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“my boy,” and told me stories, and would sit with me by the hour after supper, playing Rook or Old Maid. We were, in a way, playmates.
    And then toward the end of the next summer I saw her begin to fail. She got so she couldn’t remember things. And she would have to rest two or three times coming up from the store to the house.
    One day, standing in the kitchen door, she called loudly, “Oh, Othy! Oh, Othy!”
    I said, “Aunt Cordie, Uncle Othy ain’t here.”
    And she said just as nicely, as if I had put her mind at rest, “Well, I reckon that’s why he don’t answer.”
    Sometimes she would look at me with a worry in her eyes that I didn’t understand until later, and she would say, “I don’t know. Honey, I just don’t know.” She meant she didn’t know what would become of me after she was gone.
    One evening when the wind blew up the river with the first cold edge of fall, she stopped to rest as we were coming up from the store. She turned and looked north, the way the wind was coming.
    â€œIt’s got a chill in it,” I said. “We’ll need a fire tonight.” I remember I was looking forward to the fire, the good warmth.
    But she said, “Child, I just don’t know if I can endure another winter.”
    I can see now that she had given up. She had searched inside herself, looking for some sign that she still desired to live, and had found none. She wanted to live for me, maybe, but not for herself.
    One morning I woke up and realized that it was daylight already and
I had heard not a sound. Though there was frost on the ground, I didn’t even wait to put on my shoes but just barefooted it over to the Thripples’.
    Aunt Cordie had died in her sleep, an easy way to go. I am thankful.
    I was a little past ten years old, and I was the survivor already of two stories completely ended.

4
    The Good Shepherd
    Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told. As almost any barber can testify, there is also more than needs to be told, and more than anybody wants to hear. The story of the next dozen years of my life could be made long, but I want to be careful to offer you only the proper handful—just enough to describe the course that carried me away from the Port William neighborhood and then twelve years later brought me back again to the proper end of my life, to the love of my life, Mattie Chatham.
    Aunt Cordie, departing, left behind her the problem of me. What, as she had wondered, was going to become of me? I could not stay on at the landing by myself, though of course that is what I wanted to do. I remember arguing, to the forces of seniority and authority who had to decide what was to become of me, that staying on was what I could do, that I was well able to do so. But of course I was only a child trying to call back a lost world.
    By then I had no living relative, or none who was known to me. The people around Squires Landing were poor, scratching a living from hillside patches as hard-worn as their clothes. The Thripples were old. And there are several good and pressing reasons why people are not eager
to take in a ten-year-old boy they are no kin to. There was no Aunt Cordie to come to my rescue this time. I had used up my allotted supply of Aunt Cordies. There had been one, when I needed her the most, and that was all.
    I don’t mean to say that one was not enough—one was enough and more—but only that there was no second. And so I went out of the hands of love, which certainly included charity as we know it, into the hands of charity as we know it, which included love only as it might.
    I was sent away to a church orphanage called The Good Shepherd up in the central part of the state. It was a beautiful place, that orphanage. The superintendent’s home and office were in a fine old brick house set well back