Arlo Johnson wasn't home the day of the wreck. He was in Muscatine, seeing the ophthalmologist about the progress of his macular degeneration. It had already made so much progress that Arlo was too blind to drive, which is why his son Donald had to take a day off from work and come all the way from

Davenport to bring Arlo into town. Donald hauled him around all morning, buying him shoes and picking up prescriptions and getting the oil changed on the Oldsmobile. They watched the News at Noon together in the ophthalmologist's waiting room, their long, bony frames folded into upholstered chairs, Donald's bald head aimed at the television screen, Arlo's aimed at the wall above and to the left of it. When the newscaster announced a tragedy early that morning in southwest Muscatine County, they both leaned closer to the TV. Arlo was able to make out a pickup truck on its side in a ditch behind the reporter, but he wouldn't have recognized the fence and pasture in the background if Donald hadn't cried out, "My God, Dad, that's your place!"

Arlo sat up straight, plunging the TV into the hole in the middle of his field of vision. He turned his head side to side like a bird, trying to find it again.

All the way home, his son Donald gripped the steering wheel and asked how could it happen, how could it happen? Arlo thought the newscaster had made it pretty clear how it happened--a kid with a brand-new driver's license cutting across the farm on the dirt road behind Emily's pasture, late for school, driving too fast, losing control and flipping into the ditch, the two children in the truck bed flying out of the back like popcorn. Arlo exhaled slowly. He closed his eyes. In his agitation, Donald was over-compensating for the slightly loose steering of Arlo's Oldsmobile. The car was his late wife Emily's idea. No more pickup trucks, Arlo, she said. You only live once. Arlo rolled down the window and concentrated on breathing through his mouth, which was Emily's remedy for nausea. When they reached the farm and turned onto the dirt road themselves, he felt the car climbing and then coasting down the sharp incline, rumbling over the ruts, slower and slower, until it finally rolled to a stop.

"Jesus," said Donald. He turned off the engine.

Arlo opened his eyes. He caught a glimpse of something flapping outside the window. Donald was already out of the car, lifting his knees high to clear goldenrod and ragweed. After a brief struggle with his seatbelt, Arlo also emerged. It took a moment of angling his head this way and that for him to see that the fluttering and flapping had something to do with the fence that enclosed the pasture.

The fence was in bloom, a whole ten-foot section of it decked with plastic roses, lily-laden crosses, wreaths of baby's breath and mums. Nestled among the flowers were toys--a teddy bear, a Barbie doll, some kind of spaceship--and here and there, articles of clothing waved like banners. Craning his long neck and squinting, Arlo made out a little plaid shirt and a white dress.

"What the hell is this?" he said.

"They were Mexican children," said Donald, as if that explained everything.

Arlo tilted his head to bring Donald's face into view.

"I want that crap off my fence," he said.

Later, when they were eating supper at the Kruegers' place down the road, Donald said, "But think of those kids, Dad, how their parents must feel."

Arlo took most of his evening meals with the Kruegers. They lived in a brick ranch house that Arlo and Emily had built for Donald, who'd never lived there. The Kruegers farmed the place for Arlo now. They agreed with Donald about the fence. "We can't just take the stuff down," said Jill Krueger. Her husband, Casey, added, "It's like-it's a memorial to their kids."

"Cemetery's the place for that," Arlo said around the bulge of dinner roll and spinach stuffed in his cheek. His table manners had declined since Emily died.

"But it's part of their culture," Donald said.

"It's their culture," said Arlo, "but it's my fence."

The next morning, Arlo looked out the window and saw the section of fence glittering as the sun came up behind it, like somebody'd flipped a switch, everywhere tiny sparks of light. He made Jill drive him around the pasture to see. They found the fence decked with tinsel garlands and dotted with snapshots and portraits in plastic and metal frames: a little boy in a white shirt and bow tie, a girl in her First Communion dress and veil. By the time Arlo waded from the fence back to the car, his trousers were soaked up to his knees with dew, and he was breathing hard. He didn't wait until after five to call Donald in Davenport.

"They got more and more junk out there," he told Donald on the phone. "Looks like shit."

