Autumn was coming, even to northern Florida. The nights were chilly enough to make them cuddle together in the doubled sleeping bag for warmth, although they hadn’t yet had to break out the long underwear or start a fire in the wood stove for warmth. Waking up each morning to the sight of the morning fog lying low on the river, and the softness of the light that filtered through the pine trees, made any discomfort that might have been involved worth the effort, however.

It was always chilly when they got up, and they both always hustled to get dressed. Though the afternoons were still sometimes warm enough to take a quick swim to clean up, it was never an appealing idea in the morning, although both of them could see how it might have been in warmer weather. Using the wood stove to warm their morning coffee seemed like too much work, but they still had their pack stoves that had served them faithfully all summer, and one was enough for the cup of coffee it took them to get their eyes open.

They had quickly fallen into a routine. Since it was still often warm in the afternoon, especially on the days that Mark and Mr. Thibodaux and Brother Erasmus had poles to set or lines to string, they had gotten used to getting up in the half-light of dawn, and not wasting any time as they got around.

After a few days, they had taken to getting up soon enough to walk to the Thibodauxs’ for an early breakfast there. While Jackie would never be the cook that either of the Thibodauxs were, she could handle pancakes and sausages and eggs, and Mr. Thibodaux initiated her into biscuits and pan gravy and grits. At least the Thibodauxs had a gas stove, although they still had a wood stove in the kitchen, and Jackie could handle that. The big breakfasts were welcome, and it soon became a family affair. On the days that Brother Erasmus worked with them – and that wasn’t every day – he’d usually drop by in time for a cup of coffee before they got to work.

Bessie Thibodaux couldn’t eat much; it seemed as if most food caused her gallbladder to act up. Most mornings, she stayed in bed, always trying to be cheerful, although usually in pain, and she limited her breakfasts usually to a cup of coffee, and maybe a piece of toast or two. She was looking forward to getting her surgery over with, so she could get back to a normal life.

After the men piled into the pickup truck and set off to work at whatever it was they might have been doing, Jackie did the dishes, picked up the house, and of course answered the phone. There always seemed to be a rush of calls between eight and ten in the morning, mostly from women, and Jackie guessed it was for the housewives to gossip after they’d gotten their men off to work.

As she worked, Jackie tried to be cheerful and helpful to Mrs. Thibodaux, who was recovering from one bout in the hospital and getting ready for the next. They quickly got away from "Mrs. Thibodaux" and "Miss Jackie" and became "Bessie" and "Jackie" to each other, just as Mark and Mr. Thibodaux had fallen to using first names.

The men usually came back to the house for lunch, which Jackie made for them, but they tended to get right back to work and then knock off fairly early in the afternoon. Occasionally, Jackie and Mark would have dinner with the Thibodauxs, and once in a while with the Greens, or the Spragues, and they even had dinner with the Cowgills once, but they were more likely to go back to the Billie Jean for their supper, which wouldn’t be anything special, after breakfasts and lunches that were bigger than they had become used to.

The evenings were long and lazy. Often, Jackie would get out her fishing pole and make a few casts from the deck of the houseboat, more to have something to do than not. Once Mark got familiar with the technical manuals, he would often use the evening time for drawing.

After a few days, Bessie Thibodaux went off to the hospital in Tallahassee. Paul Thibodaux spent most of his days up there with her; Mark and Jackie would go down to the house to see him off, and Mark spent the day setting up the switching system. It was an old rotator relay system that had been salvaged from some place around Southern Bell, he discovered; not exactly an up-to-date piece of equipment, but one that would do the job that was asked of it, and Mark imagined that the price had to have been right. It took a little figuring out how to set up, and there were some parts of the equipment that didn’t work quite right, so Mark spent much of his days with test equipment and the manual open in front of him, as he struggled to make sense of the system.

Jackie soon learned that Mark wasn’t very good company when he had a telephone technical problem in front of him needing resolution, and waiting for something to happen at the switchboard occasionally got boring. There wasn’t much she could do to help him out, and just staring at the switchboard left something to be desired.

