For weeks later she has dreams almost every other night concerning her father — in one he says “Save me, I’m drowning in dirt,” in another he greets her with a formal handshake while she has her arms out for a hug and kiss, asks her to cup her hands, she does and he spoons a pyramid of earth in each palm and says “One more time?” in another she gets a telegram saying “My dearest child, I am completely in pieces and unmotivatedly scatterbrained, is there no rhyme not to say a season why you’re also not distraught, my deepest regards to those authorities above who might be able to do something to redress this, your loving poppy, Nat,” in another he’s a boy of about six sitting on her lap and she’s supposed to be his mother she thinks in the dream “but how’s that? since he’s this and I’m his,” when he says “Mamma grammar, divided we’re lame, together we contaminated, do you know that hysterical smote? — who said it second? ah, I could never teach you nuttin’,” and dives off into a hole in the sofa and disappears, in another he appears in the distance riding a horse, shouts “Hi-ho, my Margo, hi-ho,” and rides closer waving a sword over his head, stops under her bedroom window still shouting hi-ho, her husband stirs in bed m the dream and says in his sleep “Largo, heed the drosses, need the worms, give them crosses, sieve the burns,” she says “Glendon, wake up, be up, we’ve got to start making some sense,” and to her father from bed “Daddy, hide away, now, bow,” and her father says from below, still seated on the horse but sword sheathed, “Dearest Julie, I mean my darling Margo, I’m so lonesome, separated, throw me a rope, I want to crawl up and join you,” same night in another dream he’s standing talking to her cordially, seems like an art opening at a gallery, then a cocktail party at her home, he seems to be a friend of a couple she invited and he clinks her glass with his and says “So how’s the weather up there?” “Am I that tall to you?” “I’m talking real weather, lady: shrouds, tornadoes, lightning storms,” “Excuse me but who brought you, the Kahns, the Kanes?” “I’m still asking weather, missus, weather,” “Weather? where? we’re both in the same spot and consanguineous, Father, indoors,” “Hardly, earthly, cementally, it’s as dark as a person can see, though I love you neverthebestly, I mean beastly,” then he suddenly becomes a rat, same size and color as one but with her father’s face, and leaps onto her chest and starts scratching at her eyes and she swats it off and runs out of the house, her husband in pajamas, when in her dream she thinks “That’s funny, he only sleeps nude,” yelling from their bedroom window “Come back, he’s scampering up the vines, I told you we should’ve cut them down, now he’s coming through the window, don’t leave me be a solitary speck with him, he still has all his teeth and the rat can bite,” in another her father’s a mosquito buzzing around her head and she says “Stay away, now stay away — okay, don’t say I didn’t warn you, for I can get murderously allergic to bugs, having attacks like you’ve never seen,” and slaps at it but keeps missing, then she doesn’t see or hear it and while she’s looking around and listening for it it lands on her arm, she watches it stick its proboscis in, “Wait till it’s drawing blood,” she thinks, “even if there is some pain it’ll be worth it,” counts to six, whispers “Time,” and slaps it hard and lifts her hand to see what she thinks will be its squished bloody carcass even if it is a male, but nothing’s there and she yells “Damn air pockets, damned if they’re there, damned if they’re not, but I still might have nipped its tip if not flattened it and it’s dead or dying on the floor and all I got to do is step on it,” when it starts buzzing around her head and she says “I can take it, you don’t bother me so don’t think you do, I can take much more than this so you’ll just have to do your sneaky biting and then buzz away on your own, for I’m not wasting another wave on you,” in another she’s sleeping alone and he pushes open her bedroom door with his head and crawls into the room and up to her ear and says into it “I miss you, I miss your sis most persistently not to mention you, what dries up isn’t a scream, what cries down isn’t a dream, I can come up with these long after you’re sufficiently sick of them and me, fried, dried, you got it, so make more meaning out of me, my sweet, release me, let me already Margo,” and she says in her dream half asleep “But it’s you, goddamnit, you, I did everything good I could, cried, dried, so all right, didn’t fly, but that’s over and done with so now let me sleep,” and her eyes close and in her dream-sleep she dreams of hovering butterflies and bees, a flower garden with a deer eating the sweet peas, and a few hundred feet behind it an old barn with several big holes in the roof and its doors off and a buggy in a cow stall showing through and nothing else around but pasture with the tall grass being jerked by the wind, and she thinks “Peaceful, I like it, even the peas, by God, even the sky, blue with downy clouds, and thank goodness, nothing of him,” in another she and a grown-up Julie enter an empty cottage she and her family rent for two weeks every summer, wonders where’s the ramshackle furniture that practically makes the place in addition to the missing woodstove and the picture postcards of artworks she’s tacked to the door frames and the owner till now hasn’t taken off, hears tapping under the floor and says “What’s that?” “What’s up?” Julie says, “I don’t hear or see anything,” “That tap-tap, tap-tap, it’s even louder now and could be a code of some sort, Morse, lost, from under the floorboards,” and Julie says “You’re seeing things again, hon, for what floor, who boards?” and she says “And pardon me, my nearest miss, but you’ve either lost all your sensory powers or I don’t know what, lower powers, infrapowers,” and says to the floor “Tell her in taps or words if there is someone down there for I don’t want to appear hard of feeling,” and he says “Yeah, it’s me, Daddy, to you both though you’re so much apart, hidden from you while I’m hiding from one of the Axis, and if they find me, the Nazis particularly, I’ll be pitched into an infinite dip like everyone else of my kind, first shot, stabbed or gassed or eaten by dogs or two of those or three,” “Maybe Julie can help you, sir, but I’ve got to inform you I’m not that sort of daughter and don’t see how I could ever be, in fact now that I know you’re there and wanted, if I don’t say anything I’ll be risking all our lives for yours — even mine, let me tell ya, which I have to admit is to me of much less significance, feeling deep down that being last on line and kind’s the only thing,” “Please, enough with heartfeltness and panoplied philosophies, pry open the fucking boards, help me out and to get away for I’m too goddamn weak to, and take me to my mother cunt where there are no such things as axioms and Nazis, then I’ll be free and never again need to ask you for anything for me,” “No can do,” and Julie says “Who you speaking to, hon, me?” and she says “Yup, you, nope, me, maybe, unclear, over, under,” in another she draws up a pail from a well and he’s cramped into it, chin pinned to his knees, rubbing his knuckles and looking asleep, pail’s seams stretched and buckling, in another he says to her in a barrens with no houses or other people around “The weather’s been so inclement out here, I can’t see any shooting stars this year, there are only another few days till the peak of the shower’s over, I wish I could go back to where I started from to see it better, would you buy me a ticket?”