"Look, Dad," Donald said, and Arlo could tell right away that he probably shouldn't have used the emergency auto-dial button. In Davenport, Donald was the executive director of something, Arlo wasn't sure what. "What do you care what's on the fence anyway?" Donald said. "If somebody hadn't told you it was there--"

"I can see it from the window," Arlo said. What he wanted to see was the sunrise, the red fading to coral around the dark space in the middle of things, the undersides of clouds shot with light from below. Arlo watched the sun rise every morning. He liked the suspense of it, the sense that Something's coming. He liked how, just when you thought it was all over, a hole would open sometimes in the clouds and rays of the sun would come shooting out of it, lifting your heart a little. Arlo felt closest to Emily at this time of day. She used to say that it gave her a strange feeling to see the same magnificent display of color that the dinosaurs saw. Arlo wasn't sure that dinosaurs could see in color--some animals don't--but Emily said, Hush, Arlo. She said it was the same sunrise that Indian maidens looked at and Egyptian pharaohs and John the Baptist and her own mother and father. They were all dead now, but they had watched the same sunrise. She said: It's where we all catch up with each other.

"Are you telling me that you can see the fence all the way across the pasture?" Donald sounded doubtful. "From the house you can see it?"

"That's right," said Arlo. Even with his eyes closed he could see it, a glittery smear on the fence.

"I don't know, Dad. Casey's afraid you'll never get anybody to work on the farm again if he takes the stuff down. Jill said the priest called and he says the same thing. This kind of thing is very important in their culture."

Arlo was tired of hearing about their culture. "Casey's got nothing to worry about," he said. "I can call Ted Hobart. His grandson has a couple friends can help me out here. They'll be glad for the chance--"

"To tangle with the Mexicans?" "--to make a few bucks!" said Arlo.

"Look, Dad," Donald said, trying a different tack. "Put yourself in their place."

"I been in their place," Arlo said. "And so have you. But I guess you forgot all about that by now."

The silence at the other end of the line went on for so long that Arlo turned up his hearing aid. He flinched when Donald's voice boomed, "I haven't forgotten anything." Clawing at his ear, Arlo turned the volume down too far, brought it back up, and caught the end of what Donald was saying: "--exactly why I understand where these poor parents are coming from."

"They're coming from Mexico," Arlo said. Not that he wished this kind of grief on them, even if they were. He didn't wish this kind of grief on anybody.

"Jesus, Dad. Is that why--is that what this is all about?"

Arlo couldn't figure out why nobody else understood. These things happened to people. Twenty-two years ago it had happened to them--hadn't it?--when that girl Donald never quite married drove off the road, but they hadn't gone and dumped a load of baby clothes and flowers on I-80 twenty-two years ago, had they? No. They had cleaned all the doodads and pink-and-blue out of the baby's room and taken it to Goodwill. Nobody--not even the girl--thought they ought to have piled the stuff up by the DeWitt exit with a big flowered cross on top of it all.

"Dad?"

Arlo couldn't remember the girl's name. Emily would know.

"DAD? I've got work to do. Are you still there?"

Sometimes Arlo believed that Emily's illness had started with that accident, that the grief had weakened her. Maybe it was holding the dead baby in her arms at the hospital. Or sitting with Donald night and day in the waiting room until the girl was out of the woods, striking bargains with the Powers That Be. Emily was the kind who would say, Take me, Lord, take me instead. The way Arlo saw it, God had waited years to take her up on that offer, and then, once He got started, He took His own sweet time about it, whittling away at her for so long that by the time she died, everybody except Arlo had forgotten who she was, who she used to be.

"Dad, I'll give you ten seconds. You called me, remember? I don't know why you do this."

He had tried making a few deals himself, especially in the beginning. When Emily couldn't hang onto a pen or a fork anymore, Arlo promised to give up using his right hand, too, if God would stop right there and leave her be. Arlo kept his side of that bargain for a long time, even signing his name with his left hand and dressing himself the way she had to, struggling with the buttons, the impossible zippers. Oh, Arlo, don't, she used to say, although it took a trained ear like his to hear her words as anything but a groan.

"DAD--CAN YOU HEAR ME?"

"I hear you," Arlo said.

"Listen. Just hold off on Ted Hobart, will you? Don't call him until we talk. Can you do that?"

Arlo shook his head. He had learned from long experience that God did not negotiate. God stuck to His guns, and so would Arlo. In a way, he figured he was doing those Mexicans a favor, setting them straight instead of letting them kid themselves. They were crazy if they thought putting flowers on a fence made any difference to God. God wasn't even looking.

