He smiled easily, said his father had also owned a white mule named Fanny. Jittery. Fast-stepping. Given to kicking at the trace chains. He had grown up believing all white mules were spirited.

“Not my Fanny,” she said; then realizing how the comment must have sounded, she turned away to hide her embarrassment.

He looked down, feeling the crimson of a blush rising over his neck. A nearby bird made a mocking chirp, almost like laughter.

She turned back after a moment, touched her face with her hand as though testing the July heat. She said, “Were you in the war, Mr. Locke?”

He drank from the jar of tea, answered, “I was.”

“My late husband was, too,” she said simply.

“Yes ma’am,” he replied. “The man at the store told me—the storekeeper.”

She let a pause build, then: “Taylor Bowers. He tell you how Boyd died?”

The question made Noah uneasy. “Yes ma’am,” he said quietly. “Sorry to hear about it.”

“Thank you,” she said evenly, as though she had given the answer many times. She glanced back at the cow, held the gaze.

“Why do you think he did that, Mr. Locke? Why would a man go through a war and come home and kill himself?”

“I don’t know, ma’am.”

“Nobody does,” she said. She added, “I don’t think he knew himself. Maybe it was because he lived and there were others from here who didn’t.”

“Could of been,” he replied.

“Sometimes I think it was because he was at one of those camps where all the Jews were killed, and he couldn’t get it out of his mind,” she said.

“Yes ma’am.”

“Did you know about those camps?”

“Yes ma’am,” he answered. “I was at one of them.”

“You were? Which one?”

“The one they called Dachau,” he said.

The expression on Eleanor’s face changed to curiosity. She said, “I’ve read about them, because of Boyd. That was one of the worst.”

“I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “It was bad.”

“You have trouble forgetting it?”

“Some,” he said, keeping the answer short, not wanting to talk about it.

“I don’t understand how all that could happen,” she said.

“Hard to make sense of some things,” he said.

“I guess I’ve lived long to enough to know that a lot of things don’t make sense.” She paused again, turning her gaze back to him. “I thank you for what you’re doing, helping out. I want you to have supper at the house.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “What you brought me will do.”

“I wish you would,” she said earnestly. “Maybe Taylor said something about the rumor of Boyd coming home from the war with a lot of money—and he did have some that caused some talk—but if he had any left over when he died, I don’t know anything about it. It’s why I’m trying to sell the place. No way of me making any money out here, but I guess there’s not many people looking for a farm that’s got more rocks than dirt on it.”