A thin knobby boy, coming sixteen, all long bone and stringy muscle, not yet grown up to knuckly hands and seeming oversize feet, and a big gaunt old draft horse, rough­coated, heavy-fetlocked. They stood by the rickety fence of a half-acre enclosure, the boy leaning against a big shoulder, looking over the broad back, the horse waiting, at the tag end of a day of waiting, patient, big haltered head sagging against the short lead rope tied to a fence rail. Off near the center of the enclosure the slanted frame shack that served for a schoolhouse quivered on flimsy foundation as the last of some fifteen children of assorted ages and sizes scattered from the doorway, released, racing in dedicated directions away. The boy leaned against the old horse and watched a stout soft-stomached red-faced man appear in the doorway, shrugging into a jacket, and walk with spraddle-legged rocking gait toward the road past the enclosure gate and take a small bottle from a pocket of the jacket and raise this to his lips as he walked.