Donald sprang the priest on Arlo two days later, timing his arrival to coincide with the end of Arlo's lunch. As Jill Krueger brought lemon bars and coffee out to her dining room--on a tray, Arlo noted suspiciously, tilting his head to one side--there was a knock on the back door. He heard voices in the kitchen and snatched a lemon bar, intending to flee out the front, but they were too quick for him. Before he knew it, he was sitting at one end of the sofa in the Kruegers' living room and the priest was at the other, perched half in and half out of the hole in the center of Arlo' s vision. A Mexican woman the priest introduced as Lupe Alvarez sat on a wing chair, wringing her hands. Lupe' s son had been driving the pickup truck, the priest said. Donald, who must have taken another day off from work, sat down on the matching hassock in front of the woman's chair.

Arlo didn't know the woman, but he recognized the priest, even with his head bobbing in and out of view. It was the same priest who had talked to him after the funeral, about letting them clean out Emily's room. (Every time they tried to get in, Arlo had barricaded the door with her recliner.) The priest had talked to Arlo then about stages of grief and letting go and the importance of sickroom hygiene. He had quoted this scripture and that scripture. He advised Arlo not to make a religion out of his grief, reminding him of the First Commandment: "Thou shalt not have strange gods before Me."

Arlo had said, "The hell with God."

Donald scolded him for it later. "What would Mom think to hear you talk like that?"

The question had surprised Arlo, who knew exactly what Emily thought. (What a thing to say to a priest, Arlo!) During her last year of imprisonment in silence and immobility, when she couldn't even smile or blink anymore to let him know she was there, Arlo had learned how to listen to what Emily couldn't say. He had learned that when you shut out all distractions and really focus on a person, when you train yourself to anticipate her every need, her every itch and ache and desire, you soon come to feel not only the bones, the loose skin, the wasted muscle, but the mind at work, the electricity reaching out of her eyes and her skin, filling the room. Even now, three years after she died, Arlo could feel her presence like a breeze from the window, like the smell of lilacs on the porch. He could hear her voice in his head.

"Mr. Johnson," the priest said, "we've come to ask you to reconsider your position on the fence."

Sometimes he saw her, too.

The first time, he was sitting on the back porch, not long after the sun came up, watching starlings light on the fence. All of a sudden, Emily was standing in the pasture. She might have been on her way to clean out stalls in the barn, wearing his old bib overalls with the crotch seam at her knees and the rolled-up legs flopping over the tops of her boots.

"These people believe that their children's souls are at stake, Mr. Johnson."

When Arlo stood up, she had vanished.

"They need to mark the fence," the priest said, speaking slowly now, as if Arlo might not understand, "in order to help the children find their way to heaven."

"And do you believe that?" Arlo asked suddenly. He skewed his head sideways at the priest. "Do you believe my fence is the gateway to paradise?"

"The point is, Mr. Johnson, these people are not going to stand by and watch you endanger their children's souls."

You couldn't tell he was a priest by looking at him, Arlo thought. He looked younger than Donald--at least he had more hair--and he wore a plaid sport shirt with his black trousers. He was leaning toward Arlo in such a way that his head seemed detached and floating above a pair of hands that held a cup and saucer. Seeing that he had Arlo's attention, the priest repeated, "They're not going to stand by."

Arlo said, "Are you threatening me, Father?"

"For heaven's sake, Dad!"

Arlo had forgotten Donald was there. Sitting on the hassock, he looked like an overgrown kid. His knees were almost level with his ears.

The priest set his cup and saucer down. He leaned closer to Arlo, his hands on his thighs and his head gone entirely, plunged into the abyss. To Arlo, the priest seemed not only headless but crouching, getting ready to spring. "All they're asking," the priest said, "is that you leave the children's things on the fence."

"I know what they're asking," Arlo said. "What I don' tknow is why I'm supposed to let these people litter up my property."

"Litter?" said Donald. "Oh, Dad."

The priest's head reappeared. He said a few Spanish words to the Mexican woman and she stood up at once, looking at Arlo as if he were an object that she didn't recognize. She left the room without a word. They heard the screen door squeak and slam in the kitchen.

The priest stood up next, then Donald. "Lupe' s son is not expected to recover," Donald told Arlo in a tone of voice that said, Are you happy now?