One day, she found some paint in a back room, and decided to repaint the "Twillingate Telephone" sign that stood in front of the house. It was a little tattered, and the lettering had been amateurish; besides, it would eat up some time. She took down the sign and spread it out on a small table near the switchboard. By the time that Paul made it back from Tallahassee, the sign was completed and back in place. "Looks good," he said to compliment her. "It was you that did the sign down at Brother Erasmus’ church, wasn’t it?"

"Just something to pass the time," Jackie explained.

She forgot about it, until a couple of days later, when she got a phone call from Mrs. Sattler, who ran the general store. "Mr. Thibodaux said you did the sign for him, and that one for Brother Erasmus," she explained. "I was wonderin’ if you’d be willin’ to do one for me."

"Sure," Jackie said. "It gives me something to do."

From that point on, there was usually a sign taking shape on the porch of the Twillingate Telephone Company while Jackie was keeping an ear out for the switchboard. It turned out that there were a lot of signs that needed making in the area, and Jackie’s work was better than what had been available. At first, she would have been willing to do the work for cost, just to have something to do, but Mr. Thibodaux told her that she deserved something for her time. Jackie found herself charging more than she thought the work was worth, but people were still happy to pay it.

"Looks like you’re getting a business going," Mark commented. "I wonder how you’d do painting signs in Spearfish Lake."

"It’s something to think about," Jackie said. "As far as I know, there’s no one in town who does signs and does a good job at it. There used to be a guy down in Albany River who did a lot of the signs around town, but I think he died. I think people have to go to Camden now."

"You might be able to make a nice little business of it, then," Mark commented. "It seems to me it’d beat being a part-time waitress."

"I can get away with brushwork and boards around here," Jackie told him. "But these plastic signs are something else again. I don’t know anything about them."

"You can learn," Mark told her. "There’s got to be someplace you can pick up that sort of thing. Maybe in Camden or somewhere."

Jackie nodded. It was something that she’d never considered before. "I don’t know that we could make a living at it," she said, "But I’m sure there would be some extra income there. If we go back to Spearfish Lake to live, it’s something that I ought to think about."

Painting signs took some of the boredom out of the day, but after a while, sitting on the Billie Jean’s deck and fishing and watching birds in the evening began to pall – even quicker for Mark than it did for Jackie. "I think I’ll call home and have Dad send me my acrylic box and some canvases," he said. "Maybe I could work on some of the drawings I’ve done and turn them into paintings."

"You really should do that one of Roger and Kathy," Jackie said. "She’s about due to have her baby any day now, so it might be kind of nice for her to have."

Mark smiled. "Maybe I ought to do that one of you and Kathy. You know, the nude one."

"I don’t think so," Jackie said. "Maybe someday, but you might have trouble explaining it to Brother Erasmus if he should happen to look over your shoulder."

"You might be right at that," Mark agreed.

It still left Jackie with the prospect of boring evenings. She thought about it for a minute, then asked, "How about if we get the mirror blanks shipped to us, and you show me how to work at hogging out the mirror?"

"That’s a lot of work, and it’s going to be dull," Mark told her. "I mean, it’s got to be done, and if you want to do it, there’s no reason why you can’t."

A few days later, Jackie got a call from the Twillingate Post Office that there were a couple of large boxes from Spearfish Lake. By then, Mark had scrounged up an empty 55-gallon drum from somewhere, and he set it up on the bank of the river next to the shantyboat. "This is going to be a big job," he told Jackie. "It’s going to take maybe twenty hours, maybe thirty. All we have to do is to take something like an eighth of an inch of glass out of the center of the disk, but we have to do it slowly and carefully and precisely."

It proved that an hour or two at a time was about all that Jackie wanted to work on the mirror, and it was hard to tell if she was making progress. Still, for the hour or two that she ground away at the disk nightly, spreading grinding compound, working one disk over the other for a few minutes, then washing the used grit off with water from the river, and starting over again, was pleasant work until her hands got tired. Then, she’d put the glass blanks back into the storage box, put it under the bed, and sometimes grab her fishing pole and throw a lure out into the stream, while Mark worked at the easel he had set up on the deck.

It took Mark a couple of tries to get his hands used to brushwork again before the painting of Roger and Kathy on the beach at Titusville took shape. Mark took a little artist’s liberty in painting the two; the Saturn launch gantry was closer in the background, close enough so that you could make out what it was. In deference to the knowledge of where this painting would be placed, Mark made Kathy’s bikini a little less radical than it had been in real life.

