Elbridge grinned, remembering his grandmother, “Big” Sarah MacKechnie, long dead, but a power in her time. “The girls,” Sarah MacKechnie and Jennie Gilman, doubtless guessed what had taken place. In a country where the custom was to tell women only what was supposed to be good for them to know, most women learned early to put two and two together. He recalled hearing Big Sarah say, once, with a snort, “The lies, for heb’m sakes, that men tell women! If ’twas only about each other, I could put up with it, makes things more fun not to have the like of that nailed down, cut and dry. But he wants to burn coal in the stove, too lazy to cut wood—so he tells me now, after fifty years, that wood will ruin the chimney!”

And indeed, it did seem to Elbridge, thinking over the lore of the country, that some of it might be based on, not lies exactly, but on men’s convenience. Weeds are good for the garden, they shade the plants. Potatoes grow better on new ground if you don’t shake out the turf. Cistern water is better to drink than well water; such things. Oh, yes, the girls would have guessed about the fight. Anse and Robert would not have wanted them to know that a decision which meant so much hardship and change in their lives had depended on whose husband had the toughest fists. And Anse would not have wanted anyone to know that he had been thrashed by a man half his size.

Elbridge hid his grin. No sense to stir the old man up—he looked pretty frail today; and MacKechnie went on.

“Anse hated the place from the beginning,” MacKechnie said. “I never could see or find out why. He said, that day, it was Old Ellick, whatever that was. It sounded foolish to me and, at first, it was what made me mad, he a grown man letting himself be shaken in such an enterprise by the bogeyman, if that was what it was; I never knew. But later on that day, I was mad because I wanted the place, and to talk to him was like talking to last year’s deer hide nailed on the barn. I wanted it for the stone, though not entirely for the stone. Though it was lovely stone.