On the Night Plain

Grant set out early for the summer range. It wasn’t far but he intended to take his time and spend a night camped in the hills. A night out might do him good: Kittredge and Cotter were living in the house now. In truth he didn’t much like them there. Kittredge in particular was hard to bear. He mourned Neeler as if he was dead, dragging himself from room to room rendered worthless by grief. Cotter on the other hand remained impassive and practical, yet made it clear by his silence that he disapproved of the arrangements. Max had assumed an air of intense concentration, as if he was very busy doing some kind of work, which he wasn’t.

The sound of them recalled the sound of the family, of two or more of the boys fighting in the hours between supper and sleep or a baby waking hungry in the night. His father had been habitual. He got out of bed the moment he woke each morning, and he woke without a clock or whether the sun rose into a clear or storm-darkened sky. He woke, the bedboards groaned underneath him, his feet struck the floor at exactly the same moment, muffled by the frayed rag rug. He took four steps across the room to the closet and slipped a shirt off its hanger, which jangled against the others. Then he pulled on the shirt. He took his pants off their hook, then one foot and then the other thumped the floorboards, and he buckled his belt and slapped the buckle. Grant heard the routine asleep or awake. To the older boys it was an alarm: their father intended to wake them. But their mother made no sound at all when she rose. Larger than their father, she ought to have been heard, but she sat up and dressed by stealth and was posed before the stove when the boys came down, and depending on the year she may or may not have had a baby in the bassinet beside her shielded by the pantry door.

Increasingly his memories were confused, who was alive at a specific time and who wasn’t, which boys were considered men and which weren’t. Some incidents, a fight or an accident, he recalled differently every time, once with Edwin as a central figure, another time with Max. On occasion he would place a brother into memory at an age he had never reached. He maintained a spurious image of a teenaged Robert swinging across the barn on a hanging rope, bellowing like Tarzan; even less plausibly he could remember Wesley taking his first steps. If one brother did something out of character, but in the character of another, Grant might remember the act performed by the second. Occasionally he even remembered himself doing something Edwin or Max had in fact done.

He suspected it was the nature of memory, not his own nature, that caused the confusion. The truth of a thing only existed as long as the thing itself, and afterward it changed with distance or perspective. His own experience of this very moment, a hot fogged summer morning, belonged only to him; it could not resemble the same moment lived by someone else, Sophia for instance.

She was unhappy here in the house, with the men. Grant feared she would leave them and the intensity of his fear disturbed him. After all, he didn’t have her now, and if she left he wouldn’t have her then either. But still: the sight of her drawn face turning away from his was too much to bear. For this reason above all others he chose now to visit the herder, putting himself into misery in order to put himself out of it.

He rode west toward the low hills in a light rain. The land was barely visible today, disguised by clouds and mist, its hidden edges arched like muscles. He kept his eyes trained on them as he passed the graveplot and burned quarters. For a long while he rode seeming to come no closer to the hills, then he was in among them, his face beaded with haze, his hat dripping water on his fingers around the saddlehorn. The damp got up under his coat and the clothes pressed coolly against his skin.

He was in no hurry to find the herder. Instead he let his nerves read the map of the terrain they had memorized. They spoke the right directions to the horse, guiding him along the trails, while in his mind’s eye Grant probed the gullies and creekbeds and meandered through the breaks for signs of bear.

In a while he dismounted and pissed and clambered up a sidehill to look around. From a little ways up he could see the first sheep a mile to the south, grazing in a lush depression which graduated into a hill, and now among gray rocks he could make out more of them, still and summerfat and out of danger. There was no sign of Murray and no rain either, only a gray wet heat.

Satisfied, he went back and loosened the horse’s saddle and sacking and took out the bits. Then he found a dry outcrop and sat. He shucked off his hat and coat and took in the whole living highland.

