story, when Ruth would come to the house as his bride—he would have it painted and put right by then.) The trees of the yard have grown shadowy, the leaves now indistinct in their mass. The work is done at the barn, the men have gone home for the night, the place has fallen quiet. He feels the melancholy of the old house reach out toward him and touch him like a draft of cold air.
And then, behind him, he hears a horse stepping along the road. He turns and sees a man turn in at the gate on a high-headed bay. The man, whom he has seen before but does not know, rides up beside the boy and stops. He is a young man with good eyes and a heavy brown beard, whose squareness of build and breadth of shoulder make him appear less tall than he is. He leans forward, his two hands crossed over the pommel of the saddle—at ease, as though he might mean to stay quite a while right there.
“My boy,” he says, “might your sister be home?”
“She ain’t ever anyplace else,” Jack says.
Ben clears his throat. “I see.” He raises his head and looks for some time at what is now only the silhouette of the house, as though he is making some intricate calculation about it. Does he want to go to the house? Or not?
“I see,” he says. And then, as if remembering something clean forgot, he looks down again to where the boy is standing, by the left foreleg of the horse, and smiles. “Can you show me where to put my horse?”
“Yes sir.”
“Do you want to ride?”
“Yes sir.
The man reaches down with his right hand. “Well, take a hold of that, and give a jump.”
Jack does as he is told, and is swung up and behind the man’s back. It is done powerfully, all in one motion, and the man has made a friend.
“I’m Ben Feltner,” he says. “Who are you?”
“Jack Beechum.”
“That’s what I thought ”
Jack settles himself behind the saddle and takes hold of the waist of Ben’s coat. There is something comfortable about this man, whose hat and big shoulders now loom up so, a new horizon, in the fading light, who smells of horse sweat and pipe smoke.
“Are you set?” Ben asks.
“Yes sir.”
Ben clucks to the horse.
“You came to see my sister?” Jack asks, wondering a little, for few people come to the house to see any of them any more.
“Your sister Nancy Beechum?”
“Yes sir.”
“Well, I came to see her.”
And they ride up the driveway toward the house, forbidding to Jack because of other people’s sorrows, but where he will come to sorrows enough of his own. As he pictures it now, even back in that far-off old time it seems already expectant of her who was to come.
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