“Now there. That’s Norman.”

Glen said, “It was a hard time for your father, as a boy. The other children were hard on him, more so than they were with the girls. And it was our own boys, often as not, led the pack. I strapped them all in the woodshed over it, more than once. Boys always need something different, something someway strange from themselves. It’s how they decide who they are. Your father was an easy target. I strapped those boys of mine even as I understood they felt if they didn’t do the leading then they’d become that other thing as well. Times, even, I wondered was I making it worse for your father. You do what you can do, but not a one among us can say what that amounts to, what it brings down the road.”

There was a short silence in the room. Glen and Connie looked at each other. As if he’d said more someway then either of them intended. Then, out of this, he went on.

“Aiden—that’s our youngest who you just met out the front of the store—he heard you were in town, he came to me. Told me of a time, the older boys had got hold of your father up in the woods. After school. A pair of them had him by the hands and feet, stretched out between them. They was swinging him back and forth, getting set to dump him down the side of a bank. And Aid, he told me—just a little fellow, not big enough to do anything otherwise—he went roaring in, yelling at those big boys to hold on, to wait. That he wasn’t done yet. So they held your father swinging there while Aiden waded in to kick up and down his ribs. Told me he wanted to hurt him, wanted him to feel as much pain as Aid could make. Before he went sailing down that hillside. Aid telling me how your father would not make a sound as he kicked him. So Aiden came a couple nights ago to tell me this. Not only because he knew you were here. It had been working at him these years. He came in, sat down, told me, asked me why I thought he’d done that. All I could do was look him in the face and tell him he didn’t know any better. And he sat there, right where you are now, and told me that yes he did.”

Foster said, “My mother and sister both died in the flu the winter of ‘eighteen-’nineteen. If there was ever a time for bitterness, that would’ve been a good one, I think. Everybody here thinks he was all hatred and old regrets. I guess there was some of that in him. But it wasn’t the man I knew. All I know is he never talked about this place here. Could be it was such a bad thing he wouldn’t talk of it. But then, maybe, it didn’t matter that much. I guess I’ll never know the answer to that. You think?”