“Going to do it?”

“Yes,” Christina said seriously. “The subject interests me. Besides, with Cornelius kept indoors, I’ll have time on my hands.”

“I have to do education.”

“Well, if anyone knows about it you do.”

Ellen had taught school from the time she was sixteen, until she married Rufus Comstock at twenty-five. Then a Boston girl took over for a while for the sheer fun of the thing, a college graduate, but the old brick school-house had been long abandoned. Willard children joined those of the next village and were driven to the school-house there instead of walking two or three miles as they had done all through the nineteenth century.

“Jem’s good at getting slave labor. I don’t want to do it,” Ellen said, walking on ahead.

“But you’ll do a good job. You know you will.”

“Seems like I’ve worked for this town enough for little pay and no thanks. I was Town Clerk all those years.”

“I know.” They were climbing now, and Christina needed her breath for that. So for a while there was silence. A chipmunk chittered, gave a little squeak, and disappeared like lightning under a stone. Christina’s knee bothered her, but her head was a whirl of thoughts, a kind of intersection where the scream of a flicker was noted, and the way the light struck a birch just ahead, or the silent fall of a single golden leaf wavering through the still air; and at the same time she was thinking about Ellen, and Ellen’s style, which was to complain about almost everything life asked of her and then do a superlative job; Ellen was a born nay-sayer who lifted herself into action with bitter humor and who, if ever a person could be counted on, could be counted on—this tiny woman battered so consistently and recklessly by life. But underneath both the physical world around them and the person plunging on ahead, this walk had another dimension for Christina: the history of the town that might have been written if Jem had not taken it over—the complex, heartbreaking tale of the slow erosion of any possibility of fanning on this rocky, poor land, and what happened to people who had to live with failure, the kinds of ingenuity, courage, and sheer stubborn grit that life here had demanded.