He lost his temper with Leah only once that fall and nothing was changed by it although for a couple of days he felt a great relief, as of an emptied vat filled near to bursting, and also a timid embarrassment, as if he’d taken advantage of someone smaller, weaker than himself. And within three weeks would have the opportunity to rework the episode endlessly to carry as another man, in another time and place, might have carried a many-lashed short-handled whip to cut himself across his own back with, walking barefoot in thorns and nettles, hatless under a white burning sky.

He’d been on the barnfloor, cleaning the ciderpress. The cider was made, down basement in barrels, and he’d washed the tub and leaned it to dry in the sun. He’d taken out the metal workings of the press itself and these he washed and dried with sacking and then worked in a fine coat of machine oil, the oil flowing onto the metal and enriching it, the parts taking on a rich patina. Even the small pits and faults on the outside nothing more than inevitable: the abrading of time. And Norman then dropped the larger of the two gear wheels and it fell against the press-plate and two of the cog-teeth on the gear broke off and with no more effort than that the gear was junk, a thing graceful in its utility and beautiful in its simplicity now scrap. And cast scrap, not even something to be reforged or made to some new purpose. He sat looking down at it. He looked at it a long while and then sat looking out onto the farm. The press was only forty years old. He could order a new part for it but this was not the point. It was a good thing ruined through carelessness, through not paying attention. It was not an accident. He felt his mind overloaded and, feeling it, knew it to be true. He felt the stiffness in his shoulders and arms and twined through his bowels as a heat and down again into the muscles of his legs and all of him ached. It was not work. It was not age. He spat onto the chaff litter over the floorboards and cursed. A short vile spew of language meant to purge but was only coal oil on his burn. He looked again out onto his farm. Prudence was gone, in school for her final year. Abby and Jamie were up to the orchard with a single horse and the stone boat with plank sideboards, filling it with the last bruised windfalls to bring down and parcel out daily to the sheep before they rotted. High on the trees the last remnant apples clung in the wind. Some would be there through snowfall. Partridge would fly in at warm midday in November to eat them as the sugar fermented and then the birds would spin off down hillside in crazed drunken flight. Last year they ate a brace that crashed into the barn and lay dazed on the dooryard. He rose and bent to lift the broken gear and placed it with great care on a ledge of framing on the inner barn-wall, broken teeth gaping up, where he knew it would remain for years. He already wanted to save it: as reference to his anger, as reference to the day. He went to the house. His gait a stalk. Each footfall hurt and drove him forward. He felt extraordinary: taut, wakened, shrewd, elaborate, guileless, enraged, simple. Righteous.