“It was the coffee. Smells splendid.” He sat next to her on the swinging bench.

“Please help yourself.”

He raised a cup, which she hadn’t seen.

They were quiet for a moment. Then Haig sighed, and said, “Ruth, the boy…”

She had noticed this about him. He would begin to say something, then falter, clearly hoping, pressured by his silence, that she would jump in to save him. But Ruth just waited.

“Things are bad at home, as I’ve explained, and I really can’t…. It really wouldn’t be good for me—for him—to…for me to take him back.”

“Look, I don’t know this boy. I’ve never wanted children. And you have to understand that the circumstances have changed.”

Haig reached now and put his hand over hers. It was everything she could do not to snatch it away.

“He’s a really…he’s a nice boy, and he could help you here on the farm and be company for you.”

“I don’t need company.”

“Ruth, my wife won’t have him. She just won’t.”

“But that’s hardly…. You’re asking me—a stranger, really, a stranger—to be responsible for your nephew. Oliver and I weren’t even married.” While this was true, she felt the warm pressure of tears, as if she had betrayed him. She didn’t want to cry in front of this man. He was staring at her lips now and had gently eased his fingers between hers. She was absurdly frightened that if she cried he would feel compelled to kiss her.

She freed her hand, pretending she needed to adjust her shawl again. “Just for the summer,” she said. “Then you have to come fetch him. Is that clear?”

He nodded. “Thank you, Ruth.”

She was so furious at herself, at how ridiculously sensitive and feckless she was. She had agreed to look after this strange child for three months simply because she couldn’t hold out against the pathetic threat of this man’s pitying desire; because even the possibility that he might try to kiss her was, under these bizarre and emotional circumstances, just too much to bear.

Ruth returned from her Sunday morning walk to the swollen Missouri and back. She felt so lonely it had even occurred to her to go to church. But she was repelled by the thought of sitting through one of the Reverend Hewitt’s interminable sermons, watching that vain little man delighting in his own sophistry while preening his silky brown hair.

At least Haig was gone. She and the boy saw him off at the station yesterday. When the train pulled out, the boy had murmured, as a freight car full of pigs rolled by, “Bet those seats are cheap.”

Since it was the first time he had spoken, she wasn’t sure what to make of it. It was as if someone had given her a dubious gift and it had now begun to do something strange.

He went on in a funny voice, “First class, second class, third class, fourth class, or I can put you with the pigs, sir.”