She let Jamie drive the last five hundred feet to the barns. The sorrels quickened with the barn in sight and immediately she let him have the lines he stopped chirping for speed and held back the team, his feet propped against the dashboard and his legs straight, using his body weight to hold the team in, calling to them, his voice high and serious without excitement or fear. The horses’ hooves clipped up off the dark packed earth like sticks off a drumhead, the geldings swinging smartly in the dooryard to come up before the carriage shed beside the horsebarn. Jamie sinking back slowly onto the seat, still talking to the team.

Leah sat a long moment on the carriage seat, not long enough for her daughter to look up from unhitching the team but time enough for the sudden sharp recognition of her boy—that whatever streak of doubt and tremble ran through her had made its way into the boy redoubled and been born a new thing altogether, a coiling anger that he held tight to him as another boy might a penny found. Held secret and deep until it was needed. She knew Jamie gained this from her and knew also that neither his sisters nor his father recognized it yet. But they would. She was confident and sad near to weeping that one day they would.

She could not bear to imagine what it might mean for Jamie, what it would bring to his life. Not yet gone, she knew he was what she would leave behind. What would remain of her. What was most true.

Norman and Prudence spent the afternoon putting up the first of the last cutting hay of the season, he on the ground and she on the wagon bed, the black Percheron mares drawing the wagon along the rolled-up windrows, undriven, their lines wrapped loose around one of the front uprights, the mares knowing the course by the length of the windrow, walking at the precise pace it took a man to fork up hay. It was hot and airless in the meadow below the barns and Norman worked bareheaded with his shirtsleeves rolled halfway up his upper arm. Pru on the wagon in a loose dress and barefoot with a wide-brimmed straw hat with the edge of one brim sheep-chewed. Norman felt a piker and delight at once, ambling and lifting the forkfuls up to her where she dipped her fork to take his hay and lay it into the load, building the load around and under her as if making a many-layered shingled roof, laying each forkful down in tight crosshatch to the next. The method let her finally stand atop the high mounded load as they drove secure to the barn, where she would hand down the forkfuls in reverse order. She wore the hat against the spray of cinnamon freckles that lay over her body top to toe as scales, barely letting her skin the color of dry tangerine rind show through. Her hair a soft brown as if sifted with ash. Her eyes wide and deeply set and beautiful like her mother’s, the color of broken shards of pale green mason jar under water, flecked close to the pupils with gold specks only visible with light reflected in the right shade if you knew when to look. She was a short-bodied young woman, thick-waisted and thighed with upper arms strong as a man’s, reminding Norman of his younger sister. He knew she pretended indifference to her looks and did not like herself. He knew she placed great distance between body and mind, a distinct opposite to her sister. He knew her heart was laced with despair and loathing. They’d never spoken of this.