He leaned on the axe handle. “How’d she risk anything, him being a Union soldier?”

“All those Union boys were not angels, son. Plenty were halfhearted about freeing the slaves; preserving the union was what most concerned them. And even those that were true abolitionists, a young man’s principles might soften up or disappear altogether, they found themselves alone in the woods with a young runaway girl like that.”

He leaned and lifted a new chunk to the block. “Well. He was wounded you said.”

“Oh, he was more than that. It’s part of what your own father missed out on, his losing his mother so young. But Sister and I grew up with them; they were everything a man and woman should be together. Whatever oddness had ever been between them, if there ever was any and I doubt there was, was long since gone. They were man and wife, ordinary and difficult as that is. In some ways maybe even easier for them. They’d already jumped the one big hoop; everything after that was simple.”

He popped the chunk, turned one of the halves sideways and halved it again. “So however it ended, until then they were happy?”

“They adored each other.”

He split the other half and kicked the pieces away, keeping the ground between the block and his feet clear. “It was hard for Pop, growing up, it sounds like. How’d people treat them, people in the town, like that?”

She went quiet then. He kept working. He did not think she had not heard him and so he waited, splitting wood.

After a time she said, “In a way it’s hard to say. Grandmother Pelham was sweet to us girls but distant too. Always gifts at birthdays and Christmas, little things. Other times little treats. But would she have been different if Father had married some white local girl? I honestly can’t tell you. She moved out of the house when he brought Mother home but she would’ve done the same for another bride. She was an old Abolitionist too. I know from Father telling me; she never would’ve. I know for a fact she did knitting and packed food parcels that were passed along to the people heading for Canada. She didn’t harbor any, but I know the name of the woman she gave the parcels too. A Glover in Braintree. But was she happy when she met Mother? You can believe in the idea of a thing but that doesn’t mean you want it in your living room. It’d be nice to think she was high-minded enough so she only saw that it would be difficult for them, that people would always stop and look, some say things.”

He nodded, paused. Then asked, “Other people?”