There was little that frightened her. Once, as a child, her brother, Silas, had attempted to scare her with ghost stories, the moonlight drifting into their bedroom, the tendrils of its soft glow cutting through the darkness. These were the stories their father had told him not to share with her, meant only for the men in the family, to be passed on to Silas’s own boys in the future. By the midpoint of his tale of gore and death she had reacted so coolly, with such piercing skepticism couched in her silence, that Silas had stuttered and quit the story outright. He was not the last boy to test her courage, and she would not be cowed by this man by the barn who had somehow managed to unnerve her once before.
She held her dress up from the reeds of oat grass and made her way over to him so quickly that he had little time to react. The first thing she could make out, standing there next to him, were the blackened tips of his fingernails lodged with dirt. He reached forward to the clothesline and took one of George’s socks, then the other, and turned to face her. Isabelle did not know what to say. He did not run. Did not even move. His eyes expressed little and he clenched the socks as if they were the one possession he owned, already his to keep forever.
“May I ask what you’re doing?”
He said nothing.
“Where do you come from?”
There was something frustrating about the condition of his mouth, perpetually open but vacant of any words.
“Say something,” she pleaded. “You must.”
But if the reason for his first appearance was unclear, his current errand was so obvious it needed no explanation. His clothes were still wet from the downpour the night before, his leather shoes so dark with moisture and so shabby they looked like they’d been put through a kiln and had their charred remains refashioned into the shambles they were now. Surely there was nothing more enticing for a man in such condition than a dry pair of socks.
She let the hem of her dress fall to the grass.
“I see. You must have been caught in the storm.”
The simplicity of the fact fell upon her with a wave of embarrassment and now she wondered how she had happened into a position so undignified as to be alone in this man’s presence. She could recall a time when her life had the stitching of a well-bound corset—her husband and her son the interwoven laces that held together the ribs of an active social life, the relationships she had cultivated since marrying her husband and moving to Old Ox. Yet in the past year, since Caleb joined the war, it had all come undone, and she felt naked before this stranger, disappointed not by his silence, but by the idiotic expectations she had assigned to him.
“Please,” she said. “Just go on your way. You may take them. I don’t mind.”
He blinked once, peered at the socks, and proceeded to put them back on the line where he’d found them, as if, upon further scrutiny, they had not met his standards.
“Do you not hear me?” she said. “I said to take them.”
He stood still, looking at the job he’d done with some satisfaction, and casually turned to walk toward the woods without even glancing in her direction.
“Now where are you going?” she said to his back, voice rising. “It may rain again. Come back, now. You will catch something. Why don’t you listen?”
He lumbered on, his shoulders swaying with each step until he had slipped back into the darkness, lost to the trees. Unheard and unseen, Isabelle lingered for a few minutes, stirred only by the wind that crept under her dress. The clothesline bobbed at her side. She was still choking back shame when she returned to the cabin.
Now, at breakfast beside George, the only thing she shared of the entire exchange was the man’s actions, his silence, and his sudden departure. “I shooed him off,” she said in summary, collecting the plates on the table. “He was gone in an instant. I can’t say he won’t return. I didn’t want to worry you, but I thought it best to share.” She hurried to the kitchen, wanting him to say something, anything, that might allow her to move on from the memory.
“I believe I’ve met the man,” George said, wiping his mouth with a napkin. “You say he didn’t speak.”
“Not a word.”
“Then yes. And from what I gather he’s perfectly harmless. You need not worry about him.”
“Well. Then I won’t.”
There were questions. There always were questions. But she did not care if George had actually met the man, or how, for his nonchalance acted as an immediate balm. How easily he left the past behind, made light of the worries that plagued her. If ever he lacked warmth—which he often did—his unflagging ability to bring her back to port when she strayed into choppy waters was an asset that made up for it many times over. No one was more reliable, and if that was not the ultimate act of compassion, she did not know what was.