What’s causing this, do you think? Rose said.
I don’t know, Betty said. They just always been picking on him.
Does he say anything?
Richie don’t say nothing to them.
That’s because I been teaching him: Turn the other cheek, Luther said. When they smite thee on one cheek, turn him the other one. It’s out of the Bible.
He only has two cheeks, Betty said. How many cheeks is he suppose to turn?
Yes, Rose said, there are limits, aren’t there.
We come to the limits, Betty said. I don’t know what we’re going to do.
No, Luther said, otherwise I guess we don’t got too much to complain about. He sat upright in his chair, apparently ready to leave, to move on to whatever came next. I guess we been doing pretty good for ourselves. You get what you get and don’t have a fit, what I always tell people. Somebody told that to me one time.
3
HE WAS A SMALL BOY, UNDERWEIGHT FOR HIS AGE, WITH thin arms and thin legs and brown hair that hung over his forehead. He was active and responsible, and too serious for a boy of eleven. Before he was born his mother decided not to marry the man who was his father, and when he was five she died in a car wreck in Brush Colorado on a Saturday night after she’d been out dancing with a redheaded man in a highway tavern. She had never said who his father was. Since her death he had lived alone with his mother’s father on the north side of Holt, in a dark little house with vacant lots on both sides and a gravel alley out back that had mulberry trees grown up beside it. At school he was in the fifth grade and he was a good student but spoke only when called on; he never volunteered anything in the classroom, and when he was let out of school each day he went home by himself or wandered around town or occasionally did yardwork for the woman who lived up the street.
His grandfather, Walter Kephart, was a white-haired man of seventy-five. For thirty years he’d been a gandy dancer on the railroad in southern Wyoming and northeastern Colorado. When he was almost seventy he got pensioned off. He was a silent old man; he would talk a good deal if he’d been drinking, but he was not a drunk and generally would take a drink at home only if he were sick. Each month when his pension check came he’d cash the check and spend an evening drinking at the Holt Tavern on the corner of Third and Main, where he would sit and visit with other old men in town and tell stories that were not exaggerated so much as they were simply enlarged a little, and then he’d remember for an hour or two what he had been able to do in the long-ago oldtime when he was still young.
The boy’s name was DJ Kephart. He took care of the old man, walking him home along the dark streets in the night when his grandfather was finished talking at the tavern, and at home he did most of the cooking and cleaning, and once a week washed their dirty clothes at the Laundromat on Ash Street.
One day in September he came home from school in the afternoon and the old man said the neighbor woman had been over, asking for him. You better go see what she wants.
When did she come?
This morning.
The boy poured out a cup of cold coffee from the pot on the stove and drank it and started toward the woman’s house. It was still hot outside, though the sun had begun to lean to the west, and the first intimations of fall were in the air—that smell of dust and dry leaves, that annual lonesomeness that comes of summer closing down. He walked past the vacant lot with its dirt path leading to a row of mulberry trees at the alley and then the two widows’ houses, both set back from the quiet street behind a dusty stand of lilac, and came to her house.