When the boy began his fourth year of school not only bloodied but with a dislocated shoulder that the doctor clenched and brought back to place with the first yelp of pain from the boy any of them had ever heard, it was then his sisters determined to take him from the school and so also from the town and their neighbors and educate him at home. Once seized upon the sisters held to this with the righteous fervor not of the convert but of the veteran. As if they might save the boy this way. And what that boy knew but could not ask was to save him for what? To raise up and so walk alongside them a monk to their nunhoods of carving the earth and cutting wood and the pervasive husbandry of livestock that was all they allotted themselves? They had found him as their project, their wellspring of devotion. And it was not even love but thrall that kept the ten-year-old from explaining what could not be explained to his sisters. He was sure they knew. And so he learned that ignorance is not always stark deficit but can be so clearly and simply a denying of what is known. So they removed him from the battle. And so he never once won, never once caused harm or true fear in his opponents. And in this way those tormenting defeated him through the agency of the women who loved him more than any others ever would or could. And those women did educate him but they did not make him. He was already made.

He woke in the morning beside her ruined clothing stiff with semen and crushed where he’d rolled onto it in the night. He felt he’d fouled her someway. He carried the balled mass out to the stone-lined pit where they burned paper trash and poured kerosene over it and set it alight. Back in the house he gathered the rest of her clothes off their hangers and drove to Littleton to a laundry where he left it all to be cleaned and starched and ironed, telling the woman to pack the items for storage. The sun was well up now and he was hungry but wouldn’t stop to eat. At the house he made a fire in the range and filled the copper boiler for wash water and began to clean the house, starting with the dishes clotted together in the sink. He found a rag and wiped down the furniture and then swept and after this found more rags and poured vinegar into a bucket of warm water and washed the windows, inside and out, with the sun hot now on his bare back and his stomach a hard knot consuming itself. Back inside he found a stiff brush and so was on his hands and knees scrubbing the floorboards when a motorcar came down the dirt track and he ignored it for his work and so Scully walked in and found him so, the knees of his trousers sopping from the scrub water, his chest and arms wet from his work, his hair slicked down, and when he raised his head to greet Scully the sweat ran into his eyes.