Donald Wade spotted the brown paper bag and tugged Will’s sleeve. "Hey, Will, what you got in there?"

Will reluctantly pulled his attention from Eleanor and went down on one knee beside the wagon, an arm around the boy’s waist. "Well, what do you think?" Donald Wade shrugged, his eyes fixed on the sack. "Maybe you better look inside and see." Donald Wade’s hazel eyes gleamed with excitement as he peeked into the bag, reached and withdrew the two candy bars.

"Candy," he breathed, awed.

"Chocolate." Will crossed his elbows on his knee, smiling. "One for you, one for your little brother."

"Chocolate." Donald Wade repeated, then to his mother, "Lookit, Mama, Will brung us chocolate!"

Her appreciative eyes sought Will’s and he felt as if someone had just tied a half-hitch around his heart. "Now wasn’t that thoughtful. Say thank you to Mr. Parker, Donald Wade."

"Thanks, Will!"

With an effort, Will dropped his attention to the boy. "You peel one for Thomas now, all right?"

Grinning, he watched the boys settle side by side on the step and begin to made brown rings around their mouths.

"I appreciate your thinkin’ of them, Mr. Parker."

He slowly stretched to his feet and looked up into her face. Her lips were tipped up softly. Her hair was drawn back in a thick tied-down braid the color of autumn grain. Her eyes were green as jade. How could anybody lock her in a house?

"Boys got to have a little candy now and then. Brought something for you, too."

"For me?" She spread a hand on her chest.

He extended an arm with the sack caught between two fingers. "It isn’t much."

"Why, whatever-" Elly excitedly plunged her hand inside, wasting not a second on foolish dissembling. Withdrawing the figurine, she held it at shoulder level. "Oh myyy… oh, Mr. Parker." She covered her mouth and blinked hard. "Oh, myyyy." She held the bluebird at arm’s length and caught her breath. "Why, it’s beautiful."

"I had a little money of my own," he clarified, since she hadn’t bothered to count the egg money and he didn’t want her thinking he’d spent any of hers. He could tell by her expression the thought hadn’t entered her mind. She smiled into the bluebird’s painted eye, her own shining with delight. "A bluebird… imagine that." She pressed it to her heart and beamed at Will. "How did you know I like birds?"

He knew. He knew.

He stood watching her, feeling ready to burst with gratification as she examined the bird from every angle. "I just love it." She flashed him another warm smile. "It’s the nicest present I ever got. Thank you."

He nodded.

"See, boys?" She squatted to show them. "Mr. Parker brought me a bluebird. Isn’t it about the prettiest thing you ever saw? Now where should we put it? I was thinkin’ on the kitchen table. No, maybe on my nightstand-why, it would look good just about anyplace, wouldn’t it? Come in and help me decide. You too, Mr. Parker."

She bustled inside, so excited she forgot to hold the screen door open for Thomas to scramble inside. Will plucked him off the step and got chocolate on his shirt, but what was a little chocolate to a man so happy? He stood just inside the kitchen doorway with the baby on his arm, watching Eleanor try the bird everywhere-on the table, on the cupboard, beside the cookie jar. "Where should we put it, Donald Wade?" Always, she made the boy feel important. And now Will, too.

"On the windowsill, so all the other birds will see it and come close."

"Mmm… on the windowsill." She pinched her lower lip and considered the sills-east, south and west. The kitchen jutted off the main body of the building, a room with ample brightness. "Why of course. Now why didn’t I think of that?" She placed the bluebird on a west sill, overlooking the backyard, where the clothespoles had been repaired and now stood straight and sturdy. She leaned back, clapped once and pressed her folded hands against her chin. "Oh, yes, it’s exactly what this place needed!"

It needed a lot more than a cheap glass figurine, but as Eleanor danced across the room and squeezed Will’s arm, he felt as if he’d just bought her a collector’s piece.


If Will had been eager to make improvements around the place before his trip to town, afterward he worked even harder, fired by the zeal to atone for a past which was none of his making. He spent hours wondering about the people who’d locked her in that house behind the green shades. And how long she’d been there, and why. And about the man who’d taken her away from it, the one she said she still loved. And how long it might take for that love to begin fading.

