“They not delighted with me,” Leah said.

“That’s all right,” Norman said, wondering not only why he’d failed to write his mother some warning or caution but why he’d not even thought to. And stranger still, he felt a tingling of excitement at this failure, excitement real as his balls tightening. He looked at the woman next to him and said, “I am.”

Sunday morning Mrs. Pelham and Connie hitched the mare that killed his father to the high-seated two-wheeled cart and took it to town: to church and, Norman was sure, much more than a usual simple worship and social. It would be late afternoon before they returned. He spent the morning at his father’s old desk, reviewing what passed for accounts and then writing a letter to the horse trader in Chelsea. He would not keep the team with the killer mare. This done he began a close count of the sheep, walking over the high pasture and tallying with a pencil stub on a sheet of brown wrapping paper, always watching Leah as she went back and forth outside, working at the tub, scouring their clothes with lye soap and hand-wringing them before draping them onto the lilac and hydrangea that bordered the back of the house. The clothes from the height of land small bright flags that served to bring the careless summer over him so that he did not fret over the number of ram lambs or the three ewes he absolutely could not find but allowed himself a fine moment at the edge of a stone ledge looking down over it all; this was his and he was needed here and he’d returned to it. He came down off the hill before the middle of the day to find Leah and led her back into the house, up the stairs to the attic where the night before he had taken her, instead of to his old room down just from his sister’s and close to where his mother lay not sleeping. They’d climbed up the small cramped stairs to pull out and shake loose an old feather ticking where they made their bed, and now he was on his back in the empty house with her above him, Norman deep with solace as her face pitched and roamed over him, he watching the steady come and go of mud daubers along the rafters. In the afternoon he stripped down the broken axle, readying it for the smith and then went through the barns, taking stock of the small lay-in of hay and the dairy tie-up, having already run his eye over the five cows in the pasture, small brown and dun Jerseys that all looked poor to him. He’d never cared for cows but accepted the five were there to stay and likely more of them. Then he walked through the empty pig shed and scattered shellcorn to bring out the ranging hens, the flock greater and older than it should have been. They’d be eating a lot of stewed hen this winter. He killed a young roasting rooster and took it to Leah, who sat on the ground in a clean skirt and shirtwaist under the appletrees, her legs bared to above her knee and her chin wet with apple juice. He held up the rooster and said, “It won’t hurt to have supper ready when they come back.”