“Un-uh,” she said. “I’m not messing with her kitchen.”

He said, “There’s potatoes and carrots and parsnips on the hill. There’s winter squash on the old manure pile by the barn. You could bake a pie from these apples. There’s fresh cream in the pans down basement. It’s your kitchen.” He dropped the rooster on the ground next to where she sat. He said, “It’s my farm.”

He climbed the track up the hillside, passing the sugarhouse, not willing to look inside at the buckets with rusted hoops and rotted staves, continuing on through the sugar bush, the ancient maple trunks thickbarked and dense, some capable of holding five or six buckets, from there following the track around the shoulder of the mountain into other mixed hardwood of beech and birch, ash, ironwood and hickory. The woods a carnage of color, the early autumn-smell sweet as if death could be that way. A partridge blew out of the litter beside the track, and Norman flinched without hesitation. He wondered if everything would somehow always remind him of the war. If a partridge could ever be just that again.

He came around the mountain above the wildland of a small gore and walked another quarter of a mile before coming upon Ballous’. A shake-sided one-story dwelling more cabin than house but for the length of it. Backed up against a granite outcropping the builder had used as backside for the fireplace and chimney. The front door open to the afternoon and Ballou himself seated there, as if waiting for Norman. Dressed in green woolen pants, leather braces up over red underwear, the clothing not so much dirty as having gained a texture from the forest loam, sawdust, deer and fish entrails. His long hair greased behind his ears and his face sharp-shaven, features like a fisher-cat. Smoking a long-stemmed clay pipe, the only one Norman had ever seen, the stem and bowl the color of antler from handling and tobacco stain.

“Heard you was back.”

“Yuht.” Not surprised the news had leapfrogged up the mountain.

“One a them boys hellcattin down to Randol’ last night, chasing some little skirt come weaseling back at dawn with word a you. Boys no good for nothin but they got to do her, young like that. Not me, no. Not no more. One old woman is much for me, right? You be learned that soon, eh?”

“You been keeping my mother in wood?”

“Yuht, sure. No complain?”

“Nope. Not at all. Just there’s only two—three cords back behind the house.”

“She been buying as she needed. Pretty much.”

“Uh-huh.” Angry but not sure at whom. “You got any yarded up?”

“Got plenty down. Not sawed and split.”

“Not too hard to get to?” Norman watching him.

Ballou grinned, feral amber teeth. “All I cutting here on the backside a you. What I want your wood for, I got all this?” Spreading his arms.