Jamie stood a long moment his eyes on Terry’s. Then looked away. Took cigarettes and a box of matches from his trousers and lit one and blew the smoke off into the yard, aside from Terry. Then said, “It’s a pretty day.”

Terry said, “I heard your piece of tail run off on you.”

“Well. She’s gone.”

“Chasing bigger fish I hear. Well, you’re better off. They’re fun when they’re young but they get older they turn into one bit of nuisance after another.”

Jamie nodded. “She tell you she was going?”

Terry looked at him again, his face opened now. “Me? I haven’t spoke to her. Haven’t seen her since I was last out to your house there on the river. Back in the spring. May, wasn’t it? Blackflies terrible bad I recall.”

“That’s right,” Jamie said. “It was May. But it was her told me you’d paid to repair the French Canadian. Said you’d told her.”

Terry shook his head. “It wasn’t me. She just heard it around I guess. She’s the kind that hears things.”

“I believed her,” Jamie said. Not contradicting Estus Terry.

Terry said, “A woman’ll lie as it suits her. It must’ve suited her. Now, I got some bottles of beer lowered into the springhouse. That sound good?”

He resumed in the liquor trade—acutely aware it was summer where the bulk of the year’s profit tallied. He made his rounds as usual with the exception of Laird’s after-hours dive where he had no desire to see anyone or be seen and so went there afternoons on his way to the Sinclair when Laird was still puffy and distempered from sleep and skull-rockets. He called upon Binter, hanging around after his business concluded to make conversation that was little enough, and so oddly and sweetly just right. A place free of associations. With motion once more, he could not understand his just-ended inaction. As if he had lost himself. What was frightening was he’d acted far different than he’d have predicted for himself. Drifting. A thing undone.

He went back to the house one midnight. The sheep farmer Flood’s boy was paid to daily water and feed the driving horses. Still he went first to the barn to see them and stood there in the summer dark talking to his horses, old everyday words issuing forth as undirected encompassing love, a croon of self without content and fraught with meaning. And heard himself, heard his father, his sister Prudence also, and stopped. His father would talk to horses as if they were the god who happened to live next door, easy terms and reverential at once. And his sister talked to all creatures as if they might die without the sound of her voice and she there just to reassure. He stood in the dark barn. The horses restless now with his uneasy presence. He stroked them, not speaking.