He had seen Travis only twice since coming home from the war. No, four times. Twice in the jail where he would be for another twelve years, and twice with a road gang, cutting john-songrass with a sling blade. Bent to the work of the sling blade, Travis had had the look of an old man.

Looking down from his above view, he saw himself shift uncomfortably on the porch step, lean forward, elbows on his knees. Saw himself nod to something Whitlow said to him—a question he believed. But he had no sense of the question. The memory of Travis had overpowered him.

“Fish Seller, you look like you a thousand miles away,” Taylor said in his good-natured way. “You hear what Whitlow just asked you?”

The suspended Noah fell back to the porch. He said, “Sorry.” He looked at Whitlow, saw a smile still fixed on his face.

“He asked you if you were going fishing today,” Taylor said.

“Didn’t plan on it,” Noah answered.

“Well, some of these boys were thinking about going to get in some practice fishing before Saturday,” Whitlow told him. “They was wondering if you’d like to go along.”

“I better pass on it,” Noah said. “I still got a lot of painting to do.”

“Well, damn,” said the younger man with the stubble of beard and the sun-brown face. “If that’s what’s keeping you, maybe we all ought to pick up a brush and give you a hand.”

Taylor laughed.

A cooling air slid from the mountain, air that had autumn in it, though autumn was weeks away. Still, Noah could feel it, and liked it. His mother had talked about such autumn-in-summer weather, saying it was nature’s way of telling squirrels to quit their frolicking and to start putting up stores for later on, saying that if people studied squirrels they would have some idea of how best to conduct their own lives.

Such things as his mother told him about weather and squirrels were easy for Noah to remember. He had never heard such things in school. In school, the teachers had talked from books opened in front of them, talked in rapid-fire words too confusing to understand. In school, he had been lost from his first day, had endured nine grades of it before reaching the age of leaving.

He sat in the porch rocker of the shack, having taken a supper of oatmeal and coffee, and he watched the moon’s light spread itself across the unmoving surface of the lake. A soft color, the moon’s light. Orange-red poured into yellow. The color of the sky when the sun skimmed it sometimes at sunset. Sky and water. He felt good with sky and water. Remembered as a small boy his first seeing of a globe of Earth, with the oceans colored blue, and wondering if the blue had fallen from the sky.

The owl he had seen on his first night at the lake made its call. Or maybe it was not the same owl, he reasoned, but another. Maybe the Lake of Grief was a nesting place for owls, a hunting ground of field mice skittering along dark paths made in dark grass.