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his people were seen plying along the blank patch of earth beside the rails, locating whatever little tokens of flesh and bone and cloth the crows had missed and collecting them in brightly, beautifully painted leather pouches, which they must have taken off somewhere and buried with a fitting ceremony.

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    A t just about the time Grainier discovered a rhythm to his seasons—summers in Washington, spring and fall at his cabin, winters boarding in Bonners Ferry—he began to see he couldn’t make it last. This was some four years into his residence in the second cabin.
    His summer wages gave him enough to live on all year, but he wasn’t built for logging. First he became aware how much he needed the winter to rest and mend; then he suspected the winter wasn’t long enough to mend him. Both his knees ached. His elbows cracked loudly when he straightened his arms, and something hitched and snapped in his right shoulder when he moved it the wrong way; a general stiffness of his frame worked itself out by halves through most mornings, and he labored like an engine through the afternoons, but he was well past thirty-five years, closer now to forty, and he really wasn’t much good in the woods anymore.
    When the month of April arrived in 1925, he didn’t leave for Washington. These days there was plenty of work in town for anybody willing to get around after it. He felt like staying closer to home, and he’d come into possession of a pair of horses and a wagon—by a sad circumstance, however. The wagon had been owned by Mr. and Mrs. Pinkham, who ran a machine shop on Highway 2. He’d agreed to help their grandson Henry, known as Hank, an enormous youth in his late teens, certainly no older than his early twenties, to load sacks of cornmeal aboard the Pinkhams’ wagon; this favor a result of Grainier’s having stopped in briefly to get some screws for a saw handle. They’d only loaded the first two sacks when Hank sloughed the third one from his shoulder onto the dirt floor of the barn and said, “I am as dizzy as anything today,” sat on the pile of sacks, removed his hat, flopped over sideways, and died.
    His grandfather hastened from the house when Grainier called him and went to the boy right away, saying, “Oh. Oh. Oh.” He was open-mouthed with uncomprehension. “He’s not gone, is he?”
    “I don’t know, sir. I just couldn’t say. He sat down and fell over. I don’t even think he said anything to complain,” Grainier told him.
    “We’ve got to send you for help,” Mr. Pinkham said.
    “Where should I go?”
    “I’ve got to get Mother,” Pinkham said, looking at Grainier with terror on his face. “She’s inside the house.”
    Grainier remained with the dead boy but didn’t look at him while they were alone.
    Old Mrs. Pinkham came into the barn flapping her hands and said, “Hank? Hank?” and bent close, taking her grandson’s face in her hands. “Are you gone?”
    “He’s gone, isn’t he?” her husband said.
    “He’s gone! He’s gone!”
    “He’s gone, Pearl.”
    “God has him now,” Mrs. Pinkham said.
    “Dear Lord, take this boy to your bosom …”
    “You could seen this coming ever since!” the old woman cried.
    “His heart wasn’t strong,” Mr. Pinkham explained. “You could see that about him. We always knew that much.”
    “His heart was his fate,” Mrs. Pinkham said. “You could looked right at him anytime you wanted and seen this.”
    “Yes,” Mr. Pinkham agreed.
    “He was that sweet and good,” Mrs. Pinkham said. “Still in his youth. Still in his youth!” She stood up angrily and marched from the barn and over to the edge of the roadway—U.S. Highway 2—and stopped.
    Grainier had seen people dead, but he’d never seen anybody die. He didn’t know what to say or do. He felt he should leave, and he felt he shouldn’t leave.
    Mr. Pinkham asked Grainier a favor, standing in the shadow of the house while his wife waited in the yard under a wild