Arlo looked at both of them head on, blotting them out.

"The fact is," he said, "if all that junk was spread out on the highway, somebody would be spearing it up and sticking it in garbage bags."

He heard the screen door slam again.

Arlo heard an engine starting up. He went to the window and leaned toward the, glass as if he were listening to it. He could see a b lack and yellow shape in the driveway--a van or a panel truck with flames painted on the side--the priest vanishing into it. He waited until the dust settled before he ducked down the road to his place, tilting his head at the angle required to watch his step on the gravel. From the driveway, he counted three steps up onto the back porch, avoiding the broken one, and turned around to face the pasture. She was a trick his brain was playing on him, the ophthalmologist said. He saw other things, too, after all. How many times had he flinched away from walking into a phantom door or a Christmas tree? He'd seen several Christmas trees. His brain was trying to fill in the blank space in his vision with pictures from his memory, the ophthalmologist said. Arlo had asked, "Will I see her again?"

When Donald hired a Mexican woman to help Jill Krueger clean out Emily's room, Arlo had finally given up and let them in. Her room used to be the kitchen in the old farmhouse, so it was an easy haul out the back door and over the porch rail into the pickup they had parked in the driveway behind the place. They had dragged her mattress and blankets and pillows, mountains of pillows, out the door and across the porch, letting the screen bang-bang-bang shut like pistol shots behind them. Arlo sat in Emily's recliner the whole time. He watched the women put on rubber gloves to gather things from the top of the dresser-long snakey tubes of milky plastic, pumps and funnels, fat syringes without needles. They filled three garbage bags with things. They took down the curtains and cleaned the carpet and the windows and walls, hell-bent on removing every last trace of Emily from the room.

The doctor said, "You might."

He couldn't resist trying to make it happen after that, staring out into the pasture until his eyes ached or aiming his gaze at her reclining chair. It never worked. His brain liked to catch him off guard. Once, she was sitting across the table from him at supper. He spread his napkin hastily on his lap, but when he looked up, she was gone. Another time, she was in the pasture again, sitting in a pink armchair they'd thrown away years ago, reading to a little boy in her lap. It was Donald! Arlo realized, his heart going hollow.

Twice, she was holding a baby in her arms.

Arlo stood very still on the porch. The pasture dipped away from the old farmhouse and then rose, gradually at first, so that the fence on the other side ran along the crest of a hill like spiky plates on the spine of a dinosaur. Someone had tied balloons to the fence this morning. Every day there was something new. Arlo closed one eye and stared straight ahead with the other one. "Emily?" he said. The edges of the darkness wavered a little in the sunlight, but that was all.

The trouble with Ted Hobart's grandson, Arlo decided on Saturday, was that he couldn't do two things at once, like drive and follow directions. Arlo had told the boy exactly where to go: turn right out of the driveway and then stay on the gravel until you get to the evergreen trees at the corner of the pasture. You couldn't miss those big spruces. Emily said they looked like giant green-skirted people holding hands along the fence. They had made too many turns already, but Arlo couldn't see a thing, the way the kid was driving, Ted Hobart's brand-new pickup truck bouncing along like a carnival ride. Arlo took long breaths and hoped the two boys in the back were holding on tight. When the pickup dipped suddenly to the right and stopped, he felt the shotgun slipping off his lap and grabbed for it. Then, through the windshield, he saw spruces out there, waving their skirts.

"This is it!" he said.

Ted Hobart's grandson ducked his head to look past Arlo out the window. "Pretty sad," he said.

"Looks even worse from the other side," said Arlo.

The boys set up his lawnchair by the roadside, and Arlo dozed off to the sound of plastic bags snapping, his hands hanging limp over the shotgun that bridged the arms of his chair. Emily didn't think much of the shotgun, even if it wasn't loaded. It's just for show, Arlo told her, in case we get company, but she was unconvinced. You're asking for trouble, Arlo, she told him. That's what you're doing.

He woke with a start when the van went by--a black and yellow blur that disappeared over the top of the hill, the boys at the fence turning to look. They could hear it tearing up the gravel as it turned around. In a matter of seconds it popped up again, fishtailed down the hill, and stopped in a cloud of dust. Men poured out--surely too many to fit inside, Arlo thought--maybe a dozen of them, wearing some kind of uniform, wielding rakes and shovels. They had Ted Hobart's grandson and his friends surrounded in a minute.

