She had not been up there since the fall, when she had gone to unearth her grandfather’s school records and her own. It smelled musty in the August heat, and under the roof it was stifling. She thought maybe she would just sit up there for a while, surrounded by all the mixed-up relics of the past; just sit and think about Willard, the old Willard of farmers—Comstocks, Lovelands, Townsends, the Willard of before the summer people. She blew the dust from a wooden trencher that must have come down from nearly the start of things here and held the soft worn wood in her hands. Haven’t the foggiest idea what I’m doing here, she thought. Maybe just getting away in a private corner like an animal that wants to recover from a wound. But what wound was she thinking of? What particular one? Rufus always got drunk on Old Home Day—but she certainly was in no mood to remember their life together with anything but relief that it was over and done with. Still, as she thought these thoughts, she had gone instinctively to his old hunting jacket and buried her face in it, smelling its smell of musty tweed and leather. The fact was that she felt lonely. Might as well admit it. When loneliness crept in there was some comfort in taking one’s stand backed by all the ancestors—her grandfather with his prickly whiskers, his sweet, haunting chuckle, and those shy Loveland blue eyes. She never saw one of the clan without a start. They were still farmers, dirt poor, but somehow they seemed to have the best of it. At least on Old Home Day they came together as a clan, won all the prizes, and knew the village as their own. She, with her children, moving up a notch in society—and Nick a cripple—she came to Old Home Day very much alone.

Rufus had let himself be vanquished by hard times, but her grandfather, never. “If we have apples, we’ll make apple sauce, and if we have turnips and a bit of mutton from our own sheep, we’ll eat well,” he used to say. “They haven’t got us down yet, Ellen, and don’t you forgit it.”

“Only, Grandfather, I never thought I’d grow old,” she murmured, leafing through a mouldy book of New Hampshire history that he had treasured. “Who does?”