“Yes, Harold.” He could feel his father’s breath past his ear.

“Tucker said he’d-a lost something.” He remembered that Tucker had really asked him whether he had lost anything yet. “He said I was young and ain’t lost nothing yet.” His father said nothing. “What’d he mean by that?”

He could feel his father thinking.

“Papa, I lost things, ain’t I? Like marbles and the time I lost that quarter you give me. Ain’t that losing something?”

Still he could feel his father behind him, his arms reaching around him, almost a hug except that if his father did not have to guide Deac, he might not have hugged him either; he could feel the man thinking. Finally: “I don’t think he meant it that way, son. I think he’s talking about something else. Maybe like…”

He waited but his father did not go on. He could not tell what he had been about to say, or what Tucker meant, but he had the feeling (he did not put it into thoughts; the absence of worries, of thoughts, somehow gave him the feeling) that it was not important.

They came to their house, turned off the road, went into the barn, and his father took off Deac’s bridle and led the horse into his battered stall. Then they went into the house.

His mother did not say hello to them. “Harry, here you go again bringing that child in here at ten o’clock. Harry?” She was waving her arms. She was still dressed, her hair still up, long and black as…like Papa says, the inside of a blueberry pie…that black.

“Honest, Marge, couldn’t help it this time.” His father spoke timidly. “We—”

“That’s what you always say. Honestly, all your drunken cronies call him mister but leastways you should know he ain’t but eight.” She was a Sunday-school teacher. “Did you go see poor old Miss Rickett?” She had put her hands on her hips and turned away from his father, was speaking to Mister Leland now.

“Yes, Mama. We went and sat and she give Papa some cigars.” He lied, he knew it, and turned to look at his father, and saw the fleeting smile of relief and gratitude cross the man’s lips, then realized it was not like a lie at all, not really, more like the soldiers in Korea, where Papa fought, looking out for each other because they was all soldiers and had to keep each other alive else the enemy would-a done them harm. And the enemy, Papa says, could be a Red or a captain or even a sergeant though Papa was a sergeant hisself, but was also under sergeants who was just as much enemies as the men they shot at and who shot at them.

She turned on his father again. “Did you feed him?”