The painting took shape over several evenings, layer on layer. Jackie was happy to just sit, fishing pole in hand, and look over Mark’s shoulder as it progressed. "I think you’re capturing them very well," she said at one point.

"It’ll do, I guess," Mark said. "I’m not real happy with it, but it’ll do for a practice job. I may just finish this one and start over on it again."

"Don’t be so picky," Jackie told him. "I think it’s a good job. Maybe when you get it done, you should put it aside and try something else."

"You could be right," Mark agreed.

A couple of days later, Mark couldn’t think of anything else he wanted to add to the painting, so he hung it on one of the walls of the Billie Jean to cure, while he went on to something else – a painting of the Billie Jean itself, with Jackie sitting on the deck, fishing pole in hand. The swamp it was sitting in was quite clearly the river, but somehow it was a mystical, foggy bayou at the same time.

One day, Brother Erasmus happened by as Mark was painting. "I see you ain’t the only one of you two that can handle a brush," he said as he stood and watched Mark work.

"I play at it," Mark said defensively. "It’s just something I do for the fun of it."

They talked for a while, half an hour or so, before Brother Erasmus was on his way. By the time he was gone, Mark was tiring of the evening’s work.

"You ought to do a painting for him," Jackie suggested. "Maybe of the church. I’m sure he’d like one, but I don’t think he’d ask."

"Yeah, you’re right," Mark said as he set to cleaning brushes. "We owe him a lot."

But the painting that Mark started next wasn’t of the church, but of a sailplane in the air over Waverly – not a sleek, high-performance piece of fiberglass, but a tattered fabric 2-33, sharing the sky with a bald eagle.

"Those were some good days we had out there," Jackie commented.

"Yeah," Mark said. "All in all, we haven’t got much to complain about the way this trip has gone. We’ve had some bad times, but I think that the good has outweighed the bad."

The days passed swiftly. Mr. Thibodaux and Mark decided to work six days a week when they could, but in practice they usually didn’t work too hard on Saturday, leaving the afternoons for painting and working on the mirror. It was what they could do on Sundays afternoons, too; every Sunday, they went to church, just to be part of the community. One week, they would go to Brother Erasmus’ church in the morning, to enjoy the preaching and singing, and in the evenings, they would go to Reverend Sprague’s church for the evening service. On the next week, they did it the other way around. As a result, they spent a lot of time in church, and got to know many more people around the community fairly well.

Mark was working on the sailplane picture one evening when Samuel, the hermit-like old boatman who had helped them move the Billie Jean dropped by, bringing them a bass he had caught. Quite to their surprise, he hardly turned out to be the same fellow at all. "I likes to talk to folks," he told them. "I just don’t take to workin’ close with ’em is all." He sat in his old rowboat, piled high with nets, hand lines, oyster poles, a tin-can anchor filled with cement, knives and rusty buckets, and it seemed appropriate for him. "I knows somethin’ about this coast, ’cause it take more than one lifetime to know everythin’ about it, the birds and the Guff and the fish and the animals. I done got so some of ’em and I understand each other pretty good. You know seagulls talk if you give ’em a chance. You ought to hear ’em beggin’ when I haul in my nets. Some days I got a trail of ’em followin’ in the sky behind my boat."

It was more than they had ever heard him speak at one time before. "Is Twillingate your home?" Jackie asked.

"I got a little shack here where I stays in sometimes," Samuel admitted. "These old bones ain’t as young as they once were, and when we gets a big freeze, I gots to have a stove to stay warm, an’ I didn’t usta have to have that. But that’s where I stays, sometimes. Home is sort of out there, the salt marshes and Sand Creek and Lost Creek, Big Piney Island, Snake Hammock, this here River, and like that. I can pretty well go where I wants to go, an’ you got to keep goin’ to places ’cause they changes so much in the seasons and freezes and droughts and storms. As long as the Lord keeps fish in the Guff, I can makes out fine."

