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tipped disinfectant into a bucket. The chlorine fumes watered his eyes. He sloshed it onto the floor and it ran in little steaming streams here and there, following invisible channels in the concrete. He scrubbed for a while with a long-handled brush, his lips formed around a whistle that was never born, and then picked up the hose again.
    â€œJohn.”
    He turned, the water spattering across the floor. In an oblong of blue-green brilliance stood a human figure. He looked toward it for a moment, not speaking, as if listening to the golden light, or the random drone of flies. Then, moving deliberately, he twisted the nozzle closed and coiled the grass-green snake back into its wonted place. He passed his hand over his hair, bending forward, hesitating a little. Then the rubber boots went squish, squash across the concrete.
    The woman held the yellow envelope against her apron. Her eyes were not so much self-contained or self-assured as past all need for containment or assurance; like the eyes of an oak, if an oak had eyes, or of a waterfall. But to someone who did not know her they might have seemed unexpressive, almost dumb. Faded blue, like her denim skirt. Her heavy, shining hair, the color of clover honey, was braided tightly and pinned up under a figured kerchief.
    â€œWhat is it, Ola?”
    â€œTelegram.”
    Their hands met briefly, her clay-dried fingers to his leather gloves. She looked at him closely, her lips parted. But he was studying the address; had not yet made a move to open it. So she turned, and began making her way back through the yard to a white house, double-porched, toward a clapboard shed in back of it. Its door was all but blocked by a waist-high heap of shattered crockery.
    Gordon glanced around absently. His eyes found the straggling, slow-moving line of ruminating beasts. The distant blue-green, like deep water, of the hills over which Ethan Allen had fought. And above it all, the molten glow of the rising sun.
    A moment later, the envelope fluttered to the cow-tracked ground.
    FROM: COMMANDER, US NAVY RESERVE FORCES
    TO: SENIOR CHIEF GUNNERS MATE (DIVER) JOHN W. GORDON, USNR
    1. IN ACCORDANCE WITH PROVISIONS OF US CODE 673 (B), NAVAL RESERVE EXPLOSIVE ORDNANCE DISPOSAL DETACHMENT 20 HAS BEEN NOMINATED BY THE PRESIDENT FOR EMERGENCY ACTIVE SERVICE. THIS CONSTITUTES TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR NOTIFICATION OF YOUR CALL-UP. CONTACT YOUR RESERVE CENTER IMMEDIATELY TO PICK UP ORDERS AND AIR TICKETS .
    2. FOLLOWING MINE CLEARANCE REFRESHER TRAINING, YOU WILL DEPLOY TO USS AUDACITY, MSO -442, FOR ACTIVE SERVICE IN THE ARABIAN GULF AREA .
    3. ADVISE IMMEDIATLEY IF FOR ANY REASON YOU ARE UNABLE TO RESPOND TO THIS ACTIVATION ORDER .
    He stood motionless in the growing daylight, looking at the words. When he had them nearly by heart, he folded the paper slowly in two, then creased it with his thumbnail. It hung down by his side, in his long, awkward arm.
    He lifted his eyes to the hills.
    They rose to four thousand feet, rocky and rounded, dominated by the distant blue of Mount Mansfield. He’d opened his eyes to life to see them brooding above him, as if someday they might slide forward over the small dairying towns on their way to Champlain. Closer to him, the land gentled, and gradually became grazeable. Crevecoeur Farm was three hundred acres of those foothills, rolling meadow, and orchard ten miles out from Stonefield.
    Gordon’s maternal grandfather had share-farmed on the other side of town. His father, a quarryman, had died young in a fall from a granite terrace. So he’d milked for his grandfather until his country needed him—as wittier people than he had said at the time—to travel to distant countries, meet exotic people, and kill them. He’d spent ten years in the service, then left it for a woman and a farm. But he had had to do something else to make ends meet. So a few years later, he’d gone back, in a way, affiliating with a Reserve unit in Burlington.
    At last he