THOUGH IT WAS well past ten that Thursday, Mister Harper, Bobby-Joe, and Mister Stewart had not yet appeared. Standing on the porch, a little apart from the others, peering from under the torn brim of his straw hat, Harry was waiting for his boy, Harold—the men called the boy Mister Leland—to turn the corner into the Square, and run (he always ran when he wasn’t riding) down to Thomason’s. That morning before they left for town Harry’s wife had told him to visit Miss Rickett. “She’s down with a broken hip, Harry, and she likes visitors. Don’t come back here and say you-all didn’t go by.” He had only nodded—thinking: Let the boy do it; I’ll send the boy over. That woman gives me the willies. I can’t see how Marge can’t know about her and what she does. But I know she wants a screwing and I ain’t about to give it to her. I’ll just send the boy—and so thinking, nodded again.

They had ridden the mile in from their farm, his boy in front of him on the saddle-less horse, between his extended arms, and when they reached the General’s statue in the center of town, he pulled Deac up, and told the boy to get down. “You don’t have to stay too long, Harold. Just go and say, ‘How do, Miss Rickett. My ma and pa heard you was feeling poorly and sent me by to see how you was doing.’ ”

Harold had just stared at him. Harry knew what he was thinking, and answering, did not lie. “I know I’m supposed to go by too, Harold. But I don’t feel like it. You can go in and come right out. If I was to go, I’d have to stay a-visiting until sundown. So you do this favor for your pa. And if she asks for me, tell her I had some pressing business by Thomason’s. Okay?” Still Harold did not move, continued to look up at him out of live gray eyes, like bits of a crushed, powdered, broken gray bottle. “I know, Harold. I don’t like her neither. But I’m older and know more about her that I don’t like.” The boy nodded then—Harry liked that—with an expression saying he knew and understood and would go alone to save his father the hardship because his hardship was only a boy’s and his father’s was that of a man, larger and worse. Then he turned and started west up Lee Street.