Without stirring, somnolent, Mebane spoke. “I was a boy. Your age, a year younger I guess. But I did not know what you do. I was still wrapped up in childhood. I don’t know what it was. Perhaps it was the war. Perhaps it was just the way I was made. But for me that winter was all about what I had not done. And that had-not-done was all laid up alongside what I thought I ought to’ve done. And you see, that was all Spencer. Spencer in my mind. Dead Spencer. I could spend the night talking about the ways I tried to track after him. Because they was countless; they informed and re-formed each breath and thought and step I took. Now, is that just the younger brother or is it something else? How can you know? There is the example of my father and Uncle Buchanan. Who came to my father’s funeral and stood solemn and silent watching the earth get thrown in under a winter rain, not saying a word to me or anybody else that I could see. Him in his brushed wool overcoat with the rest of us arrayed in clothes three years outgrown. But him watching that box go down. Like maybe it was something he’d been waiting for.

“I was fifteen. My brother dead more than a year. Me alone in the house with an arm gone. And there was that girl there. Your grandmother. I can’t see her as a grandmother. All my life what I see is her long lean body and that bright sudden smile and the way she walked as if every ounce of her body walked all over an earth that was held away from me, was something I could not touch. You see? I’m not talking about a sister here. And there was this: She and Spencer adored each other. As a boy that was all I could see. It seemed he had something I did not. And, to be fair, he would not admit to me what it was between them. That took me most the rest of my life to learn. Because at the time he was a boy too. So what he told me was not the truth. It was what he wanted me to believe. No. It wasn’t even that. It was what he thought I should believe. But beyond all that there is a more simple truth. Spencer did not bother to see her but as his sister. Spencer was able to step away from all the rest of it. That’s what he would not tell me. Or anybody else. Except of course her and I guess he did not have to tell her. They both knew it. But he would talk otherwise to me. I guess he thought he was protecting her someway doing that. Keeping their tenderness hidden. He would see that as more dangerous than any empty brag he could come up with. Because when all around you is built up of lies then where do you allow the truth in? You cloak it is what you do. You hide it anyway you can. You do not think about how one lie may twist around and allow another. You have no choice. So I was an empty boy. I did not have what my brother had.”