She stood up, and it took her a moment to shake off the surprise of what she’d seen in his sketchbook before she walked toward the cartoon paper. “Well, let me tell you what’s happening here,” she said. She explained about the cartoon and that she would be working on it while he and Theresa and Peter built a stretcher for the canvas, which she hoped would arrive in the Norfolk art supply store shortly. “The stretcher is very exacting work,” she said, thinking that she really should have accepted Martin Drapple’s offer to help with it. It had to be accurate to the inch.

“I done door framin’,” Jesse said, only his accent was such that it took her a minute to understand what he meant. “My aunties and uncles and everbody call me to do it ’cause I know how to miter them corners right. Miss Furman give me some canvas and I made frames to stretch them over, even with bevel edges and all. I’m good at it.”

“This’ll be a bigger project than any you’ve done,” Anna said. “Way bigger even than a door frame.”

“Jes’ leave it to me,” he said, and Anna began to worry that he would boss Theresa and Peter around. She shouldn’t have, though.

When Theresa and Peter arrived, Jesse changed into a different boy. His bravado and self-confidence seemed to disappear, and it took Anna a while to realize that he felt the need to defer to them. That deference was expected of him. She didn’t like seeing the change in him. He communicated with the two of them in grunts, acquiescing to Peter’s directions, which were, fortunately, excellent. She had to admit that these boys who grew up on self-sufficient farms were good with their hands. She didn’t think the Plainfield boys she’d gone to high school with would have known what to do with all that wood.

Gradually, though, the awkwardness between the boys seemed to ease up. Anna had bought some cotton work gloves for all of them to use to protect their hands, but the boys just laughed at her.

“Miss Anna,” Peter said, “we don’t need no gloves! We build fences with our bare hands!” He looked at Jesse as if for corroboration, and Jesse picked it right up.

“An’ butcher hogs with our bare hands, too!” he said.

“An’ muck out the stables!” Peter said. “An’—”

“All right, all right!” Anna laughed.

Theresa rolled her eyes in annoyance at the boys and held out her hand for a pair of the gloves. It looked like she and Anna would be the only ones wearing them.