AS I WALKED all the way home from the courthouse on that hot June day, I still had no idea what life-changing things were in store for me and my family. Not a hint, not a clue.

Our house was quiet and dark that afternoon when I arrived. I walked through the front parlor. No sign of Meg, Amelia, or Alice.

In the kitchen a peach pie was cooling on a table. Through the window I saw our cook, Mazie, sitting on the back stoop, shelling butter beans into a white enamelware pan.

“Has Meg gone out, Mazie?” I called.

“Yes, suh, Mr. Ben. And she took the littl’uns with her. Don’t know where. Miz Corbett, she was in some bad mood when she went. Her face all red like, you know how she gets.”

How she gets. My Meg, my sweet New England wife. So red in the face. You know how she gets. The gentlest girl at Radcliffe, the prettiest girl ever to come from Warwick, Rhode Island. Burning red in the face.

And she gets that way because of me, I couldn’t help thinking. Because of my failure, because of my repeated failure. Because of the shame I bring on our house with my endless “charity cases” for the poor and disenfranchised.

I walked to the parlor and lifted my banjo from its shelf. I’d been trying to learn to play ragtime tunes since I first heard the new music that had come sweeping up from the South late in the old century. It was music as noisy and fast as one of the new motorcars that were unsettling horses all over the country.