And so Francis stayed home and worked the farm with his father and mother. They made hay in summer to feed out the rest of the year. He milked the cows and fed them the hay and in an endless round of days shoveled their runny shit from the gutters and deposited it on the storage pile, and from there shoveled it again into the horse-drawn spreader and took it to the fields where it fertilized the grasses that would be made into hay. Francis liked the rhythm of the farm, the certainty and surety of chores, the rising early to care for the stock, the choppy cadence of milk squirting from tit to tin bucket, the muffled grunt of satisfied hog and throaty cluck of hens laying. He grew, his muscles developing with the steady laboring, but he remained blanchy, unweathered, his eyebrows and hair empaled by the sun.

He seldom lingered in the village, stopping only long enough to deliver the cream cans to Pincher's loading dock and pick up the mail and whatever supplies were needed at home. Sometimes he would see Lucy at the store; she always smiled and said,Hello, Francis. How have you been?" He would duck his head to hide his grin and tug quickly at the brim of his hat. When she entered teacher training at sixteen and began boarding in Lennoxville during the week, he seldom saw her.

Francis avoided the larger towns along the border; the day trip by train to Sherbrooke some forty miles distant was something his parents had done once and talked of many times over the years. Francis never made the trip but he delighted in the shrill warning blasts from the engine's steam whistle as it approached the bridges and grades crossings throughout the valley; if he was alone, he would utter high, guttural sounds that to him echoed the train's whistle, and he would smile and nod his head. The scheduled runs of mixed passenger and freight trains were woven into the fabric of the daily life of the valley, unconsciously marked, noted, taken into account, the warning whistles a comfort and a reassurance, the slow, steady comings and goings of the trains marking the passage of the day, of the time between chores.

Time. Time not gauged by the sharp, tiny click of seconds or the steady, relentless circling of minutes, or the abrupt change of the hour hand, but time measured by the journey of the sun rising from behind the ridge across the river from the placid village, arcing over the spruce bog (a haven for biting, sucking, humming insects in summer, a deeryard in winter, silent then but for the chewing and snorting of the deer), climbing higher over the fields and woods between the Hildreth farm and Lake Memphremagog, then disappearing behind the Owl's Head and the westerly mountains.

Time ascertained by plowings and plantings, harvests and church suppers and strawberry socials and county fairs, of barn raisings and retellings of hoary deer hunts and bear killings, of sugaring-off parties in the bush on the rolling ridge to the north, of deliberate, plodding passages along the dirt road winding through the valley that became a quagmire in mud season, impassable, dreaded, to be avoided at your peril; in the dog days of summer a ribbon of dust on which, from a high place, you could mark the progress of a traveler from several miles distance; in winter, disappearing; passable only by horse-drawn sleighs once the snow was rolled to a semblance of level, the drifts shoveled and shoveled again and again, often cursed, the trail sporadically marked with paired saplings at treacherous places that awaited the unwary, the incautious, the stranger.

This, then, was time to Francis; never considered nor dwelled on, but simply lived. There was the unquestioned reality of farm life: wherever you chose to go, you had to be able to get there and back by horse and wagon before night chores. And then there was the knowledge of his otherness.

Lucy. Fire-haired woman, tall and slender. Eyes blue as wild chicory. Laugh like clear brook water murmuring over mossy rocks, soft, caressing. Radiant, flickering Lucy with hair flying, sinuous skirts a-whirl, dancing, turning, twisting, moving through the night like a firefly, smiling, smiling and dancing with Francis who bobbed and swayed as he curried the horse that would carry him that night to Pincher Langdon's dance hall, and Lucy. His breath came a little quicker as he rubbed hid callused hand across the sleek swell of the horse's flank, his sweaty chest felt tight against his shirt. "I'm going," he thought. "Tonight, I'm going."

His mother watched from the kitchen window. Her arms were crossed tightly over her breast, her lips pursed. She was frowning.

His father looked up from his plate. "It's time he took a wife."

"He's too young."

"He's eighteen, Mother."

"Francis isn't ready for a wife."

"He's ready."

"I don't want him hurt."

"He needs a woman."

"No." She shook her head.

"He was in the hoochy-coochy tent again last week. The boys were laughing about it down at the store."