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Neither were any other members of my spiritual family. Only Noble was visible and heard, and usually it was to gloat and to irritate me. He would always follow with his complaint.

"I don't like wearing your dress. and I want my amulet back."

Some nights. I practically leaped out of sleep and sat up, a cold sweat over my body, my heart pounding. He was weaving himself into all my dreams, crawling slowly like a worm through my brain. His face was everywhere. Once. I saw a bobcat saunter out of the woods and cross the meadow. When it paused and turned toward me, it had Noble's face and it was

There was no escape. Even the wind began to repeat his complaint.

"I don't like wearing your dress, and I want my amulet back."

The tree branches and their leaves were like multiple hands of symphony conductors moving to the rhythm of that sentence. I would have to stand there with my palms pressed tightly over my ears and wait for the breeze to calm and the chanting to end.

Once Mommy caught me doing this and asked me why I was doing it.

I told her I had a buzzing in my ear, and she gave me something to stop an infection from developing. Now, evenings when she played her piano. I pretended to be busy doing something else other than reading. The last half dozen or so times when I was relaxing with her. I didn't see anyone but Noble, and all he would do was squat below me and stare up at me with that mean-spirited smile on his lips. It was on the tip of my tongue to shout at him. but I caught myself in time and just rose and went to get myself some water.

He tracked after me everywhere, cloaking himself in shadows sometimes and then just sliding out along the wall before he disappeared.

Another month passed without anything changing. My appetite went from hardly anything to my sneaking meals between meals. The more weight I gained, however, the happier Mommy was. The woman in me was sinking under the added pounds. Even the postman who saw me occasionally shook his head with disgust.

One result of Noble's haunting of me was to make me want to succeed more at doing the things he thought were his things to do. I mastered the use of the chain saw. and I cut many logs. I split them and piled them to dry. I had calluses upon calluses. but I didn't moan and groan. Mommy had good herbal remedies to soothe the pain. and I began to soak in an herbal bath eve

ry night. It helped me sleep.

Fortunately, she never came in on me, and she didn't see how my waist and my breasts had

expanded. She didn't notice the stretch marks or how my ankles were swelling. It was getting more and more difficult to tighten the corset around myself, but it gave me the idea to use one of my grandmother's girdles to keep my swelling stomach from showing. As another precaution. I stopped going places with her. For months now, no one off our farm but the postman and an occasional delivery man saw me. I didn't return to the school either. That was all ended.

"You're at the age where you don't have to attend any school anyway," Mommy told me when I made a vague reference to our failure to appear for my periodic testing. "Who wants those busybodies interfering in our lives? Not me," she answered.

Not me either. I thought, especially not now.

I used to wonder how Mommy could be so contented, living alone as we were. Didn't she miss the company of men, of other women her age? Didn't she want to get out in the world and see what was new in fashion?

Now I thought I understood her better. I didn't wake up longing to leave the farm as much anymore. I wasn't interested in meeting young people my age. After all, look at what that had led to when I had. I didn't even think as hard about the public school.

But I knew my time was running out. Despite all I had done and continued to do. Mommy would soon realize what I realized but refused to

acknowledge. Only Noble gloated about it, and he would never stop saying, "I don't want to wear your dress. I want my amulet back."

"I cant do it," I shouted back at him. "Why don't you stop?"

He just stared.

Everywhere, he stared and he waited and the weeks went by and I grew bigger.

One night I woke up absolutely terrified. I had dreamed of Mommy looking at me in the morning and bursting into tears and rage and great sorrow, so great, it broke her heart and she died. I would be alone, and because of what I had let happen, no spiritual ancestor would comfort me or care to be in my presence ever again. Where do people go when they can't go to the warm, happy spiritual places? What dark hole awaited me?

"I don't want to wear that dress anymore," Noble chanted from the darkest corners in my room. "And I want my amulet back." He was on my right, then my left, then behind me, then in front of me. I slapped my hands over my tars, but he was whispering in between my fingers like someone whispering through the cracks in a door.

I threw off my blanket and, dressed only in my stretched pajama bottom and top. I fled the room.

Like a ribbon tied to the back of a car, he trailed along.

I charged out of the house, down the porch steps, and across the yard, not caring about how the small pebbles and Gravel tore at the soles of my feet. I went to the barn. I was crying now, the tears streaming down my cheeks.

The sky was thickly overcast. I felt the first drops of rain, but it didn't deter me. I found the spoon shovel, and I rushed across the yard and up to the small cemetery. I was even surprised myself at how well and how easily I moved through the inky darkness. When I reached the tombstones. I saw Noble standing there. waiting.

"If I take the dress off of you and give you back your amulet, will this stop? Will I stop growing in my stomach?" I asked him.