I'll set my own, but I want to know the baseline. He nodded. He looked like a man who had come prepared to argue and found the argument unnecessary. From the cradle, young Henry made a sound, not a cry, the conversational version of impending complaint, the preliminary. They both looked at him.
He appeared to look back at both of them with the unfocused gravity of the very young. Tonight, Amos stopped. Can you what? Clara said, "Hold him." He looked slightly uncomfortable. "If that's all right." She looked at him.
This man who ran several thousand acres and managed a crew of experienced hands and had held her together during the worst hours of her life was uncertain about asking to hold an infant. "Yes," she said. "Support his head." She watched him pick up young Henry with the concentrated care of someone handling something irreplaceable. He got the head supported correctly and settled the child against his arm and stood there for a moment just looking at him. "Young Henry accepted this rearrangement with the equinimity of a person who has not yet developed preferences about being moved." "He looks like his father," Amos asked.
"Around the eyes?" She said. "And the mouth, I think. I'm too close to see it clearly." "You'll see it later," Amos said. "Give it a few years." He was quiet for a moment. You'll see it and it'll catch you off guard.
That's how it works. She looked at him. You have children? She said. She had not asked before.
There had been no good moment to ask. He was quiet for a moment, a long one. I did, he said. A daughter, Margaret. She was three.
She understood from the tense and did not ask how or when. I'm sorry, she said. Long time ago, he said. His face said it wasn't. Not in any way that mattered.
He handed young Henry back to her with the same careful precision he had used picking him up, and she took the child, and they sat in the quiet of the cabin for a moment. The two of them, with their respective losses, sitting between them, in the way losses sit between people who have begun carefully, cautiously, to let each other see them. And then the trouble came. It came on a Monday morning at the end of September, and it came in the form of two men on horses at the edge of the garden plot, and Clara knew before either of them had dismounted that this was not a social call. The first man was in his 50s, heavy-hed, with the permanent squint of a man who had been looking at other people's property for a long time, and had decided he liked what he saw.