He wore a biballs over a blue chambray shirt that showed his thickly folded and wrinkled neck. His face was sunburned, and he was smoking an unfiltered cigarette. As Louis looked at him, the old man pinched the cigarette out between his thumb and forefinger and pocketed it neatly. He held out his hands and smiled crookedly… a smile Louis liked at once-and he was not a man who “took” to people.

“Not to tell you y’business, Doc,” he said. And that was how Louis met Judson Crandall, the man who should have been his father.


3

He had watched them arrive from across the street and had come across to see if he could help when it seemed they were “in a bit of a tight,” as he put it.

While Louis held the baby on his shoulder, Crandall stepped near, looked at the swelling on Gage’s neck, and reached out with one blocky, twisted hand. Rachel opened her mouth to protest-his hand looked terribly clumsy and almost as big as Gage’s head-but before she could say a word, the old man’s fingers had made a single decisive movement, as apt and deft as the fingers of a man walking cards across his knuckles or sending coins into conjurer’s limbo. And the stinger lay in his palm.

“Big ‘un,” he remarked. “No prize-winner, but it’d do for a ribbon, I guess.”

Louis burst out laughing.

Crandall regarded him with that crooked smile and said, “Ayuh, corker, ain’t she?”

“What did he say, Mommy?” Eileen asked, and then Rachel burst out laughing too.

Of course it was terribly impolite, but somehow it was okay. Crandall pulled out a deck of Chesterfield Kings, poked one into the seamed corner of his mouth, nodded at them pleasantly as they laughed-even Gage was chortling now, in spite of the swelling of the bee sting-and popped a wooden match alight with his thumbnail. The old have their tricks, Louis thought. Small ones, but some of them are good ones.



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