One day when Rachel followed him out of doors, he took her hand and led her about the grounds as he often did, showing her things and talking to her. He loved the way she would let go his hand and march straight up to a thing and stare at it—a rock, a bush, a flower pot, empty and overturned, anything—and then come back and take his hand again as casually as she had let it go. That day he showed her figs growing on the gnarled tree near the kitchen door, the same tree whose limbs had supported the swaddled babies, Leon and Floyd, once upon a time. He took her around the house and showed her a small pomegranate tree and picked a fruit. When he opened it, revealing its multitude of tiny pink jewels, she was astonished, and wanted to eat them. But he would not let her, afraid she would swallow the seeds, and so distracted her by teaching her to feed the fleshly pellets of fruit to the guineas that came pod-racking up to them.

They were laughing together when she suddenly spied Leon coming around the house from the barns. She dropped what remained of the fruit in her hands and ran squealing toward the man Roman did not know was her father as well as his. If he had known, what further romantic flights he would have flown!

Instead, he watched as his darling girl-baby ran across the grass. Seeing her, Leon dropped to his knees and opened his arms to catch her. They laughed and hugged and looked at each other. Leon stood, swinging her up into his arms and taking her off to the house, not even noticing—and Rachel forgetting—Roman standing there with half a pomegranate in his hands and the guineas around him noisily demanding that he give it to them.

It was right: the man and the child, both so beautiful and so intent on each other that all else was forgotten.

Before sleeping that night, Roman thought again of the incident, seeing Rachel less and less clearly in his mind, because she was the more familiar to him, and seeing Leon more clearly than he usually did, his face a little flushed with the heat of the day, sweat running down the sides of his cheeks from the line of his golden-reddish hair. Alone in his bed, Roman groaned, knowing it was Leon he loved. He could not claim him as father; yet would he find a way to love him.

8

Felix ailed. He had not been his truly well self since last autumn when he suffered a bout of chills and fever. He recovered—that is, the chills and fever diminished and finally ceased altogether, but he did not get his strength back fully before he was brought to bed with influenza during the same early-winter epidemic that took Trudy Davis to her grave.