“It’s cool here on the verandah and under the tree where that dog is napping. Now the dog might look like he’s sleeping under the sugar maple, the one I was telling you about which Rose planted, but if I snap my fingers he’ll wake up and you won’t be able to run. Don’t worry though, I’m just kidding. He’s an old dog. His bark is wicked mean but he’s got the rheumatism and he is no longer able to run like he once did. You can’t tell for how he’s lying there in the shadows. Most of his teeth are gone. But you should never trust an old dog even if his teeth are gone. Sometimes they can turn.

“That dog, he don’t like the heat. I don’t mind it, for it never lasts long here, and when winter comes in, she don’t let your thoughts linger on summer too long. She’s that kind of lady. You love her and only her.

“You have to be careful telling stories. Some of them aren’t yours to tell, you understand. Bad things happen when you steal them or change them. Did you know this?”

Ondine looked away, toward the small pond where something jumped. The fountain was running now. Maybe it had been the whole time and Ondine hadn’t noticed.

“I came back up here on the Mountain to the old place for good after I did my one and only time in jail. You didn’t know that, now did you? Oh, I imagine I was almost forty by then. I can’t remember. The whole decade just seems like it was one big long year. Daddy was gone finally, wizened up in a nursing home. I did go see him from time to time and he’d mutter away and say things that made me shudder. It was mostly nonsense. A bird flew in the window, he said, a bird with deep green eyes. A hand was crawling under his bed flashing a pretty ring with a purple stone. The mind does that for some. It collapses like the old barn over there will someday. But it never happened to me nor my brother. Our minds stayed sharp. Hiram’s mind was still clear when he had the heart attack in the woods by the waterfall. I found him there when he was breathing out his last words, his regret over how Elmore died, how he always knew he’d pay for it.

“Some people, they get more astute when they get older. Hiram got craftier, but not one damn bit smarter or sensible, mind you. Always coming up with some way to get ahead that always involved putting someone else behind. Don’t get me wrong. He’d do some nice things for you, if he wasn’t trying to pull one over on you. He was the one who picked me up when I got out of jail. He testified to the judge about my character. Of course that don’t mean much, for Hiram had no trouble lying for his kin. At least family loyalty ran in him. When my prison days were behind me I took over the family farm to work it in the old ways, with the horses, the plough.