In the clearing, then through it, at the water.
Jim, a voice said.
John Newcomen turned his head. He saw the dull tip of a musket.
He’ll kill me without knowing my name, Newcomen thought.
Jim, John Billington said. Have another look.
He’d come this far, across the Atlantic. Survived seven weeks at sea. Had not died from storm, pirates, the seamen’s illness. Now, this man. For a single acre.
Newcomen closed his eyes.
The sunlight dappled through fluttering leaves, which he could see though his eyes were shut. He’d left Eugenia in her good summer dress, the wind blowing. Eugenia at the top of the hill, the smile she gave him in recognition. How he preferred to watch her when she did not know he was looking.
His mother’s hand across his forehead, her worried expression when he had a fever. The time she took him to see the geese in their grand flight south.
Newcomen turned to Billington to try to say anything to pardon himself from this wild man’s whims.
Then a deep inward plunge, the face of his stepfather, glassy-eyed with drink, pulling him from his bed, and under it, into a hole whose depths were boundless.