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arms familiar from a winter of chopping firewood. At lunch, Pearl gave me a few biscuits and shared some water.
    The next morning, my mother told me to wash and put on my Sunday suit, and after the wedding, instead of going into the cuts, I helped my mother and Father Earl—my new stepfather—carry our belongings to his tidy house.
    The furniture belonged to the company, so there was only our clothing and my mother’s books, pots and pans, drawings, the toys my father had carved, my skates and stick. My mother left my father’s mended clothes. “For Pearl,” she said, though I knew that Mrs. Gasseur would not keep the clothes of a dead man. After three trips, when all that was left were some jars of summer berries in syrup and a few bundles of clothes, Father Earl reached over the door to take down my father’s ax.
    “No.” He stopped at the sound of my voice, his hand almost touching the handle. He moved aside as I stepped past him. The ax felt heavier than it had the day before. When I pulled it down, the blade struck against the lintel stone, the sound ringing and clear, like the sound of my mother chopping at the ice. But the last sound I heard in the house was that of my mother’s voice. “No more to the cuts,” she said.
    But the last sound I heard in the house was that of my mother’s voice. “No more to the cuts,” she said.

    THAT WAS THE SUMMER that my grandfather finally returned to Sawgamet. He was too late to see my father, of course—and I thought of him a little bit like a sinner trying to repent only after he was already burning—but that wasn’t what had caused him to return to Sawgamet.
    And maybe because I did not ask my father how he felt about his hand and lost my chance to do so, I asked my grandfather why he had returned. He had been in the house less than five minutes, clearly weary from traveling. When I think about it now, it is almost funny: the picture I have of him in my mind, sitting at the table in my stepfather’s house, is that of an old man, though he would have been not much past fifty. Here I am, past forty years myself.
    My grandfather kept his hat in front of him on the table, and he alternated between running his thumb around the brim of his hat and occasionally picking up his cup of tea and blowing on it before putting it back down without taking a sip.
    I gave him a moment, and when he did not answer, I asked again. “Why are you here? Why did you come back?”
    He spun the hat around once, and then did it again. “Do I need a reason, Stephen?”
    I felt my mother put her hand on my shoulder and then she reached past me to put a plate of warmed biscuits on the table. “Your son grew into a man and then had a son of his own. It’s been nearly three decades since you left, Jeannot. Andjust now you come back, asking if you need a reason? You’ve missed him. You’re too late. Your son is gone,” she said, and then she paused only slightly as she put a jar of preserves on the table, before going on. “And my daughter’s gone.” I recognized the jar of preserves. I had carried them down to my stepfather’s house from the foreman’s cottage.
    “I’m sorry,” my grandfather said. He said it firmly, but he dropped his head like he could not look at my mother, and for the first time I decided that I liked him.
    I felt like I knew him already. I’d heard so many stories. I still hear the stories, even now, when they are just things that have been handed down. When I was a child there were men and women in Sawgamet who had known Jeannot—not in the beginning, of course, not when it was just Jeannot and his dog, when Sawgamet was simply an idea, an uncleared swath of trees waiting to be created by my grandfather—but men and women who had known him after that, in the early days, before the gold gave out, before the land started trying to reclaim what had been taken from it.
    Even with all of these stories making him a part of my life well before he returned to