“Nothing,” Parker said. “Just talkin’ to myself.” He pushed the sheet aside and wrapped the fish in another. As soon as Hartley staggered out, the storekeeper licked the brine off his fingers and locked the door. He picked up the paper and held it under the lamplight, wishing that he’d paid more attention to the boy while Ellsworth was talking. From what he could recall, though, there wasn’t a whole lot of difference between him and the chubby one in the picture other than a beard. Hell, maybe that was the reason Ells had been so jittery; maybe he was hiding something.
Pulling his visor down tight on his head, Parker tried to think it through. He might have been a meddler, but this, he realized, was a lot more serious than telling people that Lucille Adkins had gotten religion and was making her husband, Forrest, sleep in the shed because he was a sinner, or that someone saw Old Man Cottrill walking down the road without any clothes on the other day. Cutting a chunk of meat off a smoked ham hanging in the window, he chewed on it slowly. The money didn’t interest him; he had enough of that saved back to last him out if he shut down the store tomorrow. So the big question was, even if the boy was one of the outlaws, what good would it do to tell the authorities? For sure, Ells and Eula would get in trouble for harboring a criminal—Lord, they’d probably even go to prison—and then everybody would look upon him as a squealer, a rat, a no-account Judas. And as far as that went, how many times last year had he heard poor men stand right in this store and talk about the gang as if they were heroes, say that they wished they had the guts to go rob a bank? Quite a few. Not only that, how many had shaken their heads sadly when they’d heard that the one had been caught in Meade? Again, quite a few. Too, what if he was wrong? Why, he’d look like the biggest fool around. The more he thought about it, the more preposterous it seemed. It was easier picturing the Singletons as sex-crazed womanizers than believing someone as tame as Ellsworth Fiddler was buddies with cold-blooded desperadoes. When he finally turned out the lamp and went to bed, it was past midnight; and in the morning, he crumpled up the newspaper without looking at it again and burned it in the stove, having decided it best to stick with the story he’d been told. And just as the Fiddlers had hoped, within a few days everyone in the township believed Junior was the son of one of Eula’s cousins from up around Springfield, and that they had taken him in after both of his parents succumbed to the grippe within a few hours of each other. “Ye can tell the poor feller’s slow,” Parker said whenever he came to the end of the tale. “He just stood there like a statue with a grin on his face while Ells went on about his people a-dying. Reminds me of Tom Stout’s boy, the one that got hit in the head by that tree.”
Talk of the young man living with the Fiddlers began to die down after a couple of weeks, but then, after someone saw him and Ellsworth one Saturday at an auction in Bainbridge buying six Holsteins and a bull, it started up again for a while. Since it was common knowledge that Ells didn’t have two nickels to rub together, it was speculated that maybe Junior had been left a little inheritance. But that was as far as it went. By that time, Parker had repeated the story so much that he’d convinced himself it was true, and nobody else ever really wondered about the boy’s past or begrudged the farmer a few cattle for taking him in. There were, after all, new rumors every other day about the devastation being brought on by the Spanish influenza. And, too, as many pointed out whenever the subject did come up, maybe old Ells deserved some luck after losing his savings to that thief down in Pike County, and his son running off and never coming back, although everyone did agree that it was terrible the way he fell into it.
As for Cob, except when he was around Ellsworth and Eula, he kept his mouth shut. Every morning when the first cow bawled in the feedlot, he hopped out of bed and put on his clothes, headed for the barn. He liked taking care of the milking by himself. It gave him time to think about what he was going to do. It bothered him something awful, trying to decide. Every time he imagined Cane coming for him, he felt half sick, and then he’d feel guilty. But the fact of the matter was he loved it here, and he couldn’t bear the thought of leaving, even with his brother. For close to two years, he agonized over it, and then one morning, as he rinsed out a bucket at the well, he realized that Cane had already made the decision for him, and was all right with letting him stay.