Norman looked after his boy, then at his daughters. They looked one to the other and did not speak. Abby reached quickly to take and drop her sister’s hand and then turned and walked without haste after her brother already gone from sight down over the hill. As if she knew she had to find him and knew also it would do no good. She stepped through the gap in the stone wall enclosure of the dead. There was no gate, only an opening with a pair of flanking upright granite posts with old holes drilled into them for a gate long since rotted away. The sheep grazed summers between the blackened granite stones. Off in the southeast corner an old rose had grown wild, now a thicket of bare canes crabbing together in the wind. Above the plot in the edge of the sugarbush a hundred or so crows had chosen the afternoon to caucus, their cries brilliant, jagged in the air, pitched as if to lift the short hairs on the backs of necks, the flesh on the arms, of the people gathered below. Norman watched Abby until she dropped bit by bit from sight on the incline down to the farm. He did not wait for her to come back into sight in the farmyard. He didn’t look at the people around him. He turned back to his shovel. But the moment offered by his son had stopped everything in him and he bent to his work with the clear notion that this was the job of his life, that everything else had only one way or another pointed him to this. He shoveled easily and slowly now, not wanting it to end.

They filed down the hillside following Norman and Prudence, the sky hazing so the sunlight fell on them with the vapid color of old beech leaves, the wind up. In the house they stood in random odd clumps and pairings, standing up eating off plates of the funereal food carried in on platters and in canning jars and beanpots and baskets of baked goods wrapped in clean toweling. The minister, his slender work done here, stood in a corner leaning over his cupped plate like a palm tree, his hair windblown, leaving his skull shining as if polished. Norman sat at the table in the kitchen with his children, drinking coffee. Abby had Jamie on her lap, one of her hands running constant back over his face with a damp cloth napkin. He’d sobbed and screamed himself into a narcosis of grief. Norman had looked at him and at Abby and back to the boy and Abby shook her head and he nodded at her. She’d tell him later. People drifted through the kitchen to lean and speak to Norman and the girls. He watched their mouths move and their faces work and did not understand them and so mostly nodded and took offered hands, trying not to watch their eyes, loaded as they were with stark strata of pity, dread, surprise, animation and fear. Connie came, finally it seemed, and pulled a chair close to tell him she’d take Jamie for a couple of weeks.