It was during those days that Will became aware of things he’d never noticed before: how she hadn’t hung a curtain on a window; how she paused to worship the sun whenever she stepped outside; how she never failed to find praise for the day-be it rain or shine-something to marvel over; and at night, when Will stepped out of the barn to relieve himself, no matter what the hour… her bedroom light was always burning. It wasn’t until he’d seen it several times that he realized she wasn’t up checking on the boys, but sleeping with it on.

Why had her family done it to her?

But if anyone respected a person’s right to privacy it was Will. He needn’t know the answers to accept the fact that he was no longer laboring only to have a roof over his head, but to please her.

He mended the road-oiled the harness and hitched Madam to a heavy steel road scraper shaped like a giant grain shovel, with handles like a wheelbarrow, an ungainly thing to work with. But with Madam pulling and Will pushing, directing the straight steel cutting edge into the earth, they tackled the arduous task. They shaved off the high spots, filled in the washouts, rolled boulders off to the sides and grubbed out erupted roots.

Donald Wade became Will’s constant companion. He’d take a seat on a bank or a branch, watching, listening, learning. Sometimes Will gave him a shovel and let him root around throwing small rocks off to the side, then praised him for his fledgling efforts as he’d heard Eleanor do.

One day Donald Wade observed, "My daddy, he didn’t work much. Not like you."

"What did he do, then?"

"He puttered. That’s what Mama called it."

"Puttered, huh?" Will mulled this over a moment and asked, "He treated your Mama nice though, didn’t he?"

"I guess so. She liked him." After a moment’s pause, Donald Wade added, "But he din’t buy her bluebirds."

While Will considered this, Donald Wade voiced another surprising question.

"Are you my daddy now?"

"No, Donald Wade, I’m sorry to say I’m not."

"You gonna be?"

Will had no answer. The answer depended on Eleanor Dinsmore.

She came twice a day-morning and afternoon-pulling Baby Thomas and a jug of cool raspberry nectar in the wagon. And they’d all sit together beneath the shade of her favorite sourwood tree and relish the treat while she pointed out the birds she knew. She seemed to know them all-doves and hawks and warblers and finches. And trees, too-the sourwood itself, the tulip poplar, redbud, basswood and willow, so many more varieties than Will had realized were there. She knew the small plants, too-the gallberry and snow vine, the sumac and crownbeard and one with a lovely name, summer farewell, which brought a winsome tilt to her lips and made him study those lips more closely than the summer farewell.

Those minutes spent resting beneath the sourwood tree were some of the finest of Will’s life.

"My," she would say, "this is gonna be some road." And it would be all the charge Will needed to return to the scraper and push harder than before.

The day the road was done Will whispered his thanks into Madam’s ear, fed her a gold carrot from the garden and gave her a bath as a treat. After supper, he and Eleanor took the boys for a wagon ride down the freshly-bladed earth that rose firm into the trees before dripping to link their house with the county road below.

"It’s a beautiful road, Will," she praised, and he smiled in quiet satisfaction.

The next day he tightened up a wagon, replaced two boards on its bed, hitched up Madam and took his first load of junk to the Whitney dump. He took, too, a note from Eleanor, and Miss Beasley’s eggs, plus several dozen more and five pints of cream, one which never made it farther than the library.

"Cream!" Miss Beasley exclaimed. "Why, I’ve had the worst craving for strawberry shortcake lately and what’s strawberry shortcake without whipped cream?" She chuckled and got out her black snap-top coin purse.

And though Will checked out his first books with his own library card, just before he left she remembered, "Oh, I didfind some pamphlets on beekeeping while I was sorting in the back room. You need not return these." She produced a mustard-yellow envelope bearing his name and laid it on the desk. "They’re put out by the county extension office… every five years,mind you, when the bee is the only creature on God’s green earth that hasn’t changed its habits or its habitat since before man walked upright! But when the new pamphlets come in, the old ones get thrown-useful or not!" She blustered on, busying her hands, carefully avoiding Will’s eyes. "Why, I’ve got a good mind to write to my county commissioner about such outright waste of the taxpayers’ money!"

Will was charmed.

"Thank you, Miss Beasley."

Still she wouldn’t look at him. "No need to thank me for something that would’ve gone to waste anyway."

But he saw beyond her smokescreen to the woman who had difficulty befriending men and his heart warmed more.

"I’ll see you next week."

She looked up only when his hand gripped the brass knob, but even from a distance he noted the two spots of color in her cheeks.