What makes me anxious is that I have seen other incidents in this village that could tear the whole web of our society. Rumor does it—people being at the same time so close-mouthed about their own troubles and so ready to gossip about other people’s. I’ve seen how it can happen too often, roll up like a snowball into a solid mass of rage and hatred when really the start was nothing at all. This time a lot is involved. Orin’s father once had a knockdown fight with Rufus Comstock when Orin’s father was road agent one winter, and Rufus got into one of his towering rages because one plow broke down and he couldn’t get out to the barn. So Orin is hard on Nick and Ellen. There is no love lost between the tribes. And everybody’s a little more keyed up than usual with so many guns and out-of-towners around in hunting season. Two dogs have been shot already. Cornelius has to have some outlet for his frustration, but would it were not this one.

What amazes me is how tightly woven we all are together at the roots, how strong the roots are, and how deep they go into the past.

Chapter 6

CHAPTER 6

It was one of those days when there seem to be more leaves whirling about in the air than on the ground—a windy, dusty day. Eben had been out chopping kindling for Mrs. Goodnow. But the wind, the restless sky, made him restless. It was always like this in late autumn when skeins of geese went over, and every year Eben felt a pull in his chest. “Why not go to Japan?” he would ask himself, surveying the black mass of frost-killed squash in the vegetable garden.

“I never cut down the peonies,” he told himself. “Time I covered the garden.” The flowers had been Olive’s province, and now that she was gone he almost heard her telling him these things, or saw her in his mind with a little cart and the clippers, bending down, so absorbed in her work that she did not hear him coming. He knew what he ought to do now, but he felt childishly cross about it. “I just won’t,” he said to himself, and went deliberately past the peonies and up onto the porch, where he stood a moment looking out over the pasture at the mountain.

Then he became aware that a tall figure was making its way across the field. For a second it looked so like Christina that he half raised his arm to wave. But no, this woman, whoever it was, limped a little. Christina, tall and straight as an arrow, would not limp, and she had not come up here for years. So Eben turned to go in, impatient with himself and these shadowy figures from the past that never left him free these days.

“Eben!”