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Mister…”
    “Sir!”
    “Sir. I got a sister. Put her down for it. Elizabeth Orbach, Route 3, Masonville, Wisconsin.”
    “That’s better. How did you get to New York?”
    “I walked.”
    “Fair game for the infantry. Got a police record, Orbach?”
    “No, sir.”
    The recruiting sergeant watched him closely. “They’ll extradite you if you have.”
    George slurred the word wearily. “I don’t think they’ll extradite me.”
    “Think it over.” The sergeant gave him a card. “If you still want to join up, be at this address at 8 o’clock tomorrow morning.”
    George was born in violence, in a storm that tore great pines out by the roots and so flattened the tall white birches that ten years later George himself, then given to visualizing good and evil, counted the stricken birches pure white souls bowed by the devil, as he scrambled over them on his shortcut home from Sunday school. But on the night he was born, his father killed a horse racing him to Masonville to bring the doctor. Electric wires were down, the phone dead, the truck useless on the washed-out road. George and his mother were attended by Elizabeth, twelve years old. George lived. His mother died.
    Elizabeth learned more in going over George’s lessons with him than she had in attending school herself. She was more delighted with his first, second, and third readers than he was, and when he was nine or so, he could not quite understand her pleasure in them. By then Elizabeth was over twenty, which to George meant that there was less difference in age between Elizabeth and their father than between his sister and himself.
    “Do you believe all that about giants and princes?” he asked her more than once.
    “They’re nice,” she would say. “They’re real pretty. I like them.”
    Mike Orbach, who read only the Masonville weekly, Hoard’s Dairyman , and the Bible, would shake his head. He should have liked to see her reading the Bible, but all he ever said was, “You just read whatever you like, honey. You got it coming to you.”
    George was further puzzled when, bringing home a geography and then a history, and books called literature which he could now read himself, he found Elizabeth still smiling over his tattered primers.
    The world was at war then, and even to the backwoods of Wisconsin the mobile blood-bank units came. Across the lake, five of the Bergson boys went into service, but four were left and nothing changed very much. At the church basket-suppers there were more women than men, and Elizabeth was not unusual in having her father take her to dances. Nor did she mind sitting them out. She smiled and nodded as the dancers passed her and clapped her hands when a couple did an elaborate bow before her.
    “She’s so good-natured,” George overheard Mrs. Bergson say once. “God’s been kinder to them than he has to lots of us.”
    George could not see where the kindness of God had much to do with it. He was fourteen and going by bus to the township high school. Every day when he came home Elizabeth would have his dinner warm on the back of the stove—meat, potatoes, and vegetables, always in the one pot. It didn’t have much taste, he discovered, after his lunches in the school cafeteria.
    “Can’t you put some sugar or salt or something in it, Liz?” he said one day.
    The next day there were both sugar and salt, and more of them than his stomach could take. His father had come in from the barn for a cup of tea, for he liked to hear George tell of school as much as Elizabeth did. He scowled when George pushed the plate away.
    “For Cripe’s sake, Liz, what did you do to this?”
    “Eat it,” his father said quietly.
    Elizabeth went out to the icebox in the back kitchen.
    “I can’t, Pa,” George said.
    “God damn you, eat it and keep your mouth shut!”
    He had not heard his father swear before. He pulled the plate back and swallowed one mouthful after another, trying to deaden the taste with tea.
    Elizabeth