Yesterday, in the wake of the sheep dream, he’d set to his father’s affairs, bringing the will into town for the lawyer and writing a letter to his aunt in England. He’d sat thinking half an hour without setting a word to paper. In the end he kept to the facts: their father was dead, and if she was ever to come to America she would be welcomed. When he told people in town what had happened they offered their condolence. Jean Tate came around the counter and took him in her arms. Her body, though unchanged, was a foreign thing to him, and unforgiving. Surely this wasn’t something in Jean but something in him. He felt stunted, impotent. The Persons were like a shrub cut back too far, he thought. His father’s sister had had no children he knew of, there had never been talk of cousins. On his mother’s side were brothers and sisters who’d resented her leaving Iceland with an Englishman and never spoke to her again. Grant didn’t even know if they’d been informed of her death. He supposed not. He couldn’t imagine himself marrying, couldn’t imagine his body giving any woman a child.

After a time his thoughts began to embarrass him. He stood and went back to his horse and tightened up the riggings. In a few minutes he was among the sheep and the dogs ran out to meet him. They knew him now by scent and sight and made little noise, careful not to spook the flock as they led him to Murray’s wagon.

The herder was inside making his supper, the elkskin door pushed aside to admit the air. He was holding a potato in one hand and a bent table fork in the other. Without his glasses he looked pitifully insubstantial, something that would wilt in sunlight. Grant leaned his head in and asked him how he was doing.

A couple of downers a couple of days ago. It ain’t catching, if that’s what you ask me next.

Grant nodded, unsure of how to say what he’d come to say. Then the herder surprised him by inviting him in for dinner. It was only beans and potatoes, he said, but huckleberries were ripe on the bush and he’d gotten to them before the bears and birds. They could have some for dessert.

All right, Grant said. He went to his horse and took a bottle and some letters out of the pannier. Murray nodded as he received them, in acknowledgment, not thanks.

They ate under the tin canopy of the wagon then sat outside on folding stools to drink. Murray glanced at his letters before sliding them in between the buttons of his shirt.

Grant endured Murray’s glare for a moment then told him about the fire. Murray had little reaction. It was none of his concern.

And our daddy turned up, Grant went on. He was in Lewiston, Idaho. I hate to have to tell you he’s dead. We brought him back and buried him.

The herder nodded patiently, as if he’d already heard this and was only listening to be polite. He sipped the whiskey from his cup and looked off across the valley to where the dogs were running. Murray’s odd cordiality settled over Grant, making him a little uncomfortable. He waited with real apprehension for the response.

He followed Murray’s gaze to a nondescript faraway grasspatch. Then the men turned to one another at once. In the herder’s eyes was a familiar disappointment. Sell the whole outfit? Grant said. No. No, we’ll stay. Nothing’ll change.

He looked into his whiskey, reflecting rippled sky. There was some sun now and he felt hot. Murray reached into his shirt and took out the letters. He tore one open along the flap and removed a folded piece of paper. After reading it he handed it to Grant. It was hard to decipher, the shaky hand riddled with crossouts.

Dear Thomas, I dont have much to say. The girls are growin. The lettuce is all aten by rabbits but we dont miss it to much. A new calf the girls named it Jenny. Send money please we need it

Sally

When Grant didn’t say anything further he went on. The hell ye won’t sell, he spat. Comin’ and goin’ the way ye done.

Murray drank his drink and leveled a look at Grant frighteningly direct, the look of a creature ignorant of danger. Y’don’t even know who ye are, he said, and he took the letter from Grant’s hand.

The herder’s silence afterward was unembarrassed. He continued to drink, wincing after each sip with a painful satisfaction as if some loose bone was being snapped back into place. Grant thanked the herder for his hospitality. He felt no malice toward Murray, only a desire to get away. He set the whiskey down on the ground and stood, his knees audibly cracking. It’d be dark in an hour or so, he said, he wanted to get somewhere he could bed down. The undersides of the clouds were pinking up and the brightest stars were visible, and Venus and Mars. Behind him the dogs were egging the sheep back toward camp. He could sense the flock clustering nearby, the way you could sense changing weather.

Murray stayed on his stool, the wrinkled letter still in his hand and the ripped envelope trembling in the windshook grass beside him. He was still there when Grant left, and again when he looked back from the far end of the spur where the horse had led him. Then he was in the next canyon with the bottomland spread out far below, and Murray was gone from his sight.

