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Great-aunt Edith over at Honey Camp, but nobody would keep him long, not even Edith. They’d make some excuse and pass him on.
    For the pure fact was, Zeke spooked them. He spooked them all. They were not used to a big old boy that wouldn’t say a word. It made them feel bad, like they ought to do something about him, but they couldn’t think what. For he wouldn’t work, he wouldn’t play, he didn’t even want to shoot a gun! Finally they got tired of thinking up things for him to do. Finally they grew to hate the very sight of him sitting hunched on the floor thataway, staring into the fire. Ain’t nothing to see, in a fire. And they couldn’t stand the way he kept his head cocked like a robin all the time either, like he was listening out for something. For what? It wasn’t natural.
    Finally Zeke ended up living with his Aunt Dot, his mother’s older sister, and her husband, Clovis Kincaid, and their eleven children in that tumbledown place at Frog Level, out from Cana. Zeke had never seen so many kids. All of them all the time laughing and crying and fighting, snot-nosed and gap-toothed, running, running here and there. They all looked alike, fair and tow-headed, just like Zeke. He fit right in, or appeared to. So he liked it there.
    It was loud and rough over at Frog Level, and sometimes the boys ganged up on him, and sometimes there was not enough food to go around at supper, but Zeke liked it fine over there. Nobody paid him any mind. They’d say, “Go down there and get the cow,” or “Watch this littlun, honey,” or “Chop me some wood now.” They did not say, “What air ye a-thinking, honey?” or “What air ye a-listening out fer?” like his Great-aunt Edith used to. They never asked him any questions at all. Which was a good thing.
    For even as a child, Zeke had sense enough not to tell anybody about the voices in his head, or that other sound he always heard, like wind through a cave. The only way Zeke knew to shut off that sound was to sit still. Real still.
    But then they sent him over to Frog Level, where the Kincaids drowned it out. So Zeke could relax a little bit now. He could grow up some. He could shoot marbles with his cousin Tom or get in a wrestling match with Dan or play house with Jane and Pansy or hidey-go-seek in the woods until it got too dark to see, and then he could fall on the bed tick exhausted, and sleep in a smelly pile of boys. Girls in the front room, boys in the back room, Aunt Dot and Uncle Clovis in the middle room with the babies, kitchen just a jerry-built leanto against the side of the house. Sometimes Dot would kiss you and sometimes she’d slap you. She was a good cook, who grew fatter and sassier as the years wore on.
    And Dot was a Malone through and through when it came to singing, with a high nasal voice that sent a chill up and down Zeke’s backbone. After supper she’d rare back and close her eyes and set to singing by the fire or on the porch, depending on the season, and the children that wanted to would join in while Clovis sat with his arms folded and his mouth in a line and did not sing, but didn’t leave either. Clovis seemed to enjoy the singing, but you never could tell about him, famous for silence. Cousin Willie or Uncle Cornelius came by sometimes with their fiddles. Dan was taking up the fiddle too, but Zeke refused to learn it, and when he said no to Cousin Willie’s offer, his other cousins all stopped dead in their tracks and looked at each other, and Willie never asked him again.
    But Zeke liked music and he liked to sing, “Oh get around, Jenny, get around, oh get around I say,” while Cousin Willie bit his lip and perspired and the fiddles went faster and faster, “Oh get around, Jenny, get around, long summer day.” Zeke would spin in the yard like a whirligig, faster and faster and faster until all the world was a green blur that looked