A thought struck her: Did Noah Locke remind her of her husband? No, she decided. No. Noah was quiet. He had a way of standing that made it seem as though he were about to take a backward step, but his feet never moved. Her husband had been talkative, noisy even. A braggart. She did not think Noah Locke had ever called attention to himself.

The disappeared sun had left a pale sheet of light, melon-flesh in color. On surrounding hills, trees had already pulled the dark cover of night over them.

The war, she thought. It was the war. Noah Locke had been in the war. The war was the tie between them. Only the war.

Tomorrow, given a chance, she would apologize again to him for her assault of words, for being a jabbermouth.

She would pay for the fish that he would deliver—if he did—and she would wish him well.

She thought of her fish order—three or four—and wondered why she had asked for such a large number when one would do, knowing that Boyd’s grandmother would not eat fish. Maybe he thought she was hinting at inviting him for another supper.

She felt an uneasy blush on her face, thought, Why did I do that?

She pulled the car to a stop in front of her home, switched off the motor, said in a whisper, “Three or four fish.” And then she smiled foolishly, a young girl’s smile. She rubbed at her face with her fingers, kneading the smile. She said again, “Three or four fish.” And she laughed quietly, wearily. She opened the car door and got out and walked into her house.

SIX

At the Lake of Grief, Noah moved his belongings into the shack, taking the mattress and blanket and pillow from the inside cot and putting them on the cot on the porch. Cooler sleeping outside, he reasoned. Besides, the room needed airing out, and he had raised the windows and left open the house door to let the breeze go through it. On the porch he would sleep comfortably enough and the moon would give him light through the mesh of the screen wire and the wire would keep out the mosquitoes.

He sat for a time in the rocker, watching the night turn dark-thick and moon-glazed, letting the day settle into his memory. A long day, it had been. The mercy killing of the cow and its burial, the filling supper, the stories of Eleanor Cunningham, the silent presence of the old woman who stared at her hands, her body so thin it made him think of the living skeletons at Dachau.

At Dachau, on the railroad siding running into the camp, he had seen freight cars holding bodies that had been stacked as firewood would be stacked, body on body, the rot of death causing them to sink into one another. A soldier with him had said, “Bones. They ain’t nothing but bones.” And Noah had always thought of the cars as Bone Cars.