The Lowland

moment. Though she’d had a hand in something they would mourn all their lives, she had already slipped from their minds.
    3.
    Meghna was four. Old enough to be apart from Bela for a time. She was attending a summer program run by the school where she would begin kindergarten in the fall. It was out past the train station, on a campsite by a pond.
    A few times a week she spent her mornings in the company of other children, learning to play with them in a grove of trees, and sit with them at a picnic table, to share food. They baked brown rolls that she brought home in small paper packets. When it rained she sat in a teepee, resting on sheepskin. Molding beeswax, watching felted dolls enact stories that were read aloud.
    Because Bela had to leave the house so early, it was Subhash who dropped Meghna off those mornings. Bela picked her up when her shift was done. It was good to be working again. To wake up before the sun rose, to sweat once it was in the sky, to feel tightness in her arms and legs at the end of the day.
    She’d come to this farm as a child on field trips with her class, to watch the shearing of sheep. She’d come with her father to pick out pumpkins in October, bedding plants in spring. Now she sowed seeds in the rocky, acidic soil, scraping it with a hoe to remove weeds.
    She’d dug long trenches for potatoes. She’d created narrow footpaths between the rows for microorganisms to thrive. She’d started the early crops in a hoophouse, and in cut-up pieces of sod, before moving seedlings to open ground.
    One afternoon, taking advantage of the sunshine after a cloudy start to the day, needing to cool off her body, she drove with Meghna to the cove in Jamestown where her father used to bring her, where she had first learned to swim. On the way back from the beach she noticed corn for sale, and stopped the car.
    On the table there was a coffee can with a slit in the plastic lid, asking a dollar for three ears. There was a price list for a few other items. Bundles of radishes and basil. A picnic cooler containing oak leaf. Butterheads, free from tipburn.
    She picked up the can, heard a few coins rattling inside. She bought some corn, some radishes, pushing the bills through the slot. The following week she went back, making the short drive over the bridge from her father’s house. Still there was no one. She began to wonder who had grown these things, who was so trusting. Who left them, untended, for a seagull to carry away, for strangers to buy or steal.
    Then, on a Saturday, someone was there. He had more vegetables in the back of a pickup truck, onions and carrots in baskets, tatsoi with spoon-shaped leaves. Two small black lambs sat in a cage, on a bed of straw, wearing matching red collars. When Meghna approached he showed her how to feed them from her hand, and let her pet their wool.
    You grow this stuff on the island? Bela asked.
    No. I come here to fish. A friend lets me keep a stand on his property, given how many tourists pass through this time of year.
    She picked up a lemon cucumber. She smelled its skin.
    We tried growing these this season.
    Where’s that?
    Keenans’, off 138.
    I know the Keenans. Are you new to Rhode Island?
    She shook her head. They’d both been born here. They’d attended different high schools, not so far apart.
    He looked maybe a decade older than she was. He had green eyes, a few creases in the skin, salt-and-pepper hair that stirred in the breeze. He was courteous, but he was not afraid to look at her.
    Next time I’ll bring the rabbits. I’m Drew.
    He kneeled down and put out his hand, not to Bela but to Meghna. What’s your name?
    But Meghna wouldn’t answer, and Bela had to say it for her.
    Pretty. What’s it mean?
    It was one of the rivers that flowed into the Bay of Bengal, Bela told him. A name her father had chosen, had given.
    Anyone call you Meg for short?
    No.
    Can I? Next time your mommy stops by?
    He began bringing other animals, chicks and puppies and kittens, so that Meghna started talking about Drew during the week, asking Bela when they would visit him again. He gave Bela things she wasn’t paying for, tucking them into her bag and refusing her money. Purple bush beans that turned green when she cooked them. Pink heads of garlic, peas in their pods.
    The farm belonged to his family. He’d lived on it all his life. It was just a few acres now, something one could take in at a glance.