He stood there rocking silent before them. Because there was nothing he could tell either one of them that they did not already know. And he knew they knew this.

After a time Abby stood and left the room, wordless. He stood listening to her going up the stairs to bed. When she was gone he looked at Prudence. She gazed at him until he turned to her. Then she turned her hands up on her knees and gathered her face into those hands and wept. Still he stood. Until he knew her tears were not short and were not for him alone.

It was still raining. He went to the barn and let loose his dogs and they went out together into the rain. He could not see them in the dark and could not hear them but knew they were beside him, close by. He went up the hillside in the dark to the burying ground where he stood hunched in the rain, not by any particular stone because now they were all his. He drank off the last of the whiskey from the bottle, his face upturned wet with the rain. The whiskey like nothing at all. From where he stood he could see nothing at all except from time to time the vague quick shapes of his dogs coming close. Below, a single pale lighted window. With the rain, it could have been a faint star.

Eight

“Whatever it is, I don’t want any of it!” This from behind the dull shade of the screen door, far and close at once, as if the distance was not great but the traveling of it would be. The voice sincere, mocking of its own authority, as if calling out to someone not so much known or expected but as if there were no alternative. As if there could be no strangers. And then, in the deadstill end-of-September afternoon heat came the rising scuff of feet pressed forward, hard-working, accompanied by the metronomic offbeat pock of a cane. Through the screen, down the length of hall, a figure made its way up toward the door. Tall and lean, stooped toward his left side where that hand worked the cane for support.

Foster waited in the deep shade of the porch, sweating where he stood, the sleeves of his open-necked shirt rolled over his elbows. The car parked on the street under the live oaks, the small oval leaves dulled with a weight of rust-red dust. The car windows down for the dogs sleeping in the heat on the backseat. Three levels of ruined flower beds and rose arbors fell from the porch steps to the sidewalk. Even the cobbles of the brick walk were twisted up and uneven from the unchecked growth. Long spears of roses gone wild climbed above the clotted honeysuckle spread over the gardens. Here and there the dead spike of some flower or the rough foliage of a tuberous plant lifted out of the honeysuckle canopy in the way some memory of life otherwise gone remains more vivid than the present. Persistent in lone shorn beauty.