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thing, but its disadvantage was obvious. “I couldn’t make a living drawing.”
    “Exactly,” my father said. He seemed impatient that such a course had even been broached. “I was thinking of Columbia Law. It’s a fine school. What would you think of studying there?”
    “Fine,” I said. “I need a profession. The law is a good profession.”
    “Yes, it is,” my father agreed. “It requires a fine mind. And you certainly have a fine mind, Cal.” He glanced toward my mother. “And Billy has the right requirement for running a newspaper,” he added.
    “What requirement is that?” I asked.
    My mother’s answer came softly. “A heart,” she said.
    The kind of heart Billy had already demonstrated,fierce and impulsive, disinclined to calculate the odds before diving into turbulent water, swimming out to a drowning child.
    “So we’re all in agreement, then?” my father asked, getting to his feet now, visibly relieved that so much had been decided without argument.
    “Yes,” I said. “All in agreement.”
    I left for Columbia Law the following year, leaving Billy behind in Port Alma, writing to him often but seeing him rarely, save for the all-too-brief summers when I returned to Maine.
    Over the next few years, while I continued my studies in New York, his interest in the
Sentinel
steadily deepened. He went there almost every day after school, staying as long as my father would let him, writing imaginary columns, covering imaginary stories. It didn’t surprise me that after graduating from high school he chose not to go to college, but went to work at the paper instead.
    Several years later, my father retired, and Billy took over. By then he’d become “William” to everyone but me, no longer a boy, but a man poised to take his place as a pillar of the community.
    We celebrated his ascension with a dinner in Royston. It was the last time we ate together as a family. My mother moved into a cottage on Fox Creek a month later, leaving my father alone in the big house outside of town. She’d planned the move for a long time, Billy told me later. She’d waited only for her sons to grow up, to establish lives of their own.
    We’d done just that by the time she left our father. Billy was fully in charge of the
Sentinel
by then. He’d moved into a small house not far from the newspaper’s office, filled it with his usual array of books, magazines, and the bric-a-brac he’d gathered over the years. I got ajob in the district attorney’s office, routinely prosecuting whatever cases Hap Ferguson tossed onto my desk, and finally took a somewhat larger house only a few blocks down the same street as my brother.
    And so our lives went forward. When the water mill burned down, we walked its charred remains together, Billy in order to describe the destruction, I to make sure it had happened by accident rather than design. Still later, when the county’s one remaining covered bridge collapsed, we surveyed the ruins side by side. I made sure no harm had been intended, while Billy searched for some small symbol of the vanished humanity the old bridge had served, the wagons and buggies that had rattled through its dark tunnel, as he later wrote, “carrying wood chips, coffins, brides.”
    Over the years, I read scores of his articles and news stories, never in the least imagining that his fate might be coiled invisibly within the folds of a few plain lines:
Single woman seeks employment. Any offer will be considered. Inquiries should be forwarded to the Port Alma Hotel. Attention: Dora March.
    S he’d been in Port Alma over a month before I saw her. Then, on one of those December days when chill winds whip cruelly around corners and snap at cloth awnings, I spotted her coming out of Madison’s General Store. She was wearing the long cloth coat I would see so often in the coming months, and carried a bag of groceries and supplies. She didn’t so much as glance in the window of Ollie’s Barber Shop as she