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leaving — like Ben — and the other one’s by staying and not being true. By not being willing to take care of all of them, by judging and putting down, letting suspicion and hearsay keep you from celebrating the returnings when they happen.
    “That about right, Mother?” he said, looking straight across the verandah at my mother, who’d appeared from the kitchen where she and a handful of other ladies were preparing the buffet.
    “Yes,” she said, smiling proudly. “That’s about right. Now, all of you, come ’round back and meet your neighbors.”
    We moved together out onto the lawn and around the house in a raggle-taggled bunch like the herds we tended. The Gebhardts stood together outside the opened doors of their battered old ’57 Mercury in the fight-or-flight position I recognized in the half-wild barn kittens we found each spring. A small orange U-Haul was hitched behind their car, and the back seat was piled high with blankets and boxes and a huge black Philco radio. A rusted orange Schwinn bicycle was tied on the top. Harold Gebhardt came down the porch steps as slowly and solemnly as Ben Gebhardt shook hishand once he reached him. The woman beside him smiled weakly at the process, and the thin-shouldered boy beside her swept his timid, blue-eyed gaze over all of us from beneath a mop of shaggy hair. They were dressed much like the rest of us, in the pressed and creased Sunday best sort of outfits we all try to appear comfortable in. Harold exhaled deeply and then clasped his bony arms around his son, whose face contorted at the sudden intimacy. Eventually he laid his hands limply on the old man’s shoulders, patted distractedly a few times and then disengaged himself.
    “My, uh, wife,” he said to Harold, hooking his thumb towards her. “Ellen. Ellen this is … my dad.”
    She came forward almost mincingly and extended a thin, pale hand that trembled slightly and earned her the sympathy of all the women in the background. “I’m glad to meet you. Finally,” she said quietly and threw a worried glance at her husband. “This is our son. John. He’s ten.”
    Harold bent down on one knee in front of him and tousled his hair. John Gebhardt stood there, straight shouldered, rigid. His hands were curled tightly at his side. He was as pale as his mother, fine boned and fragile looking.
    Harold said softly, “Well, John Gebhardt, it’s nice to meet you. I’m your grampa and these people behind me are friends of mine who came here just to meet
you.
Whaddaya think about that?”
    The boy’s eyes darted over all of us and he swallowed hard. “Fine, sir,” he said quickly and looked at the ground.
    “He’s like that,” Ben explained. “Don’t talk much. Kind of a dreamer, you know?” He smiled weakly around at us.
    “Well, we’ll soon have him talking about those dreams, all right. Lots of good kids around this town to help him with that. In fact, one of them’s here tonight. He’s ten, too. Joshua? Come here, son.” Harold waved me over with one hand while rubbing the boy’s shoulder with the other.
    My dad nudged me forward and winked encouragement. There was a flicker of surprise in John Gebhardt’s eyes as I approached and then they settled back into a spot on the ground.
    “John, this here is Joshua Kane. Him and his folks live about five miles out of town. Joshua, this is my
grandson
, John Gebhardt.”
    The hand that reached out to clasp mine was thin and meatless. Moist. Soft. Girlish, almost. My own were callused from forking and lifting, and the muscled forearms of the farmer were already bunching along the young lines of my arms. My grip surprised him. He looked up and the depth and clarity of his eyes shocked me. It was like falling through the sky. He stared at me hard, and for the briefest moment I felt the life force within his slender frame radiating outward in a roiling, churning wave, hard and insistent, like the feeling you get when you lay your hand upon the flank