It didn't announce itself, the difference in the room, but it was there, of that he was positive. It wasn't the soft caress of the new blanket, or the deep-sensed mattress he'd never slept on before, or the grass-laden field-laden air entirely new to him pushing through the open window and tumbling like puppies on his face. If he opened his eyes he'd know, but he had kept them shut—enjoying the self-created anxiety, the deliciousness of minute fright that he'd conjured up. There was apprehension and a plethora of mental groping going on that had taken hold of him. Being alone was also new to him, but being aware of a presence did make a difference, if he could only believe what he was telling himself. At thirteen he knew you sometimes had difficulty believing yourself.

But the fact of presence suddenly hit him its full force, though it had an argument attached to it. He didn't want to leap wildly out of bed (there was a chance he could be embarrassed), so he pretended again, this time emergence, slow and oh so deliberate emergence — from his woolen cocoon, from a dark and mysterious Caribbean cave close upon the jungle, from under the lashed canvas aboard the ship of an evil one-eyed captain of pirates, from behind the dark curtains of a magician or castle wall. What he could not do was look out of the back of his head, though he tried, trying to move the slits of his eyes, now finding morning by its faintness, so that he could see behind him.

Cautiously he moved, as if by his innate stealth he could fool anyone into thinking he was motionless or asleep or unconscious. His right ear found the pillow, telling him he had moved far enough. He opened his eyes and the girl Tillie was sitting there at the small desk, or the woman Tillie, or whatever you'd call her Tillie. She had not said a word the night before when he met her rocking away on the porch, staring straight ahead, not acknowledging him, not once looking up at him, just rocking her slow rock. Twenty or thirty she could have been, but he wasn't sure of how to make that measurement, what elements to compute with. Where she had been in a blue dress and yellow sweater on the porch, she was now in the most simple of night dresses or nightgowns through which in a widening swath morning's faint light moved and made soft mounds, pleasant roundness of her flesh. Her breasts lifted themselves right there under the slight cover and his eyes had found them immediately, the nipples dark the way they had been the night before. Still she did not look at him, still she said no word, made no sound, and kept one hand secreted on herself. At once he knew she was not a danger, not a fearsome threat to him, though he could not tell how he knew. High on her forehead was a scar showing its whiteness, a very human and vulnerable scar that said that she herself had been hurt, had suffered pain at some time. On her left shoulder, faint but red, rose a birthmark. It looked to be wings open to the wind, it said she was susceptible and not ghostly. The speechless mouth was formed with pretty lips puckered on themselves, full. Hair was a soft blonde, though it tumbled about her head but in a not ugly fashion. Even in the pale kiss of dawn her cheeks had much color in them, at least heightened from that of her face. Her eyes as yet showed no color, but were not malevolent or fearful though they carried the same sense of distance in them others had shown, a long reach into something he could not begin to understand. A coarse achiness crossed through his chest and he wanted to swallow. His mouth was dry. For the very first time she turned slowly to look at him and dawn caught itself in the eyes looking at him. Something unknown had softened her mouth, made it elegant and wet and shiny; a word had not done it, or a smile or any movement on his part, but it was rolled like a smooth petal and had a lovely pout to it. He fought to remember everything that had brought him here, to the Cape, to this room, in front of this girl who had not yet uttered a sound. As she stood dreamily, slowly in the light of the false dawn throwing itself upon her, particles of morning faintness falling with some kind of fever all over her ample body, and as she looked naked in that soft reach with the darkness at her midsection and at her breasts, yesterday all came back in its crowding way. He was surprised at what he remembered so quickly even as she began to move from her place. A phenomenal silence hung about them in this house that had promised so much of sound.

It had been a slow, easy, green morning at that, yesterday, and had been since the very earliest part of daylight when his father had gentled him up with a push at the shoulder. "Don't run." he had said, "but walk to the nearest exit." The constant smile came with the voice, and over that broad shoulder, it seemed, he could hear the birds of Saxon in their small riot of gaiety, a sure sign of the day, its goodness, its promise, the sun having already laid bare most of the secrets his room had but a few hours earlier when he pitched awake in the darkness. His newsprint ball players on the walls, as if they had sprinted into position, long-legged and gangly and floppy-panted, were now the icons they were meant to be, Williams and DiMaggio and Slats Marion full-figured in a splash of sunlight, suddenly each one three-dimensional across the chest, shadows behind them, life-emerging; for a moment he thought Billy Cox would loose the ball in his hand all the way across the room to first base. He heard the birds again, as if scattered in flight from their roosts, raucous and noisy as fans at a game, the way he pictured the Sooners breaking away from the line to become propertied. Sleepily he locked on to the second sun of his father's smile, tried to remember what they had been saying in the other room as he had dozed off and on the night before.

