“There’s no arithmetic in any of it.

He answers to the court, and that is the whole of what I have to say about him.”

Frank cleared his throat and looked at the shed door and did not say the rest of what he was thinking.

I folded the page along its own creases and put it in with the hay contracts.

At one o’clock Claire had two boxes on the oilcloth and a paper sack of her mother’s canning jars, and she was wrapping the jars in newspaper one at a time.

“That’s the last of it,” she said.