They talked with Samuel some more, and he did most of the talking. He talked about how he talked to God and to the birds while he was out by himself in his old skiff, and how he wanted to take the memory of all that was good on the earth along with his soul when he went to heaven. "I just be wantin’ a chance to know the world before I got to leave it, is all," he told them

After a while, old Samuel had about talked himself out, so he said goodbye, started up his old Evinrude and headed toward the sea. Mark and Jackie just stood there watching as he puttered away. "We think we’ve traveled a lot," Mark said. "I’ll bet he has never been more than forty miles from where we are, and I’ll bet he’s seen more than we’ll ever hope to see."

"It’s all a matter of how you look at it," Jackie told Mark. "You get right down to it, we haven’t been a lot different the past few months."

"Old Hank Thoreau would have understood him," Mark said. "Remember, ‘I have traveled extensively in Concord’?"

Jackie nodded. "That’s what I said," Jackie agreed. "It’s all how you look at it. If you look at it his way, this is a pretty good place to live, and I’m not so sure he’s not right."

"I wouldn’t care to live like that," Mark thought aloud. "Much as I like this place, I don’t think it would make much of a place for us to make a home."

"I don’t know. I think I’d like it. I could see making a life out of living on this shantyboat."

"If we could afford to do it without working, then maybe that would be a possibility," Mark argued. "But, I don’t think we’d like trying to live by fishing mullet or slashing teppentine."

"Well, no," Jackie said. "I didn’t mean it like that."

"This is a fine place to live for a while," Mark told her. "I really like staying on this shantyboat. But I think I couldn’t just sit back on my ass and do nothing. I’ve found that I have to be busy at something, or I go nuts."

"I know," Jackie agreed. "It was hard for me last winter, when all I had to do was to take care of Johnnie, it got pretty bad, there. It was a lot better when I got the job at Rick’s, even though it only lasted for a while."

"I’ll tell you what," Mark said, shaking his head, "We’ve got a month, maybe six weeks, before we’ll have the phone system up and running. While this is a nice town, and it’s got good friends and good people, I’m not even sure I want to sit on my butt here until spring, with nothing in particular to do."

"You had something else in mind?"

"Not really. It’s just that while we have friends here, they’re friends because we’re workers, not just sitting on our butts. If we weren’t doing anything, then we’d be thought of as Yankees, and nobody would give us the time of day."

"You’re right, I guess," she said. "It’s just that when the time comes to leave this place, I’m going to hate to leave. We’ve made so many friends here."

"We have friends elsewhere. What’s more, we even have friends at home, and I’ll tell you, more and more, I get the feeling that when we’re done here, it’ll be time to go home."

"I even feel like that now and then," Jackie replied. "The only thing is, if I’m going to sit on my butt all winter, I’d rather do it here where it’s at least a little warm, rather than up in Spearfish Lake where it’ll be frozen."

"There is that," Mark replied. "On the other hand, if we go back to Spearfish Lake, I don’t think we’ll lack for things to do for the four months or so before I go to work for Mr. Corman."

"Such as?"

"Such as, suppose we buy a house that needs some fixing up. It’d be a perfect time to do it."

"We haven’t got the money to buy a house."

"Oh, we could get it," he replied, smiling. "I could take out a VA loan, knowing that I’m going to be going to work for Mr. Corman. There’s other ways, too.

"It’s something to think about," Jackie said, looking at the fish that Samuel had left for them. "How’d you like a late fish dinner? There’s no way this is going to keep, with no icebox."

Mark admitted they didn’t have much choice in the matter. He volunteered to clean and fillet the fish, while Jackie set up both of the camp stoves to fry it, and sliced a few potatoes to go along with it.

There turned out to be quite a bit of fish there, and Mark and Jackie were wondering how they were going to be able to eat it all when Brother Erasmus showed up. "You like a little snack of some nice, fresh-fried bass?" Jackie asked.

"I ain’t going to turn it down," the preacher said. "I take it you must have caught something."

While she was cooking, Jackie explained what had happened. In a few minutes, the three of them sat down on the deck of the shantyboat for their late fish dinner. "I can’t help but wonder about Samuel," Mark said. "I mean, he seems like a nice old man, and all that, but he sure seems a little strange."

"That’s right," Brother Erasmus said. "Some days, he don’t hardly say nothin’, and other days, he’s the friendliest man you could believe, and you don’t never know what he’s goin’ to be like from one day to the next. I guess probably he’s a little touched, but folks ’roun’ here have kind of gotten used to it, and so nobody minds."

