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And then the boy touched his arm — touched it. ‘Phil — I’ve got rawhide to finish the rope.’

‘You’ve got it? What you doing with rawhide?’

And the boy’s hand remained right where it was. ‘I cut some up, Phil. I wanted to learn — to braid like you. Please take what I’ve got?’ They were facing each other, and the boy’s hand remained right where it was. ‘You’ve been good to me, Phil.’

Take what I’ve got. You’ve been good. Phil, at that moment in that place that smelled of years felt in his throat what he’d felt once before and dear God knows never expected nor wanted to feel again, for the loss of it breaks your heart.

Oh, sure. Could have been the boy’s offer was but a cheap means of getting his pretty little mother out of the soup. But wanting to braid like him! What reason for the boy to have rawhide but wanting to braid like him! To emulate him! Why else would he have cut up strips of rawhide? The boy wanted to become him, to merge with him as Phil had only once before wanted to become one with someone, and that one was gone, trampled to death while Phil, twenty years old, watched from the top rail of the bronc corral. Ah, God, but Phil had almost forgot what the touch of a hand will do, and his heart counted the seconds that Peter’s was on him and rejoiced at the quality of the pressure. It told him what his heart required to know.

Peter was the only guest at the wedding and properly so, he thought, for he was the only other principal involved. He liked the array of roses George had bought and the fussy woman at the florist’s had arranged in the brass pots on the altar. He was honestly touched that George had made so sentimental a gesture and scarcely breathed through the marriage service and merely moistened his lips when George took his mother’s hand and slipped on the wedding band; but his heart leaped when his mother turned and smiled and touched and arranged and fixed the fold of her dark blue traveling suit, as easy and elegant a gesture as he’d ever seen — heartbreakingly beautiful — the gesture of the charming, the enchanting, the rich Mrs Burbank. She walks in beauty, he quoted from his father’s books. She walks in beauty, like the night.

He paused and looked at her. ‘Am I talking too much?’

‘I love your talk.’

‘I wouldn’t want to get in the habit of talking too much, don’t you know,’ and then he saw the reflection of her quick smile in the windshield; staring straight ahead, he reached out and took her hand, overcome by a shocking tenderness. For a moment he was struck dumb at a habit of hers he saw now for the first time, how whenever she looked up from whatever she was doing, even unwrapping a sandwich in the front seat of a car, she always looked up smiling. He wondered if anybody had ever noticed it before.

Johnny thought he had never seen a lovelier sight than his wife lying in the bed, nursing the child; he waited on her, sat beside her and read to her from Byron, enchanted by the wonder and beauty of birth. How everybody congratulated him, and how straight he sat at the wheel of the Ford motorcar, grinning and handing out cigars. Once having caught sight of his own face in a mirror, he continued to stare at himself, thinking. He thought how it was that whenever she looked up from whatever it was she was doing, she always smiled. He wondered if anybody had ever noticed that before.

Her shoes were not walking shoes. Stumbling in her high heels, running and pitching, she cried out to the Indians. ‘Stop, please stop.’ She was breathless when she caught them, and leaned for support against the side of the cart. She smiled up at the old Indian, and at last she had breath to speak. ‘I saw you this morning,’ she said. The old Indian removed his hat, but the boy sat looking through the old nag’s ears. ‘I would have come out to see you,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know you were the son of the chief.’

Edward Nappo spoke. ‘Did you know my father?’

‘My husband did. You see, we would be proud if you would camp with us. My, but that would make us proud.’

Edward Nappo looked down at her, a tiny, lovely little woman who could not have been much help to a man with a cow, or for cooking, or for making gloves. You might have said, looking into her face, that she wouldn’t last many winters, if the winters were hard at all. ‘Thank you,’ Edward said. ‘My son and I, we will be proud to camp with you.’ And as Edward turned the old horse around, the little boy looked at his father with haughty pride, and he fixed his cap.

Maybe that was why, two years later, George sat — a freshman now himself — waiting in his room for the fraternity men to call on him. He sat in his room with his feet planted square before him, sat at the study table looking at his square hands, ready to smile at whoever might knock and enter. His face was fixed in greeting. Already up and down the corridor he had heard other knocks and voices, boisterous laughter and then footsteps on the stairs.

Earlier that week he had observed the current fashions and gone at once to a clothing store and, perspiring, he bought clothes, went behind the curtains and changed into them. He emerged transformed.

And now he waited, his broad feet in new shoes planted firmly before him.

‘Probably,’ Phil told him later, ‘probably the trouble was they all remembered what I did. Probably it wasn’t your fault at all.’

But George never believed that, and never forgot the waiting in that room, a stocky young man, his wide feet planted before him. When the corridor was at last silent, he put on his new pajamas and got into bed; out the open window he heard voices and singing, and the California night was heavy not with sagebrush but with the odor of unfamiliar flowers.

George had no hobbies, no lively interests. Phil worked in wood. He constructed the derricks that stacked the wild hay — timothy, redtop and clover — hewing out the huge beams with adze and plane. With those clever naked hands he carved those tiny chairs no higher than an inch in Sheraton or the style of Adam; his fingers moved like spiders’ legs, paused briefly sometimes as if to think, for Phil’s fingers had a private intelligence lodged, perhaps, in their padded tips. Seldom did his knife slip, and if it did, he scorned the iodine or Phenol-Sodique, two of the few medicines in the house, for as a family the Burbanks did not believe in medicine. His little wounds healed rapidly once he had wiped them with the blue bandanna he stuffed in a rear pocket.

‘And Peter,’ she went on, ‘we used to have a valentine box, and they’d get this big box, somebody would bring it from home, and we’d cover it with white crepe paper and paste big red hearts on it, lopsided hearts, some of them, because all of us didn’t understand about folding the paper so both sides would match. Some drew them freehand.’ She wondered now if it was the cold light that pressed against her eyes that made her a little faint or the odor that surrounded him.

‘And you got a great many valentines,’ he said, his lips scarcely moving.

‘A great many?’

‘Because you were beautiful even then,’ he said.

How could he have said that, she wondered. How have so misunderstood her, for she tried only to convince him and herself that she had once had identity, a desk of her own, a numbered hook in the cloakroom for her coat, a place on the class roll, a view out the window of swings and a board fence beyond. Or was he right in sensing that she boasted of stars earned and valentines received because she was — beautiful? How awful to lead a conversation around so that another was bound to say, because you were beautiful!