The boys froze with their backs to the fence, garbage bags in hand. One of the Mexicans said something--he was a big man who hefted an iron rake like a javelin--and the boys dropped the garbage bags. Arlo stood up then, perhaps a little too quickly, for the lumpy ground seemed to roll under his feet. Steady, Arlo, steady! He sat back down hard. For one panicky moment he felt the lawnchair about to collapse under him, but then it ratcheted back into place with a bump. The bump was followed by an explosion. The shotgun bucked in Arlo's hands. All around him, men and boys dropped to the ground.

Long seconds passed in which the only sounds were the wind swishing the trees' skirts and snapping the bags, and Arlo's heart banging like a fist against his ribs.

When he could breathe again, he angled his head fearfully from the fence to the van, certain that the next slice of the scene would contain a bloody chest or a headless corpse. He saw men and boys face down, flattening the weeds, covering their heads with their arms. Some of them were peeking at him from the crooks of their elbows. It seemed that no one had been hit. Arlo cleared his throat and said, "All right." His ears were ringing and his heart was still pounding hard. "All right then," he said. He stood up again, more carefully this time, gripping the gun. Everyone else stayed on the ground for another moment, and then the Mexicans started getting to their feet, one by one. They backed off slowly, some shouldering their rakes and shovels like rifles, keeping an eye on Arlo while they headed for the van. They looked strange, backing away, like a film in reverse. Arlo saw now that they weren't wearing uniforms. They were wearing suits and ties.

Ted Hobart's grandson and his friends waited until the van disappeared down the hill. Then they ran for the pickup.

"Hey!" Arlo yelled, his breath raw in his throat. He hoisted the lawnchair as if to block their way. "What's the matter with you? Pick up those bags!"

The boys snatched the lawnchair and threw it over his head into the truck.

From his back porch, after the boys left, Arlo saw the van full of Mexicans reappear on the other side of the pasture. He could make out figures moving, swarming over the fence, until the whole glittery smear was gone.

"They took everything down," he said.

He knew what Emily was thinking.

That's what you wanted, isn't it?

He turned to go inside and stepped on something that bent and broke under his foot. When he stooped to have a look, he found an empty metal picture frame. The jagged corner of it almost cut his thumb.

"What's this?" he asked Emily.

She said, Somebody must have dropped it.

Now there was a person on the porch. Arlo saw the shadowy figure through the lace curtains on the door. A woman, he thought, and stuck his nose in the curtains to get a better look. He saw scraps of blue dress, brown face, black hair. On the other side of the door, the woman stepped closer, as if she were trying to see inside. Arlo stepped back. "It's one of them," he said. "What are they doing here?"

You could open the door and find out.

"Buenas dias, Senor Johnson," the woman said through the screen.

Let her in, Arlo.

Inside, the woman went directly to Emily's recliner and, without being asked, sat down. She looked around the room, nodding slowly. Her dark hands patted the arms of the recliner. She said, "I feel her, senor. She is here."

"Emily?" Arlo said. "Are you talking about Emily?"

"This is her chair," the woman said. She frowned, searching for words. "And that?" She pointed.

"That's her wheelchair," Arlo said. It was in the corner, draped in sheepskin. He had fought to keep the wheelchair. Donald wanted to donate it somewhere.

The woman repeated, "Wheel chair." She looked at the bookcase. "And books. Many books."

"I used to read to her every day," Arlo said. He could still read then, when Emily was alive.

"She is still here," the Mexican woman said.

"Yes!" Arlo said, eagerly now. "Yes."

"She can still find the way."

Arlo sat down on a kitchen chair across from the recliner. He wanted to explain that Emily was always here, always with him. She didn't need to find the way. Arlo would have liked to make that clear to this woman--what was her name? Did he know her name?

"Or maybe she is lost, like my Carlito."

"Who?" Arlo was suddenly alert. He sat up straight. "You're one of them," he said, reminding himself. "Look," he said. He pointed out the back door. "They came and took everything down--your own people."

The woman ignored him. "Every day I feel in me the empty place"--she laid her hand flat on her chest--"for Carlito. My little boy." Her words were measured, slow, as if she had written them out and memorized them. "He cannot find the way. He is lost."