"He sure seems to know every tree and fish around here," Mark commented. "I suppose after a lifetime of learning about them, he’s got a right to."

"The Lord’s hand is upon that man," Brother Erasmus said. "Maybe more than most. I ain’t sayin’ that anyone else would be happy livin’ like he does, but it’s the way the Lord has him livin’ so I guess it’s all right for him. He can go out in that little boat of his and talk to the Lord, and sometimes the Lord talks back, and I think he can hear Him a little better than the rest of us."

"I don’t know," Jackie said. "I guess I just wish I could hear Him a little better."

"The Lord is talkin’ to you," the preacher said. "He’s a-talkin’ to you all the time, but you got to be listenin’ for what He says. The Lord, He works in mysterious ways, and we can’t always know what He’s tellin’ us, or why He’s doin’ it. He was a-talkin’ to you through Samuel, tonight."

"But what was He saying?" Jackie asked.

"Don’t rightly know," Brother Erasmus told her. "He would have been a-talkin’ to you, not to me. I could have been standin’ right next to you, and He’d have been talkin’ to me, too, but He might not have been tellin’ me the same thing He was tellin’ you. Ask, and you shall receive, it says in the book. But, you gotta have faith, and know that the Lord does things His way."

Jackie shook her head and said, "It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but to have Samuel drop by out of nowhere and give us a fish ought to tell me that there’s something more there than meets the eye."

"See?" Brother Erasmus smiled. "You learnin’ something, already."

The work on the phone system picked up once Bessie Thibodaux was back from the hospital and Paul was around more. The surgery was fairly successful, and although she was very tender and couldn’t do much, at least she wasn’t in constant pain, which was a big improvement for everyone involved. Day by day, she was able to do a little more for herself, and Jackie’s need to nurse her grew less and less. By the middle of November, she was able to sit at the switchboard for an hour or so at a time, perhaps a couple of times a day, and there was getting to be progressively less for Jackie to do at the Thibodauxs’. If it hadn’t been for the increasing amount of sign painting, it could have been boring, indeed.

In only a few more days, Thanksgiving was rolling around. "You kids are coming to the house to have Thanksgiving with us," Mr. Thibodaux told them. "’Course, that’s ’cause you’re gonna have to do a lot of the cookin’. If we half let Bessie, she’d kill herself in the kitchen, so all of us are gonna have to work at keepin’ her takin’ it easy."

"I’ve never really cooked a Thanksgiving dinner," Jackie told him.

"Well, it’s something you really oughta learn, and there ain’t no time like the present to learn it," he replied.

The thought of Thanksgiving and the holidays to follow made Jackie feel a little uneasy. She had never spent a holiday season away from her home and family. She figured that it would have been a little easier for Mark, since he had spent three of them away, in Vietnam and Germany. The fact that they were going to be having a dinner with friends as good as the Thibodauxs just didn’t quite seem to compensate.

Still, it was good to celebrate Thanksgiving with friends. It was a lot of work for Jackie; mostly she and Paul Thibodaux made Thanksgiving dinner, with a little help from Bessie and Mark. It was quite a dinner; turkey, of course, but with a lot of side dishes. By the time the afternoon was over, they needed the walk back to the shantyboat, just to help work off some of the overeating.

Mark got out the easel and thought about working on a painting, but he just couldn’t raise the enthusiasm to start. Perhaps he was a bit homesick, too, Jackie thought.

"What would you think if we flew home for the holidays?" Jackie asked. "It’d be a day or a day and a half each way, assuming we caught the weather right, and we could stay there a couple of days. I don’t think Mr. Thibodaux would mind."

"I don’t think it’s going to matter," Mark told her. "By the holidays, we ought to have the system pretty well wrapped up and running. There’ll be some work taking the parts of the old system apart that he’s not going to use, but there’s no rush on that. Mostly, they could sit there and rot."

"You mean, we’re going to be done here by Christmas?"

"Yeah, maybe a week or so earlier," Mark said. "I’d kind of figured that we could stay here until after Christmas, and then go somewhere else. Maybe home. There’s no reason we couldn’t be home for Christmas, but I thought you were the one who didn’t want to go home until we were done traveling."

