Past the orchard was a frozen cornfield where I saw dozens of Canada geese foraging amid the broken stalks, some with their elegant necks held high, others with their white asses tilted in the air. Then the forest crept close to the road, and I had a brief view of the river, mostly ice-covered with open water cutting a slash down the channel.

A green truck crept toward me in a low gear. It was a pumper, and the driver was being careful on the grade although the asphalt was dry and free of ice. I waved, as was the neighborly custom in Maine, but he pretended not to see me. It was a septic truck, and I watched it descend in my side mirror, reading in reverse a sign on the bank of the tank.

The driver might have been pumping out a portable toilet up the hill. Although it was highly unusual for a porta potty to remain in operation when the temperature plunged below freezing. Maybe he lived on the summit.

The road drew close to the river, and I saw that the guardrail was missing. The drop wasn’t steep: no more than twenty feet. But if a vehicle hit black ice there, coming around that tight turn, the prospects of anyone surviving were grim.

The hill was steeper than it had appeared from the orchard, and near the top was Jewett’s place.

Coming upon it from below, I thought it looked like just another New England farmhouse, sitting too close to the road as the old places always seemed to, with a stone wall in front and a small yard and then the parlor door no one used unless the visitors were special guests. Flagpoles were mounted on either side of the entrance with dual banners flapping in the wind. One was the sun-faded Stars and Stripes; the other was the blue standard of the United States Navy. The house was handsome enough, but an air of neglect hung about it. The red shingles had begun to peel in the sun, showing gray wood where the paint had flaked, and the mortar was crumbling in one of the chimneys. Some of the bricks had come loose and tumbled off the roof, but it was too late in the year for a mason to get up there safely. A plume of woodsmoke rose from the functional chimney and was pushed sideways in the wind.

When I came level with the yard, I saw that the stone wall had bottle shards cemented to the top as a deterrent against strollers having a sit-down. I’d seen this unfriendly ornamentation in the snootier neighborhoods of Ogunquit and Kennebunkport but never in a backwater like Stratford. People walking up and down this hill must’ve been rarer than molars on a hen.

As Mariëtte had said, Jewett’s driveway was guarded by an iron gate.

I stopped short of it. Shadow was snoring again.