During her fevers there was much she said that did not make sense and there were other things that he would not hear at the time and would not remember. After the fevers passed, when she lay very still, her eyes bright, wide, dry, her mouth gaped for air her lungs could not receive; then, when the girl abed beside her was already a corpse although he did not think she knew it, she twice spoke to him. She said, “I’ll never have to”—and then a long pause as she coughed and gagged and sucked and finished—“have to sing that song again.” And later one clear sentence to hang out in the grasped tight air of the room: “Goddamn you I’ll never screw you again.” A lament. It was these twins of weariness and regret that he allowed himself of her. Each a summation he could hold within himself that would unscroll all he knew of her. Each the trail end of a knotted set of interlocking dense-corded nets. The only sure memory of her voice. He could hear her.

Late July of the year Binter arrived one morning in his T-model Ford with the rear-end cut off to make a truck of sorts. Jamie didn’t even know the farmer knew where he lived. But he heard him coming, the engine missing on one cylinder, the backfires popping off as if the truck were engaged in small warfare with itself. Jamie out on the short steps to watch it come down the track from the road. Binter did not step down from his rumbling farting machine but sat behind the wheel until Jamie went over to him. The old man, his hair gray but bleached as if streaked with urine, said, “Chew need to know I’m done. This batch working now, she’s the last. After that, I’m out. Retired.”

Jamie stepped close, leaning down to spread his hands over the doorframe, to bring his head closer to the old man. The sound of the Ford a mortification in the summer afternoon. This close, the smell up out of the car of unwashed man. Grayed woolen underwear a grimed circlet above the open collar of the man’s shirt. The black jacket rusted and wormed with moth holes. “The fuck you telling me?”

Binter looked at him. Slowly, with regret and distaste, his eyes rotated away, back to the lap below him. Then up to the windscreen. “I’m out,” he said. Then put the Ford in gear and drove a circle around Jamie in the soft soil and back up the track to the road, the Ford popping as it went.

He drove Foster and the puppy into Littleton, to Scully’s small house where the old man now sat most days in a padded rocker by the small coal-burning range that gave what heat there was to the place, even now in midsummer a small fire chuckling in the grate, Scully with a blanket over his knees. A stack of magazines one side of the chair, a box of dime westerns the other. Scully twisted always a little sideways, his arms and legs angled sharp and hard with arthritis. His hands curled claws that palsied as he held his reading matter. Jamie explained himself.