He came down from the sugar bush into the blue-dusk bowl of the farm and entered the barn basement tie-up where his mother was up in the loft, forking down hay to the stalled horses. He let the five milk cows free of their stanchions and followed their shit-caked hindquarters as they filed out into the night pasture and slid the door shut after them. He took up the yoke over his shoulders and carried the double buckets of milk out of the barn, wordless meeting his mother as she came down the ladder from the loft and saw what he was doing. He crossed the yard into the cellar of the house, the stone-vaulted chambers cool and moist. In the cooling room, he poured the milk out into the long pans and laid them out by the well square-sided with even slabs of granite, the water in the well from the same source-spring as what flowed into the kitchen overhead. Here he could smell food and heard girl-voices warbling with laughter over his head. He skimmed the cream from the morning pans and dropped the clots into jars and fastened the bails and lowered the jars into the water to sit overnight. His mother came in behind him and spoke his name. He turned to her and said, “I was remiss not letting you know. I failed you not getting home sooner. Whatever spree I was on I still ought to have let you know. Truth is I never thought to.”

She nodded, meaning she knew that much. She said, “Father passed, I’d thought they’d send you home.”

“Would’ve I’d asked.”

She nodded again. She studied him, as to fathom, to reconcile the man before her. Then she said, “You surely brought a surprise.”

“Surprise to me too.”

She cleared her throat. Pronouncement, he thought. She said, “Father left things clear. We need to set down together.”

He nodded. “I’ve money in the bank.”

“I know it.” She paused and then went on. “I always expected you’d find some girl soon’s you were home. I always supported the abolition. Little it was but I did my part, knitting things that went forward to those folks journeying on toward Canada. You didn’t know that. It was quiet, you know. But Norman, this.”

He looked down, studied the earth-packed floor. The smell of the room sweet and sour at once with the new milk and cream and the dank wet coming through the stone foundations and the faint cleanth rising from the water. His eyes off his mother he looked up to the low rafters and said, “I brought her.”

His mother looked now up. She said, “She’s taken over my kitchen. Just like that.”

“That was me. I told her to fix a supper for us. Whatever it is is all my doing. And by Jesus I could eat that chicken all myself. You can’t imagine how it smells to me.”