Ezra’s eyes smoldered with excitement. As if Gran and I had some secret and he wouldn’t rest until we shared it with him.

“Okay,” I said. “I won’t stop you.”

“What do sheep eat after snow comes?” Ezra asked.

“Hay,” I said. Just thinking about moving bales in and out of the pickup truck made my back ache.

Ezra shifted in his bed.

“How long to shear a sheep?”

I worried a flap of skin on my thumb. “A few minutes a piece. A few days for all of them.”

“All of them?”

I nodded.

“How many?”

“Over three hundred right now. We’ll cull some in the spring. We keep most, though.”

I answered him and kept answering him until his voice grew hoarse from asking. Occasionally he’d nod off, then wake again. And ask another question.

He hadn’t seen any of it, except on the day Gran drove him in. He just heard the workings of the farm coming dimly through the curtained window. That and what we told him.

Ezra put his hands behind his head as I stood to leave. I’d almost stepped into the hallway when I turned and walked back toward him.

“You’ve been asking me questions all evening, right?”

Ezra nodded.

“Can I ask you one? You can say no if you want. It’s a little bit personal.”

Ezra looked uneasy.

“It’s about the scar over your eye. How did you get that?”

He relaxed. Maybe he’d thought I’d ask about the accident. He didn’t know me very well if he thought I’d bring that up.

“I was maybe five years old,” Ezra said, smiling. “Jumping on the bed one night. Mother warned me not to.”

I looked at Ezra, imagining him as a five-year-old.

“My mother fell apart when she saw all the blood. It was my father who carried me to the doctor’s house across the road.”

Could it be only a few days ago I thought the room would win again, that Ezra would die?

“Know what, Shep?” Ezra said. “I feel like that bird. The phoenix. It burns up, then rises from its ashes.”

I listened, watching him. I’d never heard of a bird like that, but now I wouldn’t likely forget it.

“Feels good to be alive, Shep,” Ezra said.

I eyed the canes with the burly handles leaning against the wall beside the bed. Gramp’s canes. I’d cut the wood with him. I’d watched him strip the bark, shape the canes, sand them, oil them.

Gramp was gone.

But Ezra was still here.

Twelve

November slid into December. Ezra grew stronger, though he still needed Gramp’s canes.

I would come down the hall calling, “Hey, Ezra. I hope you’re decent.”

“All depends on what you mean by decent,” Ezra would answer, waggling his eyebrow.

Ezra asked about school, about the weather, about how things smelled outside.

I worried he might make himself sick again. He pushed so hard, hobbling back and forth across the wide floorboards of his room. Sometimes he got up every hour, other times he lay in bed, unable to find the strength to go on.