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of course, Gretch. I didn’t think.”
    “Well, at least the power’s back on.” Bennie squinted milky eyes, looking around them. “It’s brighter than it was before. Did they fix the line already?”
    The lights were indeed on, but Gretchen had no explanation for it. The house had been dim before she’d brought the man inside. “I can’t honestly say that anything’s fixed.”
    Trudy touched her twin’s arm. “How can you worry about the lights when there’s a mystery right in our midst? Don’t you wonder who he is and where he came from?”
    Bennie nodded, tilting her wide face toward Gretchen. “Indeed, I do. Where did you say you found him?”
    Gretchen wiped grubby hands on her jeans, ignoring how her fingers trembled. “He was lying in the walnut grove looking as though the tornado had flattened him,” she explained, having no earthly explanation for how he’d gotten there. “Matilda led me to him. She threw quite a fit until I followed her. He was at the end of a path of trampled grass and walnuts.”
    “Walnuts?” Trudy repeated. “From our trees?” Her eyebrows knitted together above the wide bridge of her nose, sporting the same puzzled expression as Bennie. “That’s impossible. The grove hasn’t produced in years, not since the day the old pastor told you Sam wasn’t coming home.”
    “I haven’t a clue where they came from,” Gretchen said and held on to the nearest chair as she bent to tug off her muddied boots. “It’s like the sky spit them out instead of hail.”
    “Ah, that’s the second time the heavens have rained walnuts on this farm,” Bennie muttered and reached for Trudy’s hand, giving it a squeeze. “Who did you say this man was again?”
    “I didn’t say, because I don’t know,” Gretchen answered, tucking her boots aside, very glad the twins couldn’t read her face. Because they would have seen quite clearly that she wasn’t telling them the truth, not the whole truth anyway. There was something about the man that seemed far too familiar, beyond the color of his eyes, beyond the strange coincidence of the walnut rain. “I asked who he was but he couldn’t remember. I’m sure it’s because of the bump on his head. Let’s let him sleep, and when he awakens, we can ask him all the questions we want.”
    But her sisters weren’t done giving her the third degree.
    “Is he old or young?” Trudy asked, taking a step closer to the sofa and hovering, as though she could see the stranger lying on the divan.
    “More old than young, but mostly filthy,” Gretchen said, pushing ashy strands of hair from her face.
    “Tall or short?” Bennie asked next.
    Gretchen sighed, impatient to get to the kitchen. “He’s taller than I am.”
    “He smells of loss and deep sorrow,” Trudy declared as she squared her chin. “Like he’s been wandering for years and years.”
    “He smells of something, all right,” Gretchen agreed, though she would describe it more as mud and sweat.
    Gretchen left them for a minute to fetch a clean dish towel, which she dampened with warm water. Then she returned to the parlor, settling on bended knees beside the couch. For an instant, she merely studied the angular shape of the face, the width of his brow, the set of his chin. Even half smothered by hair entangled with dirt and grass—despite the damage inflicted by the years—there was definitely something there, something that reminded her of Sam.
    “Let’s clean you up a bit,” she said quietly and gingerly brushed a matted lock of gray from his brow before she touched the moist cloth to his cheeks. His soot-dark eyelashes twitched, and she wondered if he could feel her presence, even in his unconscious state, wishing she could voice aloud what she couldn’t stop thinking.
    Samuel Winston, is it you beneath the dirt and changes wrought by forty years? Could you have returned after all this time? Did you not really die in Africa? Did it merely scar your hands and feet,