“Boy’s always welcome. His creature too, it don’t shit the house. If he’ll listen, I’ll tell him tales. The old days.”

“Don’t let him pester you.”

Scully ignored this. “Somebody should tell him. He should have something of her. I know you won’t speak of her.”

Jamie looked around the house. Lovey sniffing crumbs along the counter edge of the sink. Then to Foster. “You be all right?”

“Yes sir.”

“Be useful. Fill the coal scuttle. You could scrub up some too.”

“Leave the boy be. He don’t need to cart after me.”

“I won’t be but a couple—three hours.”

“Yes sir.”

Back to Bethlehem then to track down Jeeter Carrick, watery-eyed sometime dishwasher errand-boy loafer rounder-of-the-town, whom time to time Jamie employed to bottle liquor out of the casks and could not be trusted but he was in to you. At this time he was in to Jamie for a couple hundred dollars, the loss of five cases of liquor fronted to Carrick for a sure-thing deal, that as Jamie had told him when the liquor was gone and no money to show for it, wasn’t sure at all but was quite a thing. Found him sprawled in alcohol narcosis in a cheap ground-floor rented room and kicked him awake, hauled him down the hall out into the yard and pumped water over his head, holding him by the neck with one foot up on his backside until Jamie was satisfied that he was as alert as could be hoped. Then stood him up and slapped him a hard roundhouse blow the side of his head and stood waiting for Carrick to pick himself up from the soft mud surrounding the pump. And stepped in and held his shirtfront and slapped him again, this time just enough to focus the anger out of the boy’s eyes and then told him how it would be. How a debt was to be paid. How good would come of it.

The two of them rode then over the hills to Franconia and down the long valley of the Gale River with the farms spread out either side between the dark high ridges, both silent, Carrick settling himself with small hits from the leatherbound flask out of the Packard’s glovebox. The farms to Jamie like Sunday afternoon although it was a weekday. The smell of mown hay. Mixed herds of Jersey and Guernsey cattle in meadows, some lifting heads to watch their passing. A pair of big bay Belgian horses standing in the shade of an elm, their heads drooped somnolent, their tails whisking for flies. Even the smell of the barnside dungheaps was sweetened, distilled out into the afternoon air. Willows and elms.

Carrick bumming smokes, head turned to the open window, flatulent.