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Christmastime.”
    â€œBut wouldn’t you rather be out walking with me, Adam?” Ruth asked, taking my arm. “If you were at the silly Committee meeting, you wouldn’t be out here walking, would you?”
    â€œI suppose not.”
    â€œWell, there.”
    â€œThat doesn’t make any sense, Ruth,” I told her. “That doesn’t solve one blessed thing.”
    â€œAdam Cooper, what do you expect to solve? You’re only fifteen years old. Why don’t you have enough patience to wait a few years and let things take their proper and natural course?”
    â€œMaybe I will and maybe I won’t.”
    â€œWhat does that mean?” she asked impatiently. Ruth Simmons had set ideas about what was fit conversation and action for a walking-out at nighttime, and this was not according to form.
    â€œYou know about my Uncle Ishmael Jamison?”
    â€œThe smuggler who keeps the colored wife in Jamaica?”
    â€œNow that’s a fine way to talk, Ruth Simmons! That’s just a real fine way to talk! That shows a real profound knowledge of politics, yes it does! Just as if there was a master sails out of Boston without carrying a little contraband here and there! I suppose you’d want all our people to sit back and starve to death the way the British lords say we should—oh, yes, sir, yes, sir, we’ll just wither away to please your excellencies, and go ahead and take all our churches and put in your priests and we’ll all get down on our knees before those Episcopalian lords and padre them to death—”
    â€œWell, I never!” she interrupted. “Indeed, I never—never in all my born days, Adam Cooper!”
    â€œAnd as far as my Uncle Ishmael is concerned, there’s not a word of truth in that story about him having a colored wife in Jamaica.”
    â€œWho cares!” she cried. “And who ever gave you the right to snap at me fit to bite my nose off?”
    â€œI didn’t snap at you. You—”
    â€œHe could have seven wives—he could be living with every loose woman in Kingston, for all that I care. Just make certain of that, Adam Cooper. I’m not like some folks I could name who will say the first thing they hear about someone else behind his back.”
    â€œMeaning me?”
    â€œNo, not meaning you. You don’t have any more sense than a dry pumpkin.”
    â€œIt was you called him a smuggler and a bigamist, wasn’t it?”
    â€œI did not. I simply identified him. For all I know, you could have five Uncle Ishmaels.”
    â€œIt’s not likely.”
    â€œMaybe it isn’t. But it’s a fine thing to have friends who can’t trust you not to be a bigot!”
    That was when I kissed her. We were standing alongside of the Hyams’ well house, which sits behind their herb garden, and there was just enough starlight and night light for me to see her face, and it was hazy and lovely and only half real, and for that moment it appeared to me as the most beautiful woman’s face I had ever seen in all my living days, not a girl’s face, not the face of Ruth Simmons or anyone else I had known all my life, but the lovely face of a lovely stranger. When I kissed her, I felt that my heart would tear through my chest for excitement and wonder, and then I felt a good, empty sickness, if you can speak of anything in such contradictory terms.
    â€œWhy did you do that?” Ruth whispered.
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œAdam Cooper, if you aren’t the strangest boy! First you’re yelling and screaming at me as if I were heaven only knows what, and you’re like to tear me to pieces. Then, without so much as by your leave, you kiss me.”
    I nodded, and she asked me why I was looking at her that way.
    â€œWhat way?”
    â€œThe way you were looking at me.”
    â€œI just don’t know.” I wanted to tell her how beautiful she was, but