LITMIR.BIZ

       One: Light

      Since before sunup Old Jack has been standing at the edge of the hotel porch, gazing out into the empty street of the town of Port William, and now the sun has risen and covered him from head to foot with light. But not yet with warmth, and in spite of his heavy sheepskin coat he has grown cold. He pays that no mind. When he came out and stopped there at the top of the steps, mindful of the way the weight of his body is taking him, he propped it carefully with his cane and, in the way that has lately grown upon him, left it.

      From the barn whose vaned cupola was visible over the house roof against the pale sky, Mat Feltner was calling his cows. Old Jack listened with an eagerness that carried him away from himself; for all his consciousness of where he was, he might have been asleep and dreaming. Mat waited, and called again. And then from the quieting of Mat’s voice, Old Jack knew that the cows had come near and that Mat could see them moving up deliberative and shadowy out of the mists and the thinning darkness. And then he heard the barn doors slide open.

      Except for the crowing now and then of roosters, the little town and its outskirts were quiet. Old Jack’s mind was with Mat there in the barn, stirring about the lives of animals. He knew the solitude that Mat had entered at the beginning of every workday since his son was killed in the war. He knew the stiffness and pain that the tobacco cutting had placed in Mat’s back and shoulders and hands. He was aware of the deep somnolence of the hayricks in the loft of the barn.

      The old man stood on the porch in the chill whitening of the dawn, empty of himself as a public statue, while all in him that had kept most alive lived in the waking barn with Mat. And he has continued to stand there while the cries of roosters have flared and flared again across the ridges, and the daylight and then the

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