He set up camp in a clearing above a creek where he could wake and look down on the water flowing, a hundred feet downslope. In the morning he would pick his way there to wash. He’d bedded here before, as had others before him. A flat patch had been worn around a rock circle that surrounded scattered ash and bone. Dry twigs and thick branches could be found in a mossy deadfall not far from the camp. It was his favorite time of the traveling day, when there’s no reason to wander into dark woods and your horse is satisfied and still, and everything you want or need is inside the circle of fireglow. He’d brought a book to read, but instead he lay in his bedroll and tried to picture the woman who had wed herself to Murray and borne his children. Murray must have thought they would keep him, or he them. Maybe he’d once imagined they would tend sheep together, living off berries and game and potatoes planted in loose soil all across their territory.

But Grant could envision only his own mother, daughters she might have had, hard little girls who would seem to have cleaved directly from her with nothing of his father in them at all. They might have saved her life, daughters. Girls are shrewder and more adaptable than boys, he thought. They wouldn’t have succumbed to short lives of risk and pain the way his brothers had. They would be here now, strong and supple as greenwood.

Grant believed he’d been her favorite. Maybe not when Edwin was alive, not then. But after. After Edwin she brought him closer than before and gave him jobs to do that didn’t really need doing but which kept him near. It was to him she came in the night to tell him he mustn’t go to the war. Leave the killing to the killers, she said. She said, If one of you boys must go, God help me let it be your brother, and he didn’t know which brother she meant, and didn’t care. Tears were in her voice, though not her eyes, and he reached for her from his bed. But she had backed away. Stay, she said.

He did. He kept his mouth shut when to speak would have meant to leave her. But of course he would leave her himself in a few years and never see or speak to her again.

A part of him envied the squalid herder, his solitude, the simplicity of his work. The herder always knew what he was supposed to be doing. His tasks were dictated by the grass and sky and sheep. The flock wanted the same thing always, to eat and be impregnated, to sleep and to lamb. Love and family, the whole reckless world of men—there was nothing there for somebody so attuned to the gorgeous stupidity of nature.

Thornton could have been a herder. He was at ease among sheep, his empathy for them miraculous, his lumbering-head gait a human analog of theirs. Even his dark hair, curled by some providence, beaded rain like a sheep’s. When they were children they laughed at this affinity, and so did he. He understood his anomalous nature. To their father he was worthless, a beast that could neither be taught nor eaten. He terrified their mother, who was bound to receive his love and reciprocate without ever comprehending it. But the boys adored him, he was their saint and foil and secret.

Grant, he whispered that night outside the bedroom door, Grant, I want to talk to you. Grant could hear him waiting for an answer, his large body brushing the door. He could wait a long time, half the night if necessary. Once Grant had seen Thornton sit three hours in front of a prairie-dog hole. He’d watched him watch the moon span the sky. He got up and opened the door.

What is it, Thorn, he said. From across the hall came the sound of Max turning in bed.

Grant went back to the bed and pulled the covers up. Thornton sat at the far end. He sat there a while as if he’d forgotten why he came. Grant passed the time gazing out the dark window at the hillside obscuring the stars. The way the stars seemed to rise up out of the hillside like fireflies.

I don’t want you to be mad no more. I didn’t do nothing wrong, Thornton said, leaning in close, his hand on Grant’s ankle. I didn’t.

Thornton seemed to calm under his touch. He nodded, believing. Daddy said I’m going in the army.

Thornton was eighteen. He carried himself like a man did, his shoulders had the careful set, his hands were gentle and knowing and strong, a father’s. Though not their father’s. When Thornton was in town people treated him like a child, speaking slow and loud and high, or in the case of women mother-bright, or they offered him little gifts like a piece of candy, or worse, money. If anything he had become an adult sooner than the other boys. Early on he had the look of intense focus, as if upon something only he could see. He looked like the thinker that he was.

When he had left home they began to get letters. Another soldier wrote them, a boy named Granger with a florid style, the handwriting slanted and schooled, showing Thornton’s words and actions as seen from without. Sometimes, even now, when Grant thought about Thornton it was in this boy’s voice. They never met him. Thornton sends you his enduring love, a letter might say. Today he ran the obstacle course, it was a spectacular success. His dinner tonight was dreadful, the meat was old and tough. He misses riding horses and delighting in the fresh country air. The letters came three times weekly for the duration of Thornton’s training, and Max always got to them first and read them alone, often on the post-office steps. Only when he was through did he hand them over to their parents. Grant got them last.

