He was my secret, and he was healing quickly and regaining his strength day by day. I kept expecting to come to the cabin and find him gone. I wasn’t permitted to spend time with the out-of-town workers hired by the state to construct the dam, raze the houses and cut down the trees. We called the tree cutters “woodpeckers,” a derogatory term for men hired in Boston under political cronyism to clear the valley. Most didn’t know one end of an ax from the other. It was the ultimate insult in those days of high unemployment for the work of dismantling our towns to go to the people who would benefit from the waters of the reservoir and not the ones who were losing so much. One afternoon, Philip helped me pick blackberries and make a cobbler on the old kitchen stove. We ate it steaming, fresh out of the oven, with cream I’d bought from a friend who still had a cow. She wanted to know where my hideout was, but I wouldn’t tell her. After the cobbler, Philip and I sat in the shade together and this time he read to me.
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