Noah wondered if Eleanor was awake in Howard Reynolds’s home, thinking of him, throwing him a moment that had some meaning to her.

It could be. Could be.

There were a lot of things he did not understand, but believed there was some sense in them.

He turned and went back to the cot and got on it, between the sheets Eleanor had used to make a bed of it, and stared at the tin covering the porch. Wished for rain. Rain on tin made good sleeping.

He thought of Matthew, knowing Matthew must be scared, being lost, being alone. It would be hard for him to know what to do without his grandfather to guide him along.

Outside, nightsounds rang across the lake.

He heard a thrashing in the water.

Hoke Moore’s fish, he thought.

Waiting. Aggravated.

NINETEEN

It was still dark when Noah awoke, though the coloring of night in the east had purple in it. First color from the sun, long before the sun pitched in its yellow and red. He got out of his cot and pulled the covers over it to make it look made up, the way Eleanor had left it, and then he took the water pail to the spring and drew out water and went back into the shack with it. He lit the kerosene lamp and started a fire in the stove, thinking the fire felt good in the morning’s chill. Made ready his coffee and the water for his oatmeal. A good helping of oatmeal, since he knew it could be a long day and if he had any food it would be from the offering of someone else. Or maybe Eleanor would bake a sweet potato and give it to him to carry along-one for him, one for Taylor. She would think of such things, he believed. Baked sweet potatoes, even cold, were filling. Every man who had ever plowed a field some distance from his house knew about baked sweet potatoes.

His mother had always said men would starve if women did not make food for them. A man could kill any animal on earth and gut it and peel off its hide, but not many of them knew the first thing about making food out of the meat. Give a man a slaughtered pig and he could put it over a pit for cooking, and if he thought about it, he might turn it once or twice, but in the long run it would be either scorched or raw when he served it up.

Having a man in a kitchen was about the same as having a donkey at a dance, his mother had declared.

There were times in the army when Noah believed his mother. Some of the food had to be swallowed, not chewed. Maybe you could fool your stomach into believing that what it had in it was all right, but if you left it long enough on your taste buds, it was a different matter altogether.