“Could have, I guess,” Noah offered. “I saw one or two men freeze up in the fighting, and they had to be shipped home.”

Taylor rocked his shoulders again, wiggled his line. He said, “Well, I guess it’s best nobody knows what was going on, if anything was. Let the dead rest in peace.”

“You probably right,” Noah said.

“That’s a fine lady, though,” Taylor said wistfully.

“She is,” Noah agreed.

“I’m just surprised she stayed on here, but I guess that’s because she had the farm,” Taylor added. “Tell you the truth, she’s not the kind of woman you’d expect to find in a place like this. She’s got some refinement not many of us know much about. I keep expecting to see her walk in the store one day and pay off her debt and tell me she’s going off to Atlanta or New York or Los Angeles or someplace like that, someplace where a woman can buy real perfume instead of that sweet water stuff I sell. Lord, that stuff could blind a man if he got too close to it.”

Noah laughed quietly.

“There’s some women around here who put it on so heavy, you need a gas mask just to talk to them,” Taylor added. “I hear they use it to kill boll weevils down in cotton country.” He was following a fox of humor and he knew it, could tell by the way Noah was grinning. “Every time they have a revival down at the church, I give the visiting preacher’s wife a bottle or two,” he declared. “Makes all the other women come in, wanting the same thing. It’s a trick I learned from my daddy. You want to stir up women somewhere, throw the preacher’s wife in the mix. They going to have some kind of reaction to her, and that’s the truth.”

“I never thought about it,” Noah said.

Taylor lifted his pole, taking the hook out of the water to examine his bait. He made a swinging motion with the pole, dropped the hook again. “Women are hard to figure,” he said. “They’re the only creatures on earth that speak one language with their mouth and another one with their eyes, and most of the time what the mouth is saying has got nothing to do with what the eyes are saying, and vice versa. But I can tell you one thing, that Eleanor Cunningham is one fine lady. Yes, she is. One fine lady.”

She put the flowers in a vase and placed the vase on the dining-room table. Roses cut from her own yard, and daisies. The scent of the roses seemed stronger than the scent of the food cooking in the kitchen. It had been a long time since she had placed flowers in the house.

She paused at the table, touched one of the daisies to turn its face toward her. Truth was, it had been a long time since she had planned such a supper for anyone. With Noah, it had been more of a payment than anything else. She had not cut roses or daisies. Had not put out the lace tablecloth, or set the table with her good china and silverware. Had not cleaned the house so thoroughly.