They are moons of a missing planet.

At Sunday dinner Alois talks about the latest requisition order from the war office: the military now wants all the wool, even from the sheep less than two years old. When dinner is over, Isabella goes out into the Schopf. It is unseasonably warm for early March. Isabella knows without looking that the crocuses have poked up their noses; she knows too that winter is not done.

A cool fear begins to breathe on the back of Isabella's neck as she takes in the sound of hoofbeats on the dirt road. The skin rises on her arms; she can feel each hair stand up as the courier--who has ridden here four twisty uphill kilometers on a Sunday afternoon--rounds the corner. Olga, Peter's daughter, rushes up, breathless, and snatches the telegram away from the courier; she holds it face up: it is not edged in black. Then, still breathing hard, she hands it to her mother, who sits down heavily, and with pale rough hands opens the envelope to read that Peter is alive, that he has lost a leg, an unspecified number of fingers, and an eye, and that he is recovered enough now to be fetched home.

Once he arrives, Isabella spends as much time as she can spare at the window watching Peter, who spends his days whittling in the Schopf with the shutters propped up to let in the light. She tells herself that he doesn't know about this habit of hers.

Peter sits with the damaged side of his face bared to the mild winter sun. Like a blessing, the sunlight strokes what his mother cannot bring herself to look at: it moves tenderly over the mass of scar tissue that ripples from his hairline down the left side of his face to puddle on what was once a smooth cheek, a well- formed ear, a clean jaw. It soaks deep into the patch that hides the empty eye socket.

Isabella watches Peter as he turns his one eye and his mind, still whole and sharp, to the piece of wood wedged against his right thigh. Beneath his blade a world has come to life. A meadow of flowers twists and twirls around the long, tapered shaft of wood. Half hidden in a mass of blossoms, a stage raises his head. There are birds, squirrels, ibexes, and he is working now on a small group of marmots.

Quietly, the youngest of his boys slips into the Schopf to sit with his father. Peter makes no move to discourage him, but he pulls his cap down low over the left side of his face. Shavings still fall in fragile tendrils from the point of his knife. Isabella listens as Peter and Leo talk. Leo is seven, and so in love with his father that his ruined face is no penance at all. They talk about the marmots, who live in the highest ranges and cut grass and spread it to dry on rocks in the sun, using the sweet hay to build nests in their burrows. Leo imitates the high warning whistle the marmots make to their young, and Peter laughs out loud; Isabella feels her insides clutching. She chides herself for her weakness, for her jealousy of a seven-year-old child.

When Peter puts aside his knife, Isabella turns away quickly. She will not watch her son take up his wooden prosthesis, now covered to the hinged knee with flowers and vines and animals, and strap it to the stump where his left leg used to be.

AUTHOR COMMENTS:

For about four years I lived and worked in Andelsbuch, Egg, and Grossdorf, three dairy-farming villages in the Bregenz Forest, a mountain valley in Vorarlberg, Austria's westernmost province. For one of those years I was collecting language data for my doctoral dissertation on variation and change in the dialect of the central forest. This research meant that I sat in kitchens and around tables in all kinds of homes, sometimes one-to-one, sometimes with a family or neighbors. Many friendships were forged in those long hours of recording; I told some stories and listened to many more.

Some of those stories put their hooks into me, and eventually I felt a need to pass them along. I could not keep Isabella's sorrow to myself, or Mikatrin's battles with a wayward cow, or the sled ride down the mountain when Martha was born, or what it was like for Olga to lose not just her brothers and husband but her entire way of life to a war she didn't understand. Each of these women is an amalgam of the dozens of women who shared their thoughts and their histories with me, and Homestead was written about and for them.

Recently I joined the faculty of Western Washington University in Bellingham, on the Washington coast. My daughter, almost nine, comes into my study to read me her little stories. I will never live in Austria again, but I have mountains to look at now. I teach linguistics and creative writing, and I write in a room of my own, with a view.

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