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then puts it right back down again. “ ‘Burned you, didn’t it?’ says Manley. ‘Nope,’ says Torkle, ‘just don’t take me very long to look at a horseshoe.’ ”
    He’d laugh so hard at his own joke you could see the back of his throat and his thick, coated tongue hanging out of his mouth. A man’s man, some might have said. A buffoon, others might have called it more accurately. A fat clown.
    He usually came on his way to Staunton to take care of his business. Everybody treated him with a kind of deference, as though he, like Charlie, were a stranger to them, even though they’d known him their whole lives.
    “Nobody likes him,” said Will one day, after he’d gone. “Sad. Not even me. Not any more. He’s no more like the boy I knew than Eleanor Roosevelt. And it ain’t just because he’s rich. He was a nice boy, big, but not like he is now. Now he’s just plain gross. Got a hillbilly wife he wears like a ring on his little finger. Nobody else would marry him, and god knows he tried. Imagine, rich as he is, still nobody would have him. Maybe that’s what turned him so mean. He’s sharp in his dealings, don’t treat people with respect. Skinned every man who had a hide in two counties. Thinks he’s better than he is, and everybody knows exactly what he is, just a fat, rich man who’s forgotten everything he learned from his mother, who was a good Christian woman, rest her soul.
    “One day we were friends. The next, he decided I wasn’t good enough for him. We’ll get together next week, he’d say, but next week never came, and finally he stopped asking, and I stopped caring.
    “It’s a sad thing to watch your best friend turn into somebody you don’t know any more. Or even want to know. Still, you’ve got to pretend. Make the best of it. The thing about small towns is, you live with these people, see them every day. No point in fighting. Everybody is always just there, every day, so you’ve got to make your peace. And he spends good money. Still. Sad.
    “Just goes to show you that having a good name and coming from good people don’t actually make you good people yourself. I don’t know him from Adam, any more.
    “And that wife of his. Just you wait. She’s a piece of work.”
    They all called him Mr. Beale, the white women, and he gently told them not to, every time, until eventually they all called him Charlie, although he continued calling them by their married names, even though they asked him to stop.
    Charlie was a better butcher than Will, and the women were impressed, although they didn’t say anything, so as not to hurt Will’s feelings. Charlie’s steaks looked better, trimmed with just a fine thin layer of fat at the edges, and he would tie up their roasts for them with twine, so they looked tight and neat, covering the pork roasts with neatly laid strips of bacon.
    So Charlie cut the meat and charmed the ladies, one by one, but, more than charm, he treated every one, black and white, from the richest to the shoeless poorest, from dollars to dimes, with the same deference and shy kindness, and he won their hearts while Will took the money and read to Sam from the Richmond Times-Dispatch , read it to him cover to cover every day, even the captions on the pictures, everything from politics to sports, and how to keep your stockings from running by keeping them in the freezer.
    Sam was crazy about sports, even sports he’d never seen, like tennis, and of course he liked the comics, which he could just about read for himself by now, even though he didn’t start school for another year.
    He talked about Joe DiMaggio and Steve Canyon and Popeye and Harry Truman in exactly the same way, as though they were people he actually knew, as though they might all be coming to Brownsburg any day now. His special hero was Jackie Robinson, and he talked endlessly about how Jackie could hit and run and play the field, a triple threat was the phrase he used, although where he had picked it