He looked as if he should have been bigger or smaller, it was difficult to say which. Seeing him scampering about the woods, transistor radio bumping against his chest like an electronic locket, you might think he needed antennae, a glass helmet and a size four space suit. Seeing him years before, still straight and graceful as a young pine, with the face of a teen-age Adonis, you would have thought him one of the most strikingly handsome young men in the world; what this Adonis had become was a triumph of indefatigable will as well as a showcase of perseverance. He seemed to have been issued a skin many sizes too small and chest and shoulders too large. Without a shirt he seemed to have no neck; with a shirt on he seemed to have on shoulder pads. Encountering this apparition in stagged-off pants and three sweat shirts chugging toward you on the boulevard, elbows out, balled fists chest-high, spread legs thrusting splayed boots against a springy earth, one might expect to see a halfback with the football sprinting close on his heels ...were it not that the jack-o’-lantern lodged there between the shoulder pads made it extremely clear that it was not football that was being played, but some kind of queer joke . . . On exactly whom was not quite so clear. He pulled the shade back down. The shaft of light skipped again precisely across the sleeping faces, hesitating for an instant in the center of each little forehead to examine the drop of good old human spit. And as Joe struggled into his cold clothes he recited a prayer of thanks in a reverent whisper in the general direction of the chest of drawers, while the jack-o’-lantern looked on balefully with puzzled, sooty eyes and grinned a mildewed grin: a joke was being played, all right. That much was clear. And it might have been easier to figure on whom if Joe had refrained from grinning back. Saturdays were busy for Joe. That was when he worked off his rent obligation. He had lived off and on at the old house across the Wakonda for most of his life, staying there as long as six or eight months at a time during his childhood, while his father gallivanted up and down the coast possessed with the frenzied squandering of a life that was burning a hole in his pants. Rent money was never mentioned or even considered; Joe knew he had paid old Henry ten times over with the countless hours of free overtime he’d put in at the show or the mill, paid board and room for himself and the woman and kids and then some. That wasn’t it. To old Henry he owed nothing, but to the house, the house itself, to the actual flesh of paint and bone of wood of the old house he knew he owed a debt so large it could never be repaid. Never, never in a thousand years! So, as the day drew near when he would move into his own home, he had become a dervish of repairs, determined to make that deadline of never and repay that unpayable debt. Gleefully slapping paint or mending shakes, he rushed to square things with the pile of wood that had sheltered him so undemandingly for so long, certain sure, as he damned near always was certain of practically anything he decided was worth being sure of, that he would some way, right at the last, with a terrific spurt of last-minute nailing and puttying and calking, succeed in meeting that impossible deadline and pay off the debt he had already decided for certain sure was un-pay-offable. “Old house, old house,” he crooned, straddling the topmost peak with a hammer in his hand and nails bristling from his mouth, “I’ll have you shinin’ like a new dime by the time I leave here. Oh, you know it. You’ll stand a thousand years!” He patted the mossy withers lovingly. “A thousand years”— he was certain. A lot of roof left to shingle and outside to shake in the three or four weekends before he moved, but he would finish, by gosh, by golly and—if it meant Sending Out for the Divine Help—by God! The thought caused a little buzz of excitement to go through him; though he’d come pretty close, he’d never actually come to that point of really Sending Out yet. Oh, he’d prayed for things, but that’s different, that ain’t like Sending Out. You can pray for just about anything, but Sending Out for Divine Help!—well . . . it ain’t ordering from Monkey Ward. It’ll be there, don’t ever doubt it a second—oh yeah—but you wait till there’s something of a size, not just the donkey cable busted or a root hung in your—last night, now, last night with Hank so down from his argument with Lee, I come near to Sending—but I’m glad I held off. Only thing Hank has to do is quit worrying about it and go ahead and do what he knows already he’s gonna do—like I knew he knew that he was gonna walk back out into the woods to look for old Molly because it’s in him to do—to accept what he already knows is all he need do. ...Yeah, I’m glad I didn’t Send Out—because he’ll come through even if he don’t Believe, except I sure never seen him throwed before like Leland’s throwed him. If he’d just quit patty-caking and accept what he knows already: that there’s nothing but to go ahead and straighten the kid up when he gets outa line and Hank sