He sat at one end of a pine-log table on his small front porch, facing the Sound, and she at the other. She did not speak and, large as she was, ate with sparing delicacy, while Talmadge, lean as he was, devoured two helpings of the stew along with cornbread and greens cooked in bacon fat. A smudge pot smoked to keep mosquitos and sandflies at bay. It wasn’t too effective, and the meal was consumed to the sound of hands slapping forearms and foreheads. Talmadge begged their forgiveness for the outdoor dining. His ailing wife was recovering inside, and he did not think it proper to disturb her or to bring guests into a house where sickness dwelled. She’d been poorly for a week, suffering from a fever and headache brought on as a result of delivering a six-months baby, which had come out of her stone dead. He volunteered this, if not casually, then with such an absence of sorrow or bitterness that he might have been speaking about a stillborn pup or kitten.

“Come to Sunday, I asked the Reverend Dewey Jenkins—he’s the preacher what ministers to us when the steamer’s runnin’ from Beaufort—if that dead child was another chastisement, and just when was the Lord gone to have done with me? Or was I to be like that Job feller in the Bible, gettin’ one punishment after t’other for no reason? He thought on things a spell and told me that the dead child weren’t a chastisement, no, sir. He told me, too, that Job didn’t get punished for no reason. He was punished to teach him that the beginnin’ of wisdom is fear of the Lord. And that’s what the Lord was doin’ with me. He was fixin’ to end the chastisements and to get into the teachin’ part, so’s I could become a full-blowed Christian again. The Reverend told me I was in … Well, he used a word to mean I was in a time ’twixt and ’tween things.…”

“Transition?” Drew ventured, utterly at a loss as to what the man was talking about.

“That was it!” Talmadge stopped abruptly and looked at the girl. “Clara, reckon we could do with coffee and some of that pie of yours,” he said, speaking very slowly, with exaggerated movements of his lips. Acknowledging him neither with word nor expression, the girl Clara picked up the dishes and went inside.

“Excuse me asking,” Will said, “but is she your daughter?”