Foster sat quiet. Mebane studied him, the thin eyebrows almost invisible above his large eyes, eyes set out in the tight shining skin of his head. The room was grown hot as the quickened early autumn westering sun slid down the outside of the house beyond the filmed windows. Pale bars, unsteady, aqueous, slid over the threadbare carpet, a deep glow on the old heartpine planks. Foster was tired, hot, his eyes and throat sore. He watched the old man across from him as if watching some new species rise up before him. Attractive and repulsive at once, a dense and self-laid pattern of traps, some set, some perhaps already sprung. Thinking this, he took his eyes away from the old man. He wondered what was in the stack of ledgers, the pens laid out in a stand, the ink capped tight. As if they were the only valued things in the room.

Mebane gripped his cane in a sharp sudden gesture and came upright, the chair rolling back some inches as he stood. As if the man and two objects were conducting practiced ritual. “Come follow me,” he said and did not wait but crossed the room not to the hall but to a single door with no handle but a brass plate turned black against the heavy old wood. With Foster behind him Mebane turned his shoulder against the door to nudge it open and it floated back on old hinges and stuck open and Foster passed through and saw the door would open in either direction where the spring-loaded hinges would hold it open for a moment before it would slip silently shut again. They were in the kitchen. The door so people could go silent from the kitchen into the dining room and back into the kitchen again, leaving behind plates and bowls of food and then be gone.

They went through the kitchen. A big double-oven range, its cold top heavy with dust and stacked up with utensils and baskets and iron cookware and other objects. There was a square thick-planked table in the center of the room. This table was empty, discolored in places, scarred. On a counter by a sink was a small steel portable cooker with a pair of electric coils. The drainboard by the sink held a single glass, a single plate. An electric toaster was also on the counter circled by crumbs of darkened bread.

They went through an outside door and down short steps into the backyard. Ahead to the left was a square-timbered mud-chinked one-story building with a rock chimney at one end and a single window offset from the door let into the center of the building. There were no steps up but a single flat stone before the shut door. The building was raised on foundation ranks of stones at the corners. The other end of the yard stood a small two-story barn. The yard was flat here, not terraced like the front. A small garden patch with burned-out vegetables grown up with weeds. A rotting plank fence enclosed the yard, the fence overgrown with honeysuckle. As if the woven vines held the punked planks in place.