He believed his father would’ve liked Leah. He liked to think so. As if his father, freed from life, would also be freed to see all of her that Norman saw. Not only the beauty and courage that to him were evident as drawing breath but also the lesser fragments that made the whole: the temper and guileless smile; the pluck beyond even thinking; the decision then, the end product of that same pluck, given over to intense focused scrutiny as if she more than most knew clearly how one step leads inevitably to the next and not some other. Her gentle humor, less prod than tease, and the sudden way her face would bloom as if her skin gave off light when Norman would fumble or misstep. The containment of herself, so ferocious as if her skin were a moist sacking over whirling conflict and contradiction. Just the sight of her walking barefoot in a meadow amongst throngs of buttercups and daisies, black-eyed Susans. Or her face lifted and half buried in a spray of lilac. Or by evening lamplight leaning over the round reading table in the parlor, her elbows holding down the spread pages of the Randolph newspaper as she read the week’s news. Or now filling with his grandchild. Whom Norman intended to name James after him. Norman sat on the timbers of the sawpit and thought his father might know all these things. Might not only approve but applaud. Thinking this because he thought the dead may know all things and not just what each action might mean to them: freed of that concern. For in truth he wondered if his father had been living would he have brought the girl home with him or taken her to some other place, an idea unknowable to the boy who had held the farm against his thin chest over his heart throughout the battles and long deadly pauses of march and tent and march again between the battles like other men carried lockets with the likeness of a wife or sweetheart next to theirs. Even wondered if he might have left her there in Washington and rode the rods home with the others, content with some good deed done, carrying with him always that passion and fear of the what-might-have-been. Because it was all very simple. The farm became his when he married, the parents to make partnership with the son and new wife. At such a time as he was able and all parties willing he might purchase it for market value. The sole clause being in the event of his father’s death Norman must provide either home for his mother or a third share of the market value. As most are the will written with the intent of living decades past the dating and signing. Never dreaming of the mare’s hoof anymore than of a star fragment piercing the night sky and his own head. And so made way for the boy to bring the girl home. And gave to Norman the bitter hidden secret of some relief in his father’s death. As if he was freed by the death. As if his father gave him not only all of his own life but all of Norman’s as well; do as you please. His father became sealed always to what had been and only informed the present by the convenience of recollection. Not only is to recall or not the choice of the living but also how and what to recall. The father became more echo to his own desire than a man full-blown. As a knife lost in the garden over winter loses its edge and the handle rots with the spring. How well it used to cut. As with his mother’s words: Father was proud of you.