He stayed two weeks on the farm, with no timetable, no plan save to learn what he could. Following that first shock, what impressed him most, what he admired and desired for his own, and what he finally determined was not a thing that could be assumed but a way one was born and lived thereafter, was the way the women went about their days. There was no distinction between work and life but rather each day was an unhurried yet constant movement from one task to the next as if each woman followed a pattern that was old and worn into their very beings, that the work performed was not routine but life. They were grim but not dour, as if understanding that life was unrelenting but not ponderous. He’d seen enough sour hotel workers to recognize the difference. He only knew it himself through the woods. But as his father had reminded him, dollar bills would not be found in the moss or fern-beds of the woods. Be a dog-man, his father had joked. And he knew the world did not demand dogs the way it did butter or milk or eggs. Or meat. Or whiskey.

So he grew comfortable with the sisters. And found himself fond of them. Aware of this, he sought to contain it. Not sure he might trust fondness, the empty well in him. And they, mostly, left him be unless he spoke to them. Unless one would come upon him at some time the woman deemed to fit some schedule of her own in which she would speak freely to him of whatever was passing through her mind.

He did not presume upon their work. Instead he studied the place and so spent most mornings working with the double-bitted axe and the chopping block beside the stacked cordwood behind the house, splitting the wood to firesticks and carrying it by the armload into the entryway shed and stacking it against the empty north wall where scabs of bark and shreds of wood splinters on the earthen floor as well as common sense told him the winter stovewood should go.

Midmornings Pru hitched the big cream pony to a two-wheeled cart and went to the village with cans of milk and crates of eggs. It was often then, Foster at work with the axe, his shirtsleeves rolled high above his elbows, that Abby would come around the house with a glass of water for him and settle herself on an upturned round of wood and watch him drink the water and then continue his work until she would begin to talk. As if answering a question he’d not yet quite thought to ask.

“Look at you,” she said. Then when he stopped in self-conscious confusion she laughed and went on. “So much of Father in you. I can see him as a young man. Is it any wonder Mother risked everything to help him when she found him so?”