“It was just Father and me,” he lied. “My father was off in his head. You weren’t even right about the farmboy business. It might once have been a farm but all I ever saw was it grown up to puckerbrush and the shingles going a little more each spring. He fought in the war. The Southern Rebellion. Had some kind of wound to his head. Just didn’t much care about things. That legless old man back there in the Barre station, that’s why I gave him that piece of your money. Father was like that, but some ways worse. He had a pension from the army but mostly lived on money made by selling off bits of land. He was a fair hand to cook and would have supper on the table for me every evening but that was about it. Sit there watching me eat it. Told me stories but they were all about the war or before and the same ones over and over, mostly a jumble of things. The way I grew up, it wasn’t so different from how you did. Left on my own, I mean. It’s no brag that I was a hellion and a fair one at that.” He paused then and looked away from her and then went and sat beside her on the bed, no longer looking at her. “I wasn’t even really a bad kid. It’s just that people don’t like peculiar things and the two of us up there on the hill was peculiar to the rest of them. So I ended up getting a little toughened up too. Which was good I guess.”