It had been Mel's voice, deep and rugged, carrying the whole diaphragm with it, the words coming square and piecemeal as if each one was an entity, which had first penetrated his move into sleep. "Mike'll love it down there, Bill." He paused, let the weight of each one have its way. "He'll have the whole farm to run around on. Charlie and Mav will keep him busy with the cows and the chickens and the gardens. Nothing heavy, for sure, no barn building or rock walls to set up, but enough for him to break out. Hell, he's starting to grow like a weed and Mav's cooking will put admirable meat on his bones. And there's always new life coming around the corner." From the last he got the implication that Mel thought he was much younger than he really was. Most older folks had that way about them, he agreed to himself.

Quietly and sort of pleased, he knew they were talking about his summer and him, him thirteen, lanky, a stick of bones just finding a hair or two in his crotch, the wonder of a host of things either pressing down on him with almighty force or trying to come through his very skin, other messages scratching for light. Mel he could see as clear as ever; blond, muscled, the blue Corps uniform rippling across his chest and upper arms like a sail under attack of the wind. Once, according to his father, Mel had been a desperate youngster, fully at rebellion, always rambunctious, in the darkness of home beaten by his father for much of his young life, until the man had had a heart attack with a strap still in his hand. "Mel was looking for a payback for the longest time," he'd said, as if to cover a lot of ground with a few words, as if Mel was due as much room for whatever transgressions had been yet accounted for.

"He can stay the whole month of August if he wants...and if he likes it," Mel had continued. "All summer for that matter. It'd be one less mouth to feed and he'll come back bigger and stronger, maybe so you wouldn't recognize him come the end of August." That square and stubborn chin of his usually moved slowly when he talked, and he would have bet few cries ever leaped from his mouth, even when his old and mean father was beating on him. No sir, not one to cry that Mel, all blond and good looking and packed full of muscle, who walked like a bomb might go off if he got triggered wrong. It sounded great to be going down to his farm with him, even if Liv was going along, and her a teacher at that. "There's something about the earth or the elements or whatever you want to call it, that gets deep into you down there in Middleboro. It's high green all summer, wild growing making up for winter coming down the road, vegetables leaping up out of the ground like they've been shot, cream as thick as molasses and Mav's ice cream every night of your life makes it all so perfect you can't believe it even when it's happening. It's a dream much as anything that I know of, an aura, a feeling. I don't know if it's the food or the air or if it's in the damn water, but it's something that'll pop his backside as good as a ramrod. Hell, I bet he sprouts an inch or two just this summer. You got a ball player coming on your hands, Bill, and you've got to give him room."

He'd known that Mel had been left a large piece of property down the Cape way from his butcher of a father because Mel was all that was left of the Grasbys (a brother drowned in a small pond when he was only six, a sister killed in a car crash at only sixteen when she had been drinking and another sister not seen around these parts for more than fifteen years), that an old couple, Charlie and Mavis Trellbottom, worked it for him while he was still working on his enlistment, that Mel was on his long leave of the year, that Liv Pillard his girlfriend was going down to the farm with him for just about all of his leave. The aura and taste of a farm suddenly flooded him, his head being jammed with smells of hay and new cut grass and barns wet with whatever steamed up barns and made them dank and memorable other than horse or mule sweat or a cow's splatting wildly across a dense plank floor. All the sounds came back, the clacking and strapping sounds and the noisy wetness you get conditioned to, and the aging by which wood speaks so eloquently and so disparately as if the popping stretch of boards and the checking of beams is each one unique unto itself, each one a message of age and sorrow, a cry. "Barns bend but never break," he'd heard his father say once after such a visit, and such came fully at him. He'd been but once, to Billerica that time with a cousin for a long and adventurous weekend, and parts of the quick visit had stayed with him; rafts of bees or hornets at their endless commotion and business, spiders dancing on silver rails so high in the peaks it made him think of circus trapeze swingers, hay dust so thick in his nose at times he thought he might not be able to breathe, another near secret odor that had to be leather almost making its way back to life, the moan of a solitary cow, a stool being kicked over and milk sloshing its whiteness on heavy planks, in one corner of the barn the close-to-silent scurry of a mouse with a cat arched in mid-flight as if its bones were broken. Suddenly, not knowing why, the way things had been happening lately, Liv Pillard eased herself into his mind; tall, bosomy, hipped, standing in the door of a classroom watching her students return from recess, skirt full against her thigh, pushed by her rear, her mouth the reddest mouth he'd ever imagined, the long auburn curls in a slow dance about her neck whenever she moved a fraction of an inch. The graceful lines of her calves, at her hips, had more meaning in them than he could fathom. A hundred times she had smiled at him, he figured, because his father and Mel were long-time friends, because their roads high and low and often had drifted through Parris Island and Quantico and Nicaragua and Philadelphia and the Boston Navy Yard, because they played cards from cribbage through every realm of poker with the same dead-earnest intensity no hand or prize could shake and could drink beer for whole weekends at a time without seeming to move; had the same set of the chin they did, jutting and chippy, asking for it one might have said, proud, bearing absolute silence at times, whole unadulterated reams of it that could threaten a body as much as could a fist. Their competition was in place of a war, it being a time between wars.

