And he thought about all the ways a person could be knocked flat and all the different reasons some got up again and some didn’t.
And he thought about Clara who would have loved this child with everything she had.
and he thought about May, who had raised her in the hard space between danger and love, and had handed her somehow through all of it, to the road, and then to the county, and then to a Wednesday auction, where a man had come in for oats and a bottle, and had walked out with something that changed the rest of his life.
He thought about $5.
He thought about what $5 bought.
Elias, Juny said.
He looked at her.
She was looking at the figure in her lap.
I know what May’s language was, she said.
I remembered it last week.
I didn’t say anything because I wanted to be sure first.
He waited.
She was from a place far south and east, Juny said.
She talked about it sometimes late at night.
She turned the small figure over in her hands.
I looked it up in Reverend Miles’s atlas.
I found the word she used.
She looked up.
It means It means the one who stays.
He was very still.
Juny, she said.
It means the one who stays.
He looked at her.
She looked back at him, cleareyed, steady.
Sure.
I thought you should know, she said.
since you told me it probably meant something strong.
He looked at the figure in her lap, standing with both feet on its small piece of wood, planted and still, and decided.
Yeah, he said.
His voice came out rougher than he meant it to.
I reckon May knew exactly what she was doing when she gave you that name.
Juny looked at the figure for a long moment.
Then she set it carefully on the railing between their two chairs, right in the middle where they could both see it and went back to working on the face.
The last light dropped below the horizon.
The dogs were settled.
The seedlings were in the ground.
The porch step was fixed.
And Elias Grant and the girl named Juny, the one who stays, sat in the dark together on their porch in front of their home.
And that was exactly what they did.
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