What she told him about Sweetboro she’d told him only after they’d left Washington and were traveling north through the war-blown countryside of northern Virginia and through the western arm of Maryland and into Pennsylvania. Camped in the barn of a man they’d met along the road, the man with a yoke of young balking oxen that Norman stepped forward and helped goad. The man who did not offer his home but his barn-loft with good bright barley straw, the man with a woman a head taller than he who stood at the half-door of her kitchen and watched Norman and Leah cross the yard to the barn, the door holding back three round-faced boys no more than six to ten. The man crossing from the house in the summer evening with a crock of sauerkraut baked with spare ribs, a fresh wheat loaf on top that steamed when they broke it open. Leah watching his back until he closed the kitchen door behind him again and only then reaching to eat.

Norman said, “You don’t care for that feller much.”

Her mouth brilliant with grease she said without pause, “It’s not him. I don’t trust his woman.”

Norman almost asked what to trust and then stopped himself, letting his quiet run along under him as he ate his supper. It was the first hot food he’d had not prepared by the army or purchased out the back door of a rooming house or hotel. Since Washington there’d been a wariness, a caution near skittish of strangers about her that she’d not so much hidden as simply acted upon without direct reference, making clear she’d prefer camping in hedge or thicket than asking at a house. She wouldn’t linger in towns or around groups of people, especially groups of men; she would startle at the sound of galloping horses approaching on the road. Recalling the town in Maryland where a police officer had hurried toward them, cutting it seemed across the street to meet them and how Leah had folded herself against Norman’s side even as the man passed them with no more than a glance. In the pale green twilight he carried the crock back to the kitchen door and thanked the woman, returning to the barn to lie in the straw opposite Leah atop a spread blanket. He said, “Why’s that woman bother you?”

As though she was not sure she was going to tell him she said, “The way she look at us. Everybody look. But some people, like this woman, seem like she trying to line my face up with something else, something she heard or been told or maybe even some picture she seen somewhere. Or like she memorizing me, like she want to get every little line down right. It’s more than not liking me cause I’m me or even that I’m me with you.”