"Well, yeah," she said. "But now I’m not so sure about that."

"Actually, if we go to the trouble of flying up north, maybe we should just figure on staying there, at least for a while, looking for a house, and maybe I can find a job to hold us until spring."

Jackie thought about it for a minute. There was the old question again, whether to go back to Spearfish Lake to stay, or not. It was no easier to come to grips with it now than it had been every time they had talked about it before. "I just thought we’d stay for a few days and then come back to Florida, or maybe even head out west, say southern California, or something," she said, trying to put off the decision a while longer.

"Well, we could do that," Mark said. "But there’s other things we could do with that time. Like I said, if we were to buy a house that needs some fixing up, I could get a good start on it between now and April or May."

"You know," Jackie mused, "It’s a little unreal for us to be talking about buying a house and fixing it up."

"Well, yeah," Mark said, "But it’s probably the logical thing to do, and after I go to work for Mr. Corman, we won’t have time like that available again."

"I know," Jackie said. "On the other hand, I keep thinking about a little house out in the woods, someplace where we could be away from people a little. Do you think we could have something like that?"

Mark nodded "It’d be the sort of place I’d want to look for," he said. "Maybe not back in the woods, though. I’d want to be in some place that’s open enough that I could build an observatory out there. Some place where we could get in out of the wind in the winter when we’re using the telescope. It can get awful bitter out in the open with a telescope when the wind is blowing."

"We could do that," Jackie said. "That would be nice. I’d kind of like to have a big garage or shop area, so you’d have a place to work on things, like the new telescope, and maybe I could use it if I can get a sign painting business going."

"You’ve been thinking about that?"

"I have," she said. "You might have a good idea there. I don’t think we could make a living out of it, but I could be wrong. Still, it would provide some extra income, and that would allow us to do some of the things we want to do, like go traveling when we get the chance."

"Maybe if we really found the right spot, some abandoned farm, say," Mark said, still dreaming, "We could have room enough for our own airstrip. It’d sure be nice to just be able to go out in back, roll Rocinante out of the hangar, and go flying."

"Could we have a sailplane?" Jackie asked.

"I suppose we could if we wanted to," Mark said. "Spearfish Lake really isn’t glider country, but there are openings here and there if you got low and had to land, so we’d really have to learn to be careful about that. The one real hang-up is that Rocinante doesn’t have enough guts to tow one, even a real light one, even at that low an altitude."

"That could be a problem," Jackie said, reluctant to give up that particular dream. "I don’t really want to have to give up Rocinante."

"I don’t either," Mark said. "But, there are a couple of options. If we found the right field, and it would have to be a long one, we could probably work out a way to do auto tows, or maybe a winch tow from the ground. Plus, there are conversions available. Maybe when the time comes to give Rocinante’s engine a major, and it’ll need one sometime in the next few years, maybe we could hang a bigger engine in the nose. As far as that goes, the Stinson probably has got enough guts to do the job. It’s not a problem that can’t be solved, and we’ve got a few years to work on it. We just aren’t going to be able to afford a sailplane on top of Rocinante, right away, anyway."

Jackie shrugged. "Well, it’s something to think about, I guess," she said. "Do you have anything else you want in a house?"

"A fireplace would be nice," Mark said. "It’d be nice to sit down in front of a fire on a cold winter’s night, just to make the time pass in the evening, just to cuddle up and get a little romantic."

"That would be nice," she said.

"The thing is," he said, "I don’t want to have to screw around with wood heat. As much wood as we would have to cut, that could really get to be a pain in the ass."

"You know Mr. Toivo, out in Amboy Township? Kirsten and I used to pal around with his daughter," Jackie said. "They’ve got wood heat, and I seem to remember that you roast on one side and freeze your butt on the other. I’m with you. I like central heating. Do you think we can find a place like that?"

"I wouldn’t be surprised," Mark said. "I’ve kind of got an abandoned farm in mind, maybe four or five miles out of town. The house is fieldstone, so it ought to be in pretty good shape, but I’ve got no idea what the interior of the place must be like. I don’t know if it could be bought, or how much it would cost, but it would be the first place that I’d want to take a look at."

