Ezra shook his head.
“This doesn’t sound like you. Too sudden.”
“Men change.”
“I’d believe a skunk’s scent had come to smell like flowers before I believed you’d changed, George. I know you don’t take pride in much, but you don’t lose sight of yourself for any man.”
“Think as you wish.”
“Surely, there must be some reason—”
“My son is dead.” He said it very plainly, as though he were reading off the last item from the back page of a newspaper.
Ezra stiffened. He stood up and walked around his desk. George thought he might move to console him somehow, which would make for the first physical contact between them since his father’s death, when he was still but a boy. Yet Ezra merely winced, his eye twitching, as if in display of a care more genuine than any words might carry.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “So, so sorry.”
George told him of August’s visit, of his wife having gone silent from the moment he told her the news until he’d left that same morning to come to town.
“Isabelle will pull through,” Ezra said. “Give her time. That is the only remedy.”
George stood up, brushing off his shirt like the stains of dirt there had suddenly, after many years, come to bother him.
“I cannot control how she takes such things. But I can control what’s mine. That land…I suppose I just wish to hold on to what I have left. Do something with it. Something worthwhile.”
Ezra said nothing.
“I should go,” George said.
And Ezra, it seemed, used this turn to regain his footing.
“Yes, absolutely! This is no time to discuss business. Go see your wife. Even if she refuses you. Even if she spits at your feet.”
“Let us hope she stops short of that.”
George could see the seams of age that met at the corner of Ezra’s eyes; his day-old whiskers looked like a young boy’s.
“You feel free to call upon me if you need anything at all,” Ezra said.
“Thank you,” George said. “Until then.”
It was only once he was out the door, saddlebags in hand, stepping from the shadows of the shop into the sagging sun, that he realized his old friend’s sleight of hand—shelving George’s decision to keep his land as if it was merely clouded by his emotions, so that a deal might be struck another day. Part of him was amused by Ezra’s deceit, for in it he saw the glimmer of respect that had been at the root of their entire relationship. The old man would not change his ways on account of his client’s grieving, and George would never have wanted him to.
The town square was actually a traffic circle, and at its center sat the always-blooming flowers tended to by the gardening society. A Union soldier stood idle there now with his rifle at his side, rolling a cigarette, licking the paper as a dog might lick a wound. George put his head down and walked briskly, taking to the road before entering the general store. The door was already open.
Rawlings, the storekeeper, greeted George with little more than a glance and asked what brought him in.
“Just the essentials,” George said.
Rawlings rose from the wooden crate where he took his rest and began collecting the few necessities George requested every week: sugar, coffee, bread. In the back, near the equipment, sat Little Rawlings, rag in hand, polishing a scythe so sharp it looked liable to cut right through his hand. It seemed a skill, one learned with little room for error.
“Have your eye on something?” Rawlings asked. “We got new merchandise coming in all the time. Might not know you want it till you see it.”
George reflexively shook his head, then reconsidered.
“There is one thing…” he said.
After paying, George was out the door, the image of Ridley at the forefront of his mind. It took only an afternoon to miss the donkey—not really the animal, but the peace it might deliver him to. When he reached Bittle’s home, he found Ridley attempting to eat the stray fingers of grass on the ground. George stroked his mane, nodding to Ray, who appeared livelier than usual in his stoic, straight-backed pose of dead sleep as opposed to his usual slump.
“We’re off, then,” he said to Ridley. A thunderous noise escaped from Bittle, and although there was no way to be sure, George couldn’t help reading into the way his hat had fluttered atop his head, tipping forward, as if to bid him farewell.
Summer was yet distant, but already its first licks were upon Old Ox, and there was no greater shelter from the newfound afternoon heat than the evergreens that towered over Stage Road; it seemed like the sun, for all its determination, had never glanced upon the ground those trees protected. Ridley’s pace was that of a donkey half his age, and George would intermittently tell him to go easy, to save it for another day when time was more precious.