He came back into the world when everything was grayish-pink and a thousand birds haunted across the fields. Their immutable warbling rippled through the room. He went to the window and looked out at a layer of mist which lifted from meadows across the road … This life must be shed. Mrs. Wurke would be home all too soon; then he could not wander, lone and crazy, through his own house.

Dan sponged his head and shoulders, put on a clean shirt, and went out to the well. A mirror of orange was lifting in the east; the belated and sleepy roosters in Fannings’ barnyard were wailing about it. Dan went into the cool kitchen and hunted until he found a willow basket. In it he packed the remainder of the cheese, half a loaf of dry wheat-bread, butter, a knife, and a jar of quince preserves. One of the Germels boys had left a pail of milk in the little buttery off the back porch; the milk appeared mysteriously each night; you left an empty bucket and a bit of fractional currency on the wide green shelf, and miraculously the milk would be there in the morning, as if elves had brought it … Dan washed an empty wine bottle brought from the pantry, filled it with a pint of milk, and plugged the top with a roll of newspaper. He put Coleridge into the basket, and a late book of Emerson’s which he had never read; it had been bought by Pentland Bale during his last illness. He put in a slab of writing paper and a lead pencil, then took them out again; no, he could never be one with the dainty souls who sat themselves down in clovery dales and poured out their souls amid the murmur of thrushes. If he had anything to give the world, it would bear itself through a less beautiful travail … The doors stood open behind him. He walked south across the pasture, carrying the basket.

He looked at the Fanning house. It was a cube, lifeless, a desolate rock laden with old vines. The chickens gabbled shrilly, telling him.

From the Fairfield road he went south opposite Long Lane. The sun pushed above Granite Ridge and shone on a dwarf in Henry Niede’s barnyard, and animal dwarfs over west at the McMillen farm … He stepped among the spongy hummocks which give birth to Stevens Run. Thick woods, south past the Bliss place; the birds were busy and trilling there, and all the ridge was a smother of plumed trees. Blue haze made a million dimples between the puffy foliage. Green lilac tufts, he thought … the trees bring peace, but somehow it hurts you to look at them too long.

Chapter 6

6.