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exerted pressure against his back. Quent nodded in the direction of the strange boy. Cormac turned his head away and stared at his mother and Ephraim Hale.
    “You’ll be having your lessons together and such,” Ephraim said. “Easier on everyone if you get along.”
    Quent would always remember that moment: his father, the squaw dressed in blindingly white fur pressed up against his back, and her son a white boy with an English name. And the easy way his father said, “And that nigra with him, that’s my slave.” It was the first time he’d ever heard the claim stated aloud.
    He’d asked Solomon once how it was that he could be owned like a horse or a book or a bolt of cloth. “’Cause I be bought and paid for.”
    “But you’re a person. Like me. Can my father sell me?”
    “Ain’t never gonna let that happen. You be white. Ain’t no white people be slaves. Only black nigra people.”
    “Why?”
    As they talked, Solomon had been shaving the long side of a strip of oak just come from Shadowbrook’s sawmill, straddling his workbench and holding the narrow plank of wood across his knees while he smoothed the adze back and forth, back and forth. When he butted that piece of oak against the next plank of the eventual barrel it would fit smoothly, and after he bound them together with leather hoops and the barrel spent a month submerged in water, that seam and all the other seams would have swollen tight shut.
    “Ain’t no why about it,” he said without breaking the rhythm of his long, even strokes. “That’s the way it is. It say in the Bible, ‘Slaves, be subject to your masters.’ Don’t say nothin’ about asking why.”
    Quent knew about the Bible.
    One of the settlements on the Hale land was called Do Good. Maybe a dozen families lived there, and there was a small church they called a meeting house. It looked pretty much like a barn. Lorene Devrey Hale didn’t hold with the services in Do Good’s church. No preaching, she said. No Bible reading. No music. No flowers, not even in high summer when they were everywhere. Just the folks from Do Good sitting around and mostly not saying anything, and talking funny when they did.
    Quent’s mother conducted her own Sunday service in the great hall of the big house. She insisted that all twenty-six of her husband’s slaves come, and of courseher two sons. Most weeks the tenants who lived near enough came as well: the Davidsons, who worked the sawmill, and the Frankels, who were in charge of the gristmill and did the distilling at the sugarhouse. Sometimes even Ephraim attended. But whether or not he was present, it was Lorene who read from the Bible.
    “Better suited to it,” Ephraim said once when he was asked why his wife led the service. Mostly he didn’t sing either. He was the only one exempt; Lorene made the others sing while she accompanied them on her dulcimer, and before Pohantis and her son Cormac came to Shadowbrook, Lorene smiled at everyone when the service was over. After their arrival there were fewer smiles.
    Quent heard his parents talking soon after Pohantis and Cormac arrived, when they didn’t know he was outside the half-opened door to the room where his father did his sums. “I got a fire in me for her, that’s why. It’s convenient having her nearby.”
    “You had a fire in you for me once.”
    “That’s true, I did.”
    “But not since—”
    “Lorene, she’s a squaw and a whore. Left her people and ran off with a damn fool Irishman. Only went back to her village after he got himself eaten alive by the Huron. She’s got nothing to do with you, or our life here.”
    “How can you say that? You brought her here. She’s living under my roof.”
    “I decide who—”
    “You’d have lost this land if it weren’t for me! Don’t you turn your face from me, Ephraim Hale! You know that’s true. If it weren’t for my dowry—”
    Quent heard a crack of sound. Maybe a drawer being slammed shut. Maybe something else.