"If we had a farm, could we have a horse or two?" Jackie asked. "When I was a little girl, I always wanted a horse, but it was always out of the question, since we didn’t have a place to keep it."

"Don’t see why not," Mark said. "I don’t know what we’d use a horse for, except maybe to ride, now and then, but I wouldn’t mind having one."

The dream was taking more shape in Jackie’s mind. She could see a brightly lighted kitchen, a comfortable living room, a warm bedroom with a large bed. "It is kind of a dream, isn’t it?" she reflected to Mark.

"It’s not the sort of thing that we could put together right away," he said. "But there’s no reason we can’t have all of that, and more, over the course of a few years, if we go back to Spearfish Lake. That’s not one of those things we can automatically plan on doing anywhere else."

"I agree," she said. "We’d have to go back to Spearfish Lake if we want to do all that. It’s just that I’m still not too crazy about the idea of going back to Spearfish Lake."

"That’s one of the reasons for wanting a place out in the country," Mark said. "It wouldn’t be like living in town, with all that means. We wouldn’t have to spend any more time in town than we wanted to."

"Yeah, but still," Jackie protested. "We’d still have to spend time there, and put up with all the gossip."

Mark shook his head. "I don’t think that matters. We agreed long ago that if we went back to Spearfish Lake, we’d have to be married, and that’ll end a lot of the gossip. A lot of the stuff about your mother will die out in time, and the rest of it, we can afford to ignore. Like I told you once, to hell with the little minds. I think you worry about that too much."

Jackie looked out at the dark, still waters of the river for a moment. "There is the other thing to worry about, too," she said finally.

"Your mother?"

"Yeah."

"We’ve been over that until it’s almost boring," Mark said. "As I have said before, it’s a risk, sure. But it’s more a risk for me than you, because I get a choice in the matter. I don’t think it’s that big a risk."

"I still don’t think it’s fair," Jackie said.

"Let me tell you something I’ve never told you before," Mark told her. "You remember the day I walked across the causeway for water, back in Titusville?"

"Yeah," Jackie said. "That seems so long ago. We’ve come a long way since then."

"We have," Mark said. "I thought about this whole thing of you and your mother and us a lot on that hike. You know what struck me the hardest?"

Jackie shook her head, and Mark continued. "It struck me that while I have no idea what went wrong with your mother, it had to have something to do with the fact that there must have been some kind of stress she wasn’t able to handle. I mean, I don’t know what that stress must have been, but it seems to me that there ought to have been something. You think I’m on the right track?"

"You might have something there," Jackie said.

"I think I do," Mark told her. "Well, anyway, what I figured out was that the two of us, traveling together on the trip like this, ought to put a fair amount of stress on you. I just kind of figured that I could just sit back and see how you handled it, and then make a decision from there."

"I never realized that you thought of it like that," Jackie said, a little coldly. "What did you decide?"

"Isn’t it obvious?" Mark asked. "We wouldn’t be sitting here talking about getting married if I had decided any other way."

"Is that what we’re talking about?" Jackie said.

"Of course it is," Mark told her. "What else did you think we were talking about?"

Jackie was silent for a long time. A blue heron came gliding in over the trees and splashed down near the shore. Finally, Jackie got up, went over, sat down next to Mark, and put her arms around him and kissed him – a long, deep French kiss that went on and on. "Well, all right," she said. "I think you believe in me more than I believe in myself, but I can’t ask for much more than that. Let’s go ahead and get married."

"How about going back to Spearfish Lake?" he asked.

"I think so," she told him. "But, let’s go home for the holidays before we make up our minds for sure."

"Let’s get married while we’re there," he suggested. "It’ll drag the stay out for a few days, but at least we can do it with our families around."

"We can do that," Jackie said. "I don’t want a big wedding. Just a few friends. Maybe not even in a church."

"I figured you’d want a church wedding, anyway," Mark observed.

"Well, yeah," Jackie said, "But, there’s no church in Spearfish Lake that I’d really like to get married in."

"Me either," Mark said. "I mean, it’s kind of beside the point, since we want to get married in Spearfish Lake, but the only church I’d really want to get married in is right up there on the top of the hill."

"You mean, by Brother Erasmus?" she asked.

"That’s just what I mean," he said. "Can you think of anyone better?"

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