He would have made a good herder, Thornton, alone in the camp wagon thinking his long thoughts. He loved his family but didn’t need their company, only their memory, only the happy fact of them. Maybe to Murray solitude was a bitter retreat from other people. But for Thornton it was the full embrace of a natural condition, his truest state of being.

When he shipped out, the letters stopped. In a few weeks he was dead, drowned alone in his cabin.

Okay. Good night. He rose from the bed and stood in the dark room breathing. Grant closed his eyes. In a while Thornton was gone. Grant could hear him trudging down the hall.

For all he knew Max still had the letters. He hadn’t seen them since the first day he read them. But it was no matter, Grant had what he needed committed to memory, the look of the papers and the writing and the sentences so clear they were almost better than Thornton himself.

The campfire was waning, the wood still piled upright as it had been when lit, as though it didn’t yet realize it was only ash and ember. Grant grabbed a branch from the dirt and drove it into the fire. The logs collapsed in a mist of sparks and glowed steady orange. He was hungry already but it was good to sleep hungry, he would wake with a reason to move. He closed his eyes and slept.

In the morning he rebuilt the fire. Then he went down to the creek and threw in a hook with a grasshopper on it. In a while he caught a brook trout. He gutted and fried it with a few wild onions tossed on top and he boiled coffee and ate a fine, lean breakfast, leaving something to be desired so that he could eat again later with equal satisfaction.

The horse led him up through a timbered stretch of woods and onto a ridge, which he followed south. He could see over the near hills to the flats, and beyond them to mountains a full county away. It was easy to imagine the glaciers moving through, leaving the stones ground smooth, easy to imagine it happening again.

All afternoon he hunted game. When he set up camp two pheasants hung from his riggings. That night he settled down and read his book, an adventure story about exploring the poles. He woke in the morning feeling as good as he had in five years. He rolled up his sougans into the pack covers breathing cold air and exhaling vapor in clouds, and when the sun reached him between the trees he could feel it penetrate right down to marrow.

He took the trails slowly, pausing often to examine a fossil or artifact or to enjoy a good view. For his dinner he ate a bird and some berries he’d found which left a tackiness on his hands. By afternoon he had sweated it off. He avoided the hills the herder was in and circled the ranch, finally coming down upon it from the northeast. The hills were smoother and near treeless with the infrequent outcrop breaking the flesh of grass. He used to come here sometimes with his mother the year after Thornton died. It was as far from home as she would venture on horseback. In Iceland she hadn’t traveled much beyond her home valley, and woods made her nervous. So Grant guided her, taught her how to find her way back without a compass by the pattern of hills, to distinguish natural forms and their variations. She liked this land whose characteristic feature was featurelessness. She told him she liked making her thoughts mirror the land. He remembered the way she looked on a horse, post-straight and high in the saddle as if expecting a spill.

They sent an officer from the base to deliver the news. Grant was with her in the yard. They took note of the road dust simultaneously and stopped what they were doing to watch. When the bug face of a jeep appeared on the rise he saw her chest expand with breath. At first he didn’t understand, then he did. He went over to her but something kept him back: he stood close without touching, as the jeep stopped and the man got out and came to them.

The officer saluted, then told them. She nodded. Grant looked from one to the other, stupefied, doubting not the truth of the words so much as the uniformed stranger himself, his crackling emotionless voice ringing out over their yard. His face shaven so close he gleamed.

His mother’s hand shot out to quiet him but didn’t quite reach all the way. The thin steady fingers a couple of inches from his shoulder.

There was an accident, the officer said, an explosion. Nobody survived. He blinked, shook his head. I’m sorry.

A pause stretched into seconds as his mother’s hand lingered in the air beside him. The sun was wedged between the shed and barn. The officer squinted against it, trying to maintain his composure.

She swallowed. Thank you, she said simply. The officer handed her a paper. Then he saluted again, got back in the jeep and disappeared into his own still-hanging dust.

