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come far enough to be out of the way of ordinary business conducted by the town. The path ended in a tangle of weeds at the edge of a wide inlet that slipped in from the bay. Kenan knew every rock, root and shrub. The small boy in him pushed on, deciding which way to turn. For an instant, he tried to understand where the boy and man had met and merged, but the thought was quickly gone. He circled the inlet and joined a second path, his body at one with the tilt and roll of the earth. He was no longer concerned that he might trip and go down. He entered the woods, which were heavy with dusk, and stayed in the shadow of thinning trees as long as he could. A gust of wind swayed the branches. He heard the sound of many small sticks tapping together. Light had drained from the sky.
    When he saw that he would be forced to divert up a rise toward the road that led back to town, he took the opposite fork and kept the lights of town behind him. He left the bay and continued to walk until he neared the outbuildings of a farm. He did not want to be seen; he needed to be alone. He approached an abandoned barn that had a perilous tilt. The roof sagged in the middle like an old swayback. He found a place where he could squeeze between loose boards, and ducked into a half-upright room. The space was dark. It smelled of old manure, of dust, of stored apples and packed earth and sweet, rotting hay.
    He was cold, safe, out of the wind. He stayed there with no sense of time passing. He looked toward the outline of the owner’s farmhouse not far off. Someone lit a lamp while he was watching and he saw movement across a lower window, probably the kitchen. A woman. He tried to remember who had moved into this place after he’d left for the war. Someone who was a friend of Tress’s aunt Maggie. He couldn’t think of the woman’s name at first. Tress had spoken about her. Something with a Z. Zeta or Zelda, something like that. Zel, an unusual name. Yes, that was it. He could hear Tress’s voice.
    Zel was a widow who moved here from the next county after her husband died. She started up a rooming house beyond the town’s edge.
    The lamp moved past the window again, and a flicker of memory reminded him of a time and place when it had not been safe to show a light. The widow’s house was newly wired for electricity—he could see the wires—but clearly, lamps were used as well. There were occasional blackouts in his own house, and he and Tress kept a supply of candles and a few kerosene lamps. No one got rid of their lamps.
    He tried to recall more of what Tress had said about Zel. Because of his own long silences since coming home, Tress had sometimes fallen into the habit of talking on and on, telling him about people, connecting him back to the daily activities of the town. At times, he heard every nuance of her voice and vividly pictured the scene or person she was describing. At other times,he heard her voice as if it were searching him out from far off, a voice without individual words.
    The widow who moved into the place bought the house from a travelling salesman. The salesman never pretended to like farming, and he allowed the barn to fall into disrepair in the span of a few years. He built a smaller detached building beside the house, a workroom of sorts, where he stored his supplies. When the town began to shrink because of industries closing one after another, the salesman moved to Toronto.
    From the sagging barn where he now stood, Kenan could see the outline of the separate workroom in the shadows. The house itself appeared to be in good shape. He did recall the man, though they’d never exchanged more than a “Good day” before the war. The man had spent weeks on the road, travelling from town to town, around the time Kenan and Tress married. What Kenan remembered most was the auto. The salesman had bought a Model T a year or two before the war, and Kenan would have given anything to get behind the wheel. He’d been shown by