“Who’s he?”
“You don’t hear everything all the time, Mr. Bohn.”
“He never crossed my town before.”
“Come over to Clare more often,” said the Sheriff, “and you ain’t going to be in the dark so much.”
“Bugle belly,” said Bohn, “I don’t want to see you.”
Luke Lampson stepped apart, close to the man who, short as himself, had interrupted without a sound. Moonlight hit the stranger. He stood poorly in the sand with flashing spectacles, bare head. It was a waning moon, brilliant for a moment on the same warts, the same long lips and the little scowl shrunk from the sun. Luke could see, having never before touched bone of his own, the stains of contagion that spotted the face and hands like shadow, representing the white worlds through which he had passed. And in his pride, filled with the traveling surgeon’s shriveled broadcloth and his shiny temple, Luke looked quickly into the butternut eye and down.
“Pa,” he said.
They walked to the water’s edge.
The small boat was like the hollowed body of a bird. Its keel was a breastbone hung over with dry calking, waving splinters, one not sunk under the mud when the great forks disappeared.
“Keep out of that boat!” Bohn fastened his dirty cuffs and peered at the hull as if it lay snapping in the sand. Luke picked up the iron stove top that was its anchor and dropped it in the bow. In the darkness he pried the bending oars from under the seats.