Her hand fell but she stayed put, facing but not looking at the road. Grant stepped in front of her, into the path of her eyes. They moved to him reluctantly. That ain’t right, he said, he just shipped out. Hell, he didn’t even get to the war yet. Mama—

He looked into her face for direction, for what to think about what she had said. The sun lingered behind her and her stray hairs shivered in its light. She seemed insane, and as if to confirm this flung herself at him and wrapped her arms around his shoulders, wordlessly shouting. He stood horrified, Thornton’s demise suddenly plausible. She crushed him to her. Over her shoulder he could see Max, emerging from the barn with a rusted hackamore dangling from his hand. He was headed for the starveout and the new colt running there, and then he stopped—stopped in front of the barn and leaned toward them—and took a step and finally ran, his burden jingling with each footfall until he reached them.

And what he did then—at the time it seemed natural to Grant—was to take his mother’s shoulders and pluck her, pull her sharply, away from Grant, and turn her around and embrace her. He took her from Grant and held her: and why not? Max was her son, certainly he had figured out what happened, he would give her comfort. Why not?

But as Grant stood watching them he saw the strain in Max’s face, saw his arms tighten around her. He was trying to lift her off the ground, almost as if to pour her grief into his open mouth. She cried out and bit his shoulder. Max’s narrowed eyes, turning to Grant, appeared to say, She’s mine, her sorrow is mine. And shocked at what he thought he saw, Grant turned away from them and went off to find his father.

That was me, Grant thought now as the home buildings came into view. Always going off for something, leaving to other people whatever needed doing. But what choice did he have? His parents, his brothers: they were forever around him, more ardent, quicker to understand, to desire, to act. He lacked Max’s aggression, Edwin’s skill, Thornton’s determination. Their mother’s responsibility. His obsessions hadn’t the strength or specificity of his father’s. His affinity was with the soonest dead: Robert might have made him funny; Wesley, patient. But neither had ever got the chance. What choice did he have but to leave?

So he left, and found no passion, and returned to nothing at all. He wondered what he had been doing when his mother died. September 5. He would have been asea, but where? Engaged in what? He struggled to remember. The years had lost definition in his memory, had flattened into a uniform gray, the color of ocean and sky, the gray of his lies. Probably he’d been eating or sleeping, it didn’t matter. No dread sensation came over him. He was overwhelmed by no sudden terrible knowledge.

He had betrayed her by failing to stay, she had betrayed him by failing to live. Only he was left to atone, and so he would stay. He would live.

When he got back he found Cotter and Max at work on the barn. It had stood unsteadily for years, always the next thing they’d see to when whatever they were doing was finished. Now they had it stood up straight with heavy beams propped against the lean. Max was inside nailing new supports to the roof joists, while Cotter cut and fit new planks to replace the rotting walls. The horses watched idly from the pasture, the cows grazed in the yard. Grant watered his horse and led him over to the others. Then he went back to the barn.

He went to the shed and got the tools then began tearing away the bad planks and measuring the new ones against them. They worked side by side for an hour. The repaired wall quickly took shape. Cotter said, How’d he take it?

He thinks we’re gonna sell, Grant said. And like that, for the first time, the notion did not seem unreasonable. After a while he added, You know he has a wife?

He went around to the back where the wood had been baked and warped by years of sun and rain and the paint lay in brittle strips on the ground at its base. He surveyed the whole, wondering if it would be possible to choose planks to replace, or if he would have to choose between taking it all down or doing nothing.

He turned to face Cotter. The older man’s eyes were stony, as if the place was already sold and his feet tainted by trespass.

What in hell would I do with myself then, do you think? Move into town? Nothing there for me.

Inside, the hammering stopped. A hawk cried. The rustle of hoppers in the grass seemed to amplify. The answer wasn’t enough for Cotter, he stood tapping the hammer sidelong against his thigh, waiting.

Cotter appeared to consider and at last nodded. I’ll go get Kittredge, he said. He can start painting what we already done. And he disappeared around the corner of the barn.

That night at supper they all seemed improved. Kittredge ate his food. He was shaking less or hiding it better. Sophia had on a dress, it was too hot for pants, she told them. She didn’t know how the lot of them could stand it.

You just think about winter, miss, Kittredge said, and they all laughed at the joke.

