“I don’t know,” he said. “It seems an odd thing to do.”

“I guess maybe it does. You want to eat alone, there’s food there in the house.”

“Thank you. I thought I’d take these dogs for a little walk first.”

“I don’t blame you. Get away from all this.”

“It’s not that.”

“You and me,” she said, “have a ways to go. But we understand each other, don’t we?”

He said nothing.

She said, “Maybe you don’t know it yet. But we recognize each other. You and me.”

He looked at her. Then he said, “I don’t know.”

She waved her hand at the hills. A few thin streaks of cloud were over them now, showing pale color from the hidden sun. “Go on,” she said. “Run your dogs.”

The short cropped grass of the sheep pasture looked like an old man’s hair, flat silver with frost. When he stepped down and lifted his boot the frost was gone, leaving behind him a wedge of trail. He went up to the family burying ground and hunkered amid the old stones. He thought to see if he might capture some feeling there, something brought up by the old bones but it was only silent and chill. On the far eastern ridgetop the first light angled up into the sky. A single crow flew over the bowl of the farm, its rough hoarse cry cutting the air above the land. Then it was gone into the trees, silent.

But then sitting there he realized that what his father had kept from him was not something as simple as the Negro grandmother (half-Negro? What did that make him? Was he going to learn anything following these lines?) but far more than that. Not only the two women at work below, his father’s sisters whom he would now never see talk or probe or laugh or tease his father but all the rest of it: The old man dead two years when he would’ve been fourteen. The veteran of the War of Rebellion. What exactly had his father denied him by removing him from that old man? He would never know, would always wonder. What complicated levels of emotion drove his father not only to make the choice years before but to enforce that choice throughout all this time? He did not accept that it was as simple as Abigail made it to be, the notion of self-hatred. He sat as the sun came up to quicken the frost and the grass came back to life, the earth began to smell of itself and he warmed in the tender light. The dogs bouncing over the ledges and outcroppings, their tongues out, happy.

He rose after a time of watching the dogs and went down the hill, calm and resolute and undefined at once, much older than he’d been the morning before raising his hand in farewell to Andy Flood as he drove out away from the Bethlehem house. It may have been only the eggshell coffee but he felt prepared for whatever was before him. The only thing he knew was that he would shrink from nothing. His father had not been a coward; he knew this. But Foster was determined to face it all.