"Listen," Arlo said. "I'll tell you something--something that priest of yours would tell you if he knew his business. It, s a lot of superstition to think you have to leave that junk"--Arlo!--"on the fence for those kids to get to heaven, or whatever you believe. In your culture."

Don't be unkind!

"They cannot find the way," the woman said.

"It won't do those kids a damn bit of good to have my fence covered with junk."

Oh, Arlo.

The woman said nothing. He wondered how much she understood. He didn't want to hurt her. He didn't want to hurt anybody. But they had to face the truth. All this nonsense about finding the way--as if those kids were hanging around in the pasture, waiting for something. "Those kids are gone!" Arlo said aloud. "The place is empty"--here he thumped his chest with his fist-"because they're gone! You can't fill it up with flowers and shit. You can never fill it up--never! Those kids are gone!" He turned his face to the Mexican woman, casting her into darkness, and for a flickering instant, he saw Emily in the chair instead, her head flopped forward like a wilted flower. Arlo took a sharp breath and with a mighty effort he pushed himself to his feet.

"I feel her sadness, senior."

The black hole in front of Arlo rippled like a flag. He blinked to make it still. The chair was empty now.

The woman was standing by the door.

"She wants to leave this place, senior. She wants to go home. Just like my Carlito."

Arlo heard them in his sleep that night when they came to do what they had come to do. He heard them at the bedroom windows and on the porch, whispers and missteps, rustling, creaking, mysterious ka-thunks. At one point, someone stopped right below the window next to his bed and Arlo heard soft, plosive sounds, rows of b's and d's, rapid speech that seemed to dwell at the very edge of his understanding, the way Emily's words had stopped, after a time, just before the threshold of comprehension.

In the morning, he knew as soon as he opened his eyes that the light in the room was different. Troubled, somehow. Coming through the windows on either side of the dresser, the rays of the sun had a funny shape. They were dappled and lacy on the white bedspread. Arlo sat up in bed and swung his legs over the side to find his slippers. He thought he heard the back door open and shut. "Who's there?" he called, and when no one answered, he said, more quietly, "Emily?"

The smell drew him to the door, a heady blend of mold and perfume that took him straight back to Emily's funeral--kids running around, the buzz of voices, everyone relieved that her suffering was over at last. Even after his slippers had inched over the sill, it took him a moment to see that her room was filled with flowers. There were wreaths and sprays, pots of lilies, loose flowers strewn across the floor, and on the seat of the reclining chair in which Emily died (at first, perhaps, gazing out the window, and then not gazing) stood a cross completely covered in pink and white carnations. The cross was as tall as the back of the chair and it wore a load of tinsel like a neckscarf. For a heart-stopping moment, Arlo thought it was a little person standing there.

He heard more noises on the porch. He wanted to demand, "Who's there?" but the knowledge that whoever was out there had been in here kept him quiet. No matter which way he turned, a flowery thicket crowded around the darkness in the center of the room. What could Arlo do but move straight through that darkness, trampling flowers and knocking things over, until he reached the back door? From there, he stepped into a blaze of sunrise that seemed aimed right at him, the light so bright it made the porch floor rise under his feet. He fell back against the side of the house, clutching for support, and came away with a piece of cloth in his hand.

In a stand of trees near the farmhouse, van doors slammed shut at the very moment when Arlo blindly snatched the plaid shirt from its place among the flowers around his door. He raised the shirt in front of his face, moving it up and down, left and right, trying to see. To the driver of the black van streaked with flames, it looked as if the old man was blessing something--maybe the cows in the pasture, maybe the fence beyond, maybe the woman standing near the fence with the baby in her arms. To Arlo, dazzled by the sun, it seemed as if the trees themselves had sprouted doors to slam and an engine to sputter to life. Seconds from now, he would stumble down the steps into the driveway at the very moment when the van shot past, opening the sky for him like a blue gate. But first, as if to show the way, a host of starlings swooped into view, a great shining cloud of them, their iridescent wings descending on the cows. Arlo whispered, "Emily?" and they swept back up into the sky.

Mary Helen Stefaniak's fiction has appeared most recently in the Iowa Review, EPOCH, and New Stories from the South 2000. She is currently at work on a book of three novellas and teaches at Creighton University. Her work first appeared in our pages in spring 2000.