Shopping, picking up supplies in special stores, getting the oil checked a couple of times because of gauge trouble, the ride to the farm was a long and convoluted trip. Liv and Mel sat up front in the long roomy roadster, him in the back, the sun and the wind pouring down over them, Liv's hair caught up in them like a pennant, every which way flying and catching gold and throwing it away as if she were philanthropic. Now and then he closed his eyes with his head on the seat, her perfume not less than gentle in his nose but new and mysterious, new grass smell edging it out, the perfume coming back, more new grass and occasionally lilacs loose about the road, once in a while her head out of site, and he wondered if she slept fitfully as he did. A trucker honked at them as they passed, then honked again and pointed at the car to his striker craning his neck to see the car as it pulled away, Mel throwing his hand in the air as a nonchalant goodbye. He himself had no idea of what was so special about the long-hooded Packard, except that it was long and black and speeding to a grand farm in Middleboro with animals and strange crops and all the ice cream he'd ever want, and him leggy and sprawled across the back seat, and Liv's perfume coming relentlessly at him. Mel slowed the car at the crest of a small hill, and then stopped. "There it is, kid," he said, his jaw pointing, his sharply hewn nose pointing, a readable smile on his face.

Land spread itself everywhere, whole patches of it cut up and divided by more greens and yellows and rock walls and punctuating tree lines than he could imagine. It spread from horizon to horizon and coming from his own private library of National Geographics were unrolling pictures of the pampas and the savanna and a sense of space at once so vast and so intimate it walloped him, like a hand aside the head. He heard his grandfather's voice, some letters of words, some syllables, bent in half by the tongue and others stretched for all they were worth, lifting themselves out of a forgotten cave, a grotto or cairn he had put aside for too long, a place where stone took on new dimensions and new spirits, the slight figure of the small man in a forgotten doorway, the booming voice so often attributed to the upstart young poet Yeats now knocking heads asunder. Cluttering on top of Liv's resurgent perfume came the sweet odor of more new cut grass, somewhere a whole crop of it, and then a vaguely refined field smell came rolling in, dutifully at recall, coming from the green sea of a field on a crest of combers; clover from that other visit he realized, where the barn had been memorialized, ripe as the Atlantic itself, rich as brine. In the middle of all laid out before his view was a long sparkling white house, the main part of two floors and sundry additions plunked like excess punctuation, also white, easy and casual afterthoughts at a glance, which had been appended at random he surmised, or had been required by different men and different needs.

From the chimney of one of these, squat and like a hen coop, the one farthest from the main house, smoke rose slowly, its column meandering ever so slightly, uninterrupted for all intents, lazy as the beginning of this very day had been. A wide porch spread out on the two sides of the house he could see, and promised more at each of its further ends. A horse and wagon, piled high with perhaps hay, a shade of yellow not yet seen in the fields, crawled across the front yard; its facing side was gray and neutral and had no contour top or bottom, but belonged, picture-perfect.

A shed off to the side had the same color, weathered, beaten and angled, wearing a thousand storms for sure. It leaned into its own existence. Time was trying to mark this place and this event for him, time and what else was working along with it; the indelibles indeed were afoot but he could not bring them all the way home, could not decipher them the way they should be: a painting inching itself into reality, another clutch in his gut as if something were being pulled out of him, a tenon, a muscle, a useless organ through the eye of a pore. An emptiness carved its hollow way through his stomach. He felt cheated somehow, but could not lay identity on it. A woman on the porch shook a mat or a small rug over the railing. Her motion was quick and lively, and seemed to be the only thing moving. Liv's perfume came again, more than lilac, more than any petals known, more than recall could demand. And with it the realization that taste had been introduced. In such a short time, taste had been introduced; it caught itself at the tip of his tongue, lingered, left. It was not a sweetness, he knew. He tried to recall it. It came to him that a variety of borders had been built around him in his short life and were being broken down, but he could not determine the extent of them or the extent of the breakdowns. At the edges of his senses, likewise at the point of division, identity of a number of things for a new moment were unknown.

Then, the way ideas are crystallized, from a small world controlled by an inner energy, the great merger came, the meshing of sights and scents and somehow reachable mysteries. It pushed together the picture-perfect wagon and the woman at dusting and the sudden ebullient clover and the inviting spread of the house and the wide issue of fields going off to where stars waiting night were hanging out and the mix of planets. Liv's perfume crawled down the back of his neck and Liv looked up at him from the front seat and he looked down at her and saw one absolutely splendid nipple of her twisting standing alone in the cup of her gaping bra like the knob on the gate lock in the back yard at home. The rush was upon him.

Her teeth were as white as the house. His stomach hurt. Wind whirled in his ears.