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shoulders, crickets would crawl into his pockets, fox would lie down beside him and never even notice he was there.
    He was in the woods on the day they brought Ruth Blackbird Hill and her cows to the farm.   Sometimes when he was very quiet Lysander thought he saw another man in the trees.   He thought it might be the sailor who’d built the house, the widow Hadley’s husband, who’d been lost at sea. Or perhaps it was himself, weaving in and out of the shadows, the man he might have been.
    Susan Crosby and Easter West explained the situation: the parents lost, the house and meadows burned down, the way Ruth was living on the beach, unprotected, unable to support herself, even to eat.   In exchange for living in Lysander’s house, she would cook and clean for him.   Ruth kept her back to them as they discussed her fate; she patted one of her cows, a favorite of hers she called Missy.   Lysander Wynn was just as bitter as Ruth Blackbird Hill was.   He was certain the women from town wouldn’t have brought Ruth to the farm if he’d been a whole man, able to get up the stairs to the attic, where they suggested Ruth sleep.   He was about to say no, he was more than willing to get back to work in the fires of his shop, when he noticed that Ruth was wearing red boots.   They were made of old leather, mud-caked; all the same, Lysander had never seen shoes that color, and he felt touched in some way.   He thought about the color of fire.   He thought about flames.   He thought he would never be hot enough to get the chill out of his body or the water out of his soul.
    “Just as long as she never cooks fish,” he heard himself say.
    Ruth Blackbird Hill laughed at that.   “What makes you think I cook at all?”
    Ruth took the cows into the field of sweet peas.   Lysander’s horse, Domino, rolled his eyes and ran to the far end of the meadow, spooked.   But the cows paid no attention to the gelding whatsoever, they just huddled around Ruth Blackbird Hill and calmly began to eat wild weeds and grass.   What Lysander had agreed to didn’t sink in until Susan Crosby and Easter West left to go back to town.   Hasn’t this woman any belongings?   Lysander had called after them.   Not a thing, they replied.   Only the cows that follow her and the shoes on her feet.
    Well, a shoe was the one thing Lysander might have offered.   He had several old boots thrown into a cabinet, useless when it came to his missing right foot.   He put out some old clothes and quilts on the stairs leading to the attic.   He’d meant to finish it, turn the space into decent rooms, but he’d had to crawl up the twisting staircase to check on the rafters, and that one attempt was enough humiliation to last him for a very long time.   Anyway, the space was good enough for someone used to sleeping on the beach.   When Ruth didn’t come in to start supper, Lysander made himself some johnnycake, half cooked, but decent enough, along with a plate of turnips; he left a portion of what he’d fixed on the stair alongside the clothes, though he had his suspicions that Ruth might not eat.   She might just starve herself sitting out in that field.   She might take flight, and he’d find nothing when he woke, except for the lonely cows mooing sorrowfully.
    As it turned out, Ruth was there in the morning.   She’d eaten the food he’d left out for her and was already milking the cows when Lysander went out to work on a metal harness for Easter West’s uncle Karl’s team of mules.   Those red shoes peeked out from beneath Ruth’s black skirt.   She was singing to the cows and they were waiting in line, patiently.   The horse, Domino, had come closer, and Ruth Blackbird Hill opened her palm and gave him a lick of sugar.
    In the afternoon Lysander saw her looking in the window of the shed.   The fire was hot and he was sweating.   He wanted to sweat out every bit of cold ocean water.   He always built the fire hotter than