When they were finished Max went out to the equipment shed. Through the kitchen window, as she washed the dishes, Sophia watched him cross the yard. The other men drank coffee and talked, Kittredge telling some story involving a drunk and a priest. Cotter grunted appreciatively now and then, his eyes on his hands on the table. Grant wanted to go help her—take up the plates and dry them and put them in the cabinet—but he stayed put and watched her work. When she was done she stood with her head hung, seeming to gather herself. Then she went out to the shed. Through the window Grant saw her stepping through the weeds, cautious of the spines against her bare ankles.

He turned back to the table to find Kittredge looking at him. You got eyes for her, he said. It was a kid, but there seemed to be a knife hidden in it somewhere.

You got to watch yourself, Kittredge said smiling. I don’t know that her and your brother’s getting on so good.

It seemed to Grant that Kittredge was looking for information. He wanted to gossip. Grant said, It’s nothing. Nobody’s getting on so good lately.

Cotter was still looking down at his hands but with greater intent. All were silent until footsteps landed on the stoop and Sophia walked in, her color high and breath heavy. She stopped and composed her self as if for a speech. But instead of talking she looked at each of them, swallowed and went to the stairs. Before she disappeared Grant stole a glance. Her eyes were on him, narrowed in a state of accusation but lacking any specific charge.

We still got some daylight, Cotter said and got up from the table. He nodded at Kittredge. You good to work some more? Above them, the sound of a body falling on a bed.

Course I’m good, Kittredge said loudly. I can go till dark. He stood, stretched his arms out behind his back and left them there with the hands clasped. How ‘bout you, Grant? Or are you tired out? He gazed at Grant intently, waiting to be surprised.

The rest of that week Sophia stayed in after dinner, or else went out to tend to the animals before going to bed. She didn’t follow Max to the shed. Grant lay in his room nights listening to her silence, until Max returned and the two of them spoke. But he couldn’t tell what they were saying or even what sort of discussion it was. He couldn’t sleep until he heard them. Often he couldn’t sleep after that either.

One night he went out to the shed to see what Max was up to. The building was lit up from inside like a private sky, the rusted pinholes in the walls a human starlight. He guided himself across the yard to the door and pushed it open. Behind it a paint can clattered on the cement floor. Max was at work on a painting, his back was visible and his raised arm. The painting was four feet square, a field of cross-hatched streaks with bare white canvas along the edges. It didn’t look like much of anything. At any rate Grant’s view of it was brief. Max gasped at the intrusion and pulled a tarp down over the canvas as if the painting was some kind of dirty secret. Once the easel was covered he spun on his heels, his glare a mixture of fury and shame. The paint can had been a makeshift alarm. Grant snorted in surprise.

For a moment he had no reply. And then: You know, we barely been saying anything to each other since we came back with Daddy.

Max looked tired. He was holding his paintbrush like a weapon. Reckon we haven’t, he said. Then he turned and dunked the bristles into a housepaint can and fixed the brush to the upright handle with a clothespin. He wiped his hands on a rag and came limping toward Grant.

For all his childish moping Max didn’t look twenty-two but a boyish forty, his hair thinning as their father’s had, fans of wrinkles framing his eyes. And his stoop. That’s what it was, not a limp. Grant said, You look like an old man.

They went out in the yard together and Max rolled a cigarette. He lit it with difficulty in the viscid air. Clouds had been massing all day, now they were crowded into every available space so that it felt like a rainstorm in every aspect but the rain itself. Grant felt less solid out in it, as if he too had drifted here anticipating release. His brother was an orange dot of ash in the dark that seemed itself to breathe as Max smoked.

Max took his time replying, so long that Grant wished he hadn’t spoken at all. At last he said, She knew what she was getting into.

To this Max said nothing. Grant held out his hand for the makings. The tobacco was fresh and the cigarette tasted good. He said to Max, Is he on your mind?

I can’t seem to think on him directly, Grant said. I remember Mama easy, and the boys, but even that’s all fouled up. I can’t get nothing straight in my head.

Max seemed to be turning this over in his own mind, through two or three flares of the cigarette’s end. Don’t see why you need to, he said.

Grant didn’t understand. Was he saying there was no point in remembering, or implying that Grant had long ago left off caring about the family anyhow? It was typical of Max to speak plainly without actually saying anything that made sense. His face was near invisible in the compressed darkness.

