“Well, I suppose you might say that. I wouldn’t swear to it in a court of law. How did he get here?”

“Thelma Pearl brought him this morning.”

“Thelma Pearl? Thelma? Thelma was here? What the hell was she doin here?”

“She drove him over from Denver. Said she can’t look after him right now because she has to work and she can’t afford a babysitter. Apparently she was carrying this child when she left you.”

“Well, I’ll be damned. You’re Thelma Pearl’s boy?”

“He’s yours too, Jake. You’ve got a son.”

“Well, I’ll be gosh damned be go to hell.”

“And the first thing you’re going to have to do is stop swearing around him.”

Jake let the boy tag around after him when he did the chores, but the third day he was with them, Junior left the gate to the pigpen unlatched. Two of the hogs got out and Jake exploded, shouting until the boy crumpled in tears. It was easy enough to catch the pigs again, but it took Emaline half the day to calm the child, who plainly wasn’t accustomed to such explosions. After that, every time Jake raised his voice, the boy cringed.

As long as he kept his temper, Jake was good with the child. He told him stories about horses and boxers and the war in France and riding the rails with the hoboes. He carted him around on his shoulders and talked a neighbor into loaning him a Shetland pony for the boy to ride. But he insisted on calling the boy Red instead of Junior. Emaline didn’t know if that was because he liked the nickname or because he refused to admit that a child so small and slender could be his. Now and then she would catch him rubbing the cleft in the boy’s chin as if to test it, to see if this red-haired, fair-skinned child could really be his offspring. Jake was not one to want to look after another man’s spawn, but he couldn’t argue with that cleft. Red might be unlike Jake in every other way, but he bore that McCloskey stamp as surely as if he had come out of the womb wearing boxing gloves and winking at the first nurse he saw.

Emaline hoped Thelma would send the boy some little gift for Christmas. Nothing came, so she made him a toy scarecrow out of ropes knotted together and told him his mother had sent it and Jake gave him a little Ford truck he had bought in town. After two weeks, there was still no word from Thelma Pearl. The weeks went by and January turned into February. Now and then, Emaline would see the boy peering down the lane as though hoping to see the beat-up old Studebaker, but it never came.

33.