“No ma’am, I guess not,” Noah said, remembering the rocks of the cornfield he had crossed.

“The truth is, I don’t have much to pay for all you’re doing, but I can feed you. I’d not feel right if I didn’t,” she said.

“You don’t owe me,” he told her. “I can’t take money for just helping somebody.”

“Then you’ll have supper,” she said.

“I don’t think it’d be right, ma’am,” he said after a moment.

She looked at him curiously. A hint of a smile lifted in her face. “Is it because you think I live alone?”

His answer was mumbled: “Yes ma’am.”

“I don’t,” she replied.

He looked at her quizzically.

“My husband’s grandmother lives with me. I take care of her for a little money from my in-laws. I think it’s their way of saying I still belong to the family.” The way she said it sounded almost bitter.

“I didn’t know,” Noah said.

“Taylor didn’t tell you?”

“No ma’am.”

“Sometimes I think they forget about her,” she said. “I know Arthur and Rachel do.” She paused, explained, “Arthur and Rachel are Boyd’s parents, and I guess I sound mean about it, but they don’t come around very much.”

Noah let a disapproving frown say it was sad to treat old people in such a way.

She added, “So you’d be having supper with the two of us, not just me.”

“All right,” he replied hesitantly, knowing there was a matter of pride to be considered and knowing also that he would be hungry again before his work was finished.

“How old are you, Mr. Locke?” she asked.

The question surprised him. “Twenty-eight,” he answered.

“I’m only three years older,” she said. “You don’t need to call me ma’am.”

He smiled, stood, handed her the empty tea jar. “I’ll do that—on a trade. You don’t call me mister.”

“All right,” she said. She looked again at the cow, then began her walk back across the pasture.

FIVE

The supper, taken at the dining room table, was abundant in food—pan-fried chicken, butter-rich creamed potatoes, snap beans, garden onions and peppers, corn bread, mint tea, a pie of fresh peaches—yet the mood of it was awkward. Boyd Cunningham’s grandmother was tiny, brittle-old, her shoulders bowed, her eyes watery, her hair white and thin, her skin powdery. She seemed mindless, the way her head bobbed constantly on the hinge of her neck, the way her hands moved over her lap, like someone trying to brush away crumbs from her dress or to make a cat-in-the-cradle without the string to do it with. A bandage was on her left hand, reminding Noah of the iodine and gauze roll Eleanor had purchased in Taylor Bowers’s store, but he did not ask about it. The old woman did not speak, and Noah believed she did not understand anything Eleanor said to her. She did not sit at the table but in a rocking chair Eleanor had moved into the dining room. A man’s belt held her in the chair, circling her waist, buckled in the back behind two of the chair slats. She knew it looked cruel, Eleanor said of the belt, but it was done for safety.