Tonight the window was open and the attic cool. Winds had blown the curtains off and they lay on the floor, gauzy specters twice lifeless and crumpled. The floor was damp with blown rain. The roof formed an A above him, with the tin that comprised both roof and ceiling pockmarked by nails that had missed the rafter, and when he laid a hand against the tin it felt cold and damp. He changed hurriedly into dry clothes and went back down the ladder.

She seemed long taken by some vow of silence or a malfunction of whatever produced words or inspired them. He didn’t speak either. He knew she would talk sooner or later, conquer momentarily whatever had closed her lips, anger or simply boredom with one day the same as any other.

She’d left his plate on the table with another upturned over it and he lit the kitchen lamp and sat down to eat. He ate hurriedly, seemingly without tasting the food, fried okra and greenbeans and new potatoes, fending away onehanded moths and bugs drawn by the light or driven in the open window by the windy rain. A candlefly guttered in the quaking heat above the globe, plummeted to the orange flame, convulsed, died in silent white agony behind the hot glass.

She was standing in the door watching him eat. “Did he pay you?”

“Well,” he said, “it’s Friday. He pays off every Friday.” He pushed his plate back.

“I keep lookin for him to cheat you. You just a boy and him in a position to take advantage.”

It was an old argument and he didn’t care to reopen it. “If he does it’s just me,” he said. He arose, fumbling the money from his pocket, offered it to her. She took it wordlessly, he watched it disappear into her apron pocket.

When he had first gone to work for Weiss she had raged against it: a boy shouldn’t have to do a man’s work for a boy’s pay. All she said now was that if he had a proper father to look after him things would never have come to this. To such a desperate pass. She looked at him now as if all this was some contrivance of his own.

“Just walk out and pull the door to,” she said with an old bitterness. “Gone and never a word to nobody.”

That was an old argument too and if he had any words or refutation now he kept them to himself. When he was younger and easier to hurt he had said, “He never run off.”

She had gestured around the room with an expansive arm movement halftheatrical and halfdemented and shouted, “Well, do you see him anywhere? You reckon he’s behind the door playin a prank on you?” He had just watched her with eyes that were no longer child’s eyes and he had had nothing to say.

When he went up the ladder at bedtime the rain still fell and it was still cool. Feeling carefully in the dark he found a box of matches and lit the lamp and then sorted through books in a cardboard box under his bed. The bedclothes were slightly damp but after the day’s heat they felt comfortable. He lay down, positioned the lamp, and began to read, barely hearing the sibilant murmur on the tin. After a time he heard her come up the ladder and cross the floor with a kind of ratlike stealth.

“What are you doin in there?”

“Reading.”

“It’s getting late,” she said. “You blow out that lamp. Coaloil’s high.”

“All right,” he said. He got up and took a quilt from the bed and laid it across the bottom of the door to block out the light. He could hear her, satisfied, retreating back down the ladder. He read awhile longer then blew out the lamp.

He lay for a time in a weary torpor, aware that he was in bed and yet still feeling the endless motions of the shovel, scoop and throw, scoop and throw. In another part of his mind he was still occupied with acquaintances real as the denizens who peopled his day, corporeal as Weiss or William Tell Oliver.