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Show 16 about his family in the village. Lorin disliked this neighbor, and would not have given him the satisfaction of knowing a trespasser was on his property if there had been another woods closer at hand. There was not, however, and he needed to get back before his father, a granite-faced, white-haired old patriarch with the haunted glint of failure in his eyes, came home and began seriously looking for his razor strop because Lorin was supposed to be helping in the north forty himself. He scanned the hills in the distance and the rock-strewn pasture beyond the road he had walked along, and seeing nobody, ducked under a branch and entered the woods. It was early spring, because that was when it had really happened, and he was uneasy about inventing too much. The trees were spindly and just coming into leaf, like the aspens up Mill Creek Canyon, and there were still patches of dirty snow on the ground, and soft spots where his feet sank under a paste of leafmold. Hungry rabbits scuttled under rocks as he stumbled past the underfoliage where they had been hiding. He had been here before, of course, because during summers, when the foliage had thickened and nooks and shelters formed in the dense ground cover, it was a place where in the heat of an afternoon young farm boys came to find out about young farm girls. But today the sunlight was thin, the warmth in the air was tentative. He reached a clearing where dead stumps hulked through a foam of pale lavender wildflowers, looked around to make sure no one had crept through the woods behind him and knelt down in the wet grass. He was not sure how you did this. He had never tried it before, and the tent meetings he had gone to provided no common example. Even his father was not much help; he had been a Methodist, a Presbyterian, a Hard-shell Baptist, and a Shaker, and his mode of family prayer and scripture reading changed each time an evangelist came through the district. Lorin knew |