He was glad his mother had taught him how to make oatmeal and corn bread and how to fry fish, though he often cooked fish over the coals of a fire. With a little salt sprinkled over it, it was not bad cooked that way.

He wondered if Eleanor felt the same as his mother about men in the kitchen. Probably. She had seemed annoyed with Taylor over the way he hovered around her on the night of their supper together, telling him to stay away from the simmering pots and to stop poking at the fish sizzling from the grease in the fry pan.

He poured his first cup of coffee. Outside, a crow cawed, causing him to look toward the porch. Early for a crow to be making noise, he thought. A rooster, maybe, but not a crow, unless the crow had been hatched near a farm and had taken on the habits of a rooster. He took his coffee to the porch and looked out. The purpling of the sky was turning pale, like a garment washed too many times. He had promised Taylor he would be at the pull-off above the lake by sunrise, and he did not want to be late. He knew there would be men at Howard Reynolds’s home at first light-more men than the day before. Calls would have gone out, and even those men with some thought of work on their farms would be there. It was their way. If the need was great enough, nothing else mattered. He had seen it in Elbert County when a crop was in danger of being lost to weather, or a neighbor had been injured in taking up hay or in threshing grain. Men gathering, doing what needed to be done, with no expectation of pay, knowing the same would be done for them in the same circumstance.

And he had seen it in war. A soldier missing, and how the other soldiers had banded together to look for him, and how rank never seemed to matter.

The chaplain had called it a fellowship of men, a thing God had put into Adam that was like a secret heart. When it started pumping, men could do things that seemed impossible.

In his own community, he knew of a man who picked up the back of a car after he accidentally ran over his wife. Later, three men, all larger, had tried to lift the car, but had failed.

God’s doing, the people of his community said. God’s doing.

And it was, Noah believed.

He turned and went back into the shack and made his oatmeal, sprinkling it with brown sugar, and sat at the table and ate it. It was hot and pasty-tasting, even with the brown sugar. It needed butter, but he had got used to eating it the way he cooked it. If nothing else, it was filling.

At the stove, he poured enough hot water into his bowl to clean it and then poured the water into the wash basin, wiping the bowl with a washcloth Eleanor had left. He would wash the coffee cup later, he decided, since there was still some coffee in it.