“You ever going to tell me what happened with you and that boy?”

She cocked her head at him. “No,” she said. “I don’t believe I need to.”

This time he did not nod. Slowly he struck up a match and drew on the bowl. Then he said, “Well. There will be other boys.”

“No,” she said. “There won’t be.”

He said nothing.

After a time she said, “I’m a colored girl. Pretty and smart, but still.”

For longer this time he had nothing to say.

Finally she stood from her chair. She went to the window to study the blank squares and turned back, raised her arms above her head and stretched herself, then dropped her hands to join before her groin, the fingers laced. He sat wrapped in smoke, she at the edge of it. She lifted one hand and ran it across her brow as if wiping sweat or fatigue away. She took breath, as if she hadn’t had any for hours. Then said, “There’s maybe not much I can control, what happens to me. But I can control myself. I have every intention of doing that.”

He released smoke once more and laid down the pipe. “It’s late,” he said, and stood. He did not doubt her and could not wish her otherwise.

“It is late.” And she held the door into the hallway open while he bent and blew out the lamp and they went one after the other down the dark hallway, she turning at the newel to climb the stairs and he continuing on into the kitchen to draw on boots and mackinaw and out then into the night, to check the barns, the wind raging through his hair like a summer meadow of tall timothy. Finished, he stood a long moment with his head tilted back, his eyes wide to the maw of night. Then turned to the dark house.

Part II
Bethlehem

Four

In a predawn early in the summer of 1904 Jamie slipped from the house while the others slept and went down the hill wearing his best clothes with forty dollars of his own money earned hard and saved over three years and another sixty dollars stolen from his father during the same time. He caught the milkrun train north through the valley fogged thick with mist off the river. He rode looking straight before him, meeting no eye and not watching out the train window as the train ran through the blank morning. At nineteen he was small-limbed with thin muscles, lithe, with a sense of motion about him even when still. He was attractive to women while most men did not like him on first meeting. Something ethereal in his honeyed skin and large dark eyes, prominent above high cheekbones and a head of soft dark curls. His fingers were long and slender with nails clean and pink. His mouth was sharply defined as if cut out from his face. He was priapic and intent, clever but lacking just enough confidence to be charming. In one coat pocket he had a folded straight razor, in the other his cash in a money clip. The sun was up now, a burning ball of rose in the mist. When the train came into the Barre platform he got off, not James or Jim, still Jamie, but otherwise ready for all things new.