He found her midafternoon. He knew her absence in early morning, knew it was all wrong but felt hampered, harnessed by her two months’ distance. He fretted through to noon, his heart a black node in his chest, a swollen painful thing. There was a moment, climbing down a ladder from the hayloft into the sheep pens when he lost himself, was overcome, dizzy, nauseated, his eyes dazzled with floating motes of light against a red field. Later he would conclude this was the moment she stepped free of the rock. He’d been forking down hay through the trapdoors and it was sometime then that he’d determined to search after her and perhaps it was nothing more than his rushing with resolution through the job and then too fast down the ladder. Still, there would forever be that long moment he clung to the simple rungs built into the barn wall, sick, weak and blind.

There was no trail to follow in the soaked November fields and then the woods, all dead flattened grass and leaf-litter already sinking into itself toward decay, toward humus, and he needed none. He knew where to find her, and he climbed up through the misting rain and as he went higher the dropped clouds, passing through ghost-boles of trees with their stripped heads waving slowly in the rocking air, those heads denuded and lost in the cloud come down to earth.

He had brought her here that first fall after the war, before even his mother had moved herself and his sister off the farm, climbing up here, Leah following Norman’s extended long stride, chasing after him. He carried a basket dinner of sandwiches made of cold beans and bacon and sliced onion, apples, a piece of cheese the white of the moon and a jug of fresh cider just starting to harden. Behind the granite boulders was a spring, a stream-head; sunken earth around a clear pool with beds of ferns upright around it as if trying to hide the sweet water. In the center of the pool bubbles rose slowly and whole, to pock the surface as they broke, new water and ancient air rising from the earth. And they came here and ate their dinner, sharing an apple with carved cheese and then crushed the sweet ferns into the moist soil around the pool. And had come times after that. And then, without speaking of it, had stopped coming. As if each trip there diminished the strength and clarity and pureness of the original. Norman recalled lying on his back in the ferns, wetted with a sheen of exertion head to toe after that first time, the old maple-head rocking overhead in a wind he couldn’t feel and knowing as absolute fact that something of his father squatted on haunches in the woods above and watched them, intent, approving. He knew that as sure as he knew she was all he would ever need.