You plan to show them paintings to anybody ever? Grant asked. Put ‘em in a museum?

A chuckle came from Max’s direction. A museum. I don’t know about that. Ain’t thought one way or another to do something with ‘em.

Me neither. But it’d be like that, asking me if I’m gonna put my diary in the newspaper, or was I just gonna let it go moldy in a drawer somewhere. It ain’t nobody’s business and it ain’t something I expect other people are gonna appreciate.

Like asking me if we ought to leave Daddy in the ground or should we prop him up in the town square.

Grant waited a while before he said, A good forty miles to the nearest town square.

Max’s laugh was sharp and quick, a snapping twig. That’s good, he said. You can always change the subject with a joke. That’s a valuable thing to know how to do.

Yeah, well, me neither. He tossed his cigarette into the weeds and stamped it out. Old Petey did a hell of a job, didn’t he. I don’t see rebuilding those quarters.

Unless you and me get ourselves married and start fathering some babies. What do you think?

I don’t know, Grant said. He backed up half a step. He felt cracked open, like Max was rooting around in him for something he’d lost.

Well, Max said suddenly, it’s been real nice talking to you but I got to go write in my diary now. He reached out and clapped Grant’s shoulder. The fingers were hot through his shirtsleeve. And then he was gone, and Grant stood alone in the yard feeling the coming rain. Standing there it occurred to him that there was someone living in his brother he didn’t quite know. A seventh brother, at once enigmatic and familiar, that had taken the place of the one he’d grown up with. Or perhaps he had never known that one, not really.

When at last he turned to go back in the house he saw her, white as a puppet in the kitchen window. He didn’t think she could see him. When he came closer to the house she backed away.

She was waiting when he came in, facing the doorway with the fingers of one hand curled over the rim of the sink. Her hair was longer than it had been. It hung over both sides of her face and lay against her shoulder like a hand. The light was off but she had lit a candle and put it on the table.

The bulb was too bright, she said. I couldn’t stand it. Her voice had a quality of suspended motion, like a spun dime.

We ought to put a shade on it, Grant told her. He sat down to take off his boots.

She leaned back against the counter and faced him. She wore a nightgown with a robe pulled loosely around it and her face was thin and starved for sleep. I don’t know what in hell I’m doing here, Grant.

He didn’t answer, instead set his boots on the mat by the door, toes to the wall as if a penitent was standing in them.

I used to have friends, girl friends. I don’t know if you know what I’m talking about. I had a dozen of them, people I saw every day. You know what I mean?

Grant stood and pressed his shoulder to the wall. You knew it was going to be different.

Her eyes were right on him. He wasn’t sure what she wanted. He said, So what do you want to do about it?

In his head the words had sounded innocent. But on his lips they betrayed him, they implied that he had something in mind. He did have something in mind and she heard it. She took her hands off the counter and a step toward him, and he pushed himself off the wall and stood straight. There was a second then that might have stopped it, had one of them glanced away or spoken or stepped back, but they didn’t and the opportunity to stop passed them by. She came into his arms and they kissed. His one hand found her face and the other the gap in her robe, and he stroked her back through the cotton of her gown, pausing at each vertebra and pressing gently into it and into the muscled concavity around it. They shifted their weight and the boards strained underneath them. Her lips and tongue were cool from just-drunk faucet water and he touched her face and her hair and body and she brought her mouth to his ear and whispered, Now.

They were. They barely moved from the spot, falling against the wall in an ecstatic discomfort, making hardly a sound. When it was done she stepped away from him, the nightgown still bunched around her waist, and he saw her nakedness and the high color of her face in the candlelight, and the world tripled in size. He knew nothing about her, he thought as she leaned over the table and blew the candle out. Yet now he had these minutes of her that nobody else did, the hand that held her hair from the flame, the bare foot a ghostly blur against the floor. She said, You must think I’m heartless.

She leaned into him and kissed him quickly and her fingers touched him where he had loved her. Good night, she said, and he said it back, and she disappeared up the stairs. He had no idea who she was. Possibly neither did she. It would be nearly three weeks before he touched her again.

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