The “renderer” (actually only his Grandfather had ever really been in such a distasteful occupation, but both his son and Roy Sturtevant went on being called thus) slowly dropped his hands at his sides, blinked his eyes, and got out: “So, it’s you after all!” and then having spoken this, perhaps only to himself, he rushed back to his truck and trailer and disappeared, rousing his horses by his violent hurry to whinny and kick and even threaten to bite one another.

Vance slowly, almost mournfully, turned away from this brief spectacle of the meeting between two men who had long had some unspoken conflict between them which he had never begun to understand or wanted to understand, and he strove to swim out toward the direction of the little hills which he was always able to see from Dr. Ulric’s spacious back windows. When finally he turned round facing shore, he saw Sidney still listlessly stationed at the river’s edge, brooding and oblivious to anything around him.

“What did he want?” Vance wondered, toweling his dripping body, and it was then he saw the marks on Sid. He quickly turned away from looking at them so as not to embarrass him any more than he was already embarrassed. The marks or scars looked like somebody had decorated him with razor thrusts about his chest, and on past to his back and up and down his spine; red wales such as come from scourging were visible.

“Search me, Vance,” Sidney replied, a strange look both sad and almost ecstatic on his face. He began splashing the brown river water over his breast as if to draw attention now to the scars themselves, but then he held his hands and arms over the long row of irregularly healed wounds and blinked before he dove into the water. Vance watched him swim until his head was only a shiny black dot on the river.

Sidney refused to go swimming again after that day, and Vance did not urge it again.

“I do hate to leave you all alone by yourself,” Vance would say as their day’s routine began in earnest now, “but as I wrote you, I work for the doctor in his office nowadays . . . Sort of an all-­round helper. I type up his prescriptions, chauffeur for him, and prepare some of his meals, and keep his out-­of-­town appointments straightened out.”

Sidney nodded, but Vance was not certain his brother had even heard him.

“This evening I thought we’d take a little stroll uptown after it cools off,” Vance finished with forced pleasantness.

Sidney did not nod this time and appeared even further absorbed in his own musing, but just before Vance went out for the day the older boy smiled faintly and that cheered his brother so considerably that he went down the steps whistling.