You know how some of these women gets to where they got to have it. Well, she got to horsin and kept comin around here tryin to put it on me. Hintin around. Finally she spelled it out to me and I turned her down flat. Hell, I can pick and choose.”

Bellwether did not believe one word of this story but at the same time he divined that Hardin didn’t care if he believed it or not. He was spinning out the tale for his own amusement, just something to pass the time. Just keeping his hand in.

“Everybody knows she’s about half a bubble off plumb,” Hardin said. “Didn’t hang a Co-Cola bottle up in her that time and had to go to Ratcliff and have the bottom busted out of it fore they could even get it out? They tell it on the streetcorners. Ain’t you heard that?”

Bellwether stood up. He felt an intense need to be elsewhere, he’d stayed not only past his welcome but past the limits of his endurance. “It don’t matter if I’ve heard it or not,” he said. “As far as I know there’s no law against it. There is a law against threatenin people, and torchin off their property, and my job is to enforce it.”

“Shore,” Hardin said thoughtfully. “Folks always got to do their jobs. You got yours to do, I got mine.”

“It might be easier on both of us if they never overlapped,” Bellwether said.

“I was thinkin that very thing,” Hardin told him.

From the edge of the wood Hardin watched her get out of the truck, heard the door slam. The widow Bledsoe crossed in front of the old pickup, a square, unlovely woman with a masculine walk. She opened the door on the passenger side and a few moments later reappeared burdened with two grocery sacks, going up the walk to the front door. He unpocketed and glanced at his watch. “Go on in,” he told her softly. “It’s time for ye stories. Time to see what’s happenin on the radio.”

He sat in silence for a time seeing in his mind her movements about the house, a vivid image of her before a cabinet, arm raised with a can of something. Folding the empty bags, laying them by for another time.

When he judged her finished and listening to the radio he arose, followed the hillside fence as it skirted the base of a bluff. It was very quiet. Once a thrush called, in the vague distance he could hear the sorrowing of doves. The timber here was cedar and the air was full of it, a smell that was almost nostalgic yet unspecific, recalling to him sometime past, incidents he could not or would not call to mind.

He waited until she had her hay cut and stored and the loft was stacked with it nigh to the ceiling. A good crop, it looked to him, for a year so dry. The barn was made of logs and situated in the declivity between two hills and it sat brooding and breathless under the weight of the sun. The hills were tall and thickly timbered and the glade was motionless Not a weed stirred, a leaf, heat held even the calling of birds in abeyance.

Lattice shade, the hot smell of baking tin and curing wood and dry hay. Eyes to a crack in the log, he watched the hose. It lay silent as the barn.