“Not much. You see…” He and his father stood together just inside the door, his mother confronting them across the room behind the kitchen table.

“Harold, sit down and eat.” She turned abruptly to the stove, took a plate from the top of a pot of boiling water, where she had left it to keep it warm, brought it to the table and although he thought she might bang it down, set it down quite gently. Mister Leland sat behind it. There were drops of warm water on the underside. He was really too sleepy to be hungry, but knew if he did not eat heartily his father would be answering for more.

His father took one step into the room. “Marge?”

She ignored him. “Eat, Harold.” She did not have to say this; he was already doing so.

When he finished (his father having come forward like a boy late for school and snuck into a seat across from him, following his mother with his whole head as she bustled around the kitchen), she took him off to bed, where his brother, Walter, already slept as silent, as immovable as the General’s statue, waited while he undressed, helped him with his prayers, and went out, her kiss still warm and sweet on his forehead. He tried to listen for his parents in the kitchen, but could hear nothing.

He woke up later and it was night. He never considered the darkness at the end of each day truly night, only darkness. Night was when he woke up and the room, the house, and all outside were silent and he had to go to the bathroom. He got up and went down the hall past his parents’ open door and they were hugging one another in the bed into which, he was told, he had been born, into which he knew his brother to have been born. And if he had been troubled (he had not been), he no longer was and did his business and went back to sleep….

“Harold-boy, get up.” It was his father and it was Friday morning. “Come on, boy. We got to hurry.”

In an instant he was fully awake. “What happened?”

“Nothing yet. Something might. Don’t want to miss it, do you?” His father was already dressed, even to his hat.

“No, sir.” He was already climbing from bed, was standing, making certain he had left his brother covered.