He went on, beaming in his beard, “I know for a fact she lost a couple nests of swallows, when the cats figured out how to climb the old stable doors. Barn swallows are hard to discourage, but Irma’s finally did stop coming back.”

I hurried on, away from such sadness. “My question is, Dwight, what do I do about them? The cats. I can’t just leave them to starve in the landscape.”

I was begging, he could see. Though I knew he thought it, he did not ask, “Why not?” He was indulging my fancies, as he had indulged my mother’s.

“I have to get back to New Jersey,” I said, “after I see the lawyer in town and the pastor up at the church and the undertaker again.”

Now he shifted his weight, standing there. “Well, I could take the shotgun and go over at suppertime, when they gather on the porch. That would take out a few, and then the others might get the clue and skedaddle. If you’d like, I could ask Adam to come down with his woodchuck rifle and we’ll run a pincer operation. We need owner’s permission, but you’re giving that, isn’t that right?”

“I sure am. We have to do something.” Adam Schwab was the neighbor to the north, a plump orchard-keeper with a multitude of children and now grandchildren. We were, we three proprietors, about the same age, in our late fifties. They had been boys here when we moved. I had tried playing with them, but they had had stunted ball-handling skills. Their opaque, slow-moving earthiness had frightened me—reminded me of death.

“I would be very grateful,” I emphasized, and in my own ears my voice sounded citified, weak, patronizing.

Dwight said, “We don’t want you worrying, over there with all those other smart folks at Rutgers.” I could not accept my neighbor’s favor without submitting to his needle. My mother, once my father had ceased to negotiate for her, had shown a good grasp of these country transactions: a little “kidding” for every kindness. She rented fields to her neighbors, and they helped her out in blizzards and mechanical crises. If she could not stay on the land, it would likely go under to a developer, and the neighborhood would be changed forever, with septic tanks and fast traffic and higher taxes and a lowered water table. It had suited me, too, to keep her on her farm, out of my life. I had begun to worry, though, how she would survive this coming winter. She took any decision out of my hands by dropping dead at the kitchen sink, frying herself a pork chop while the Channel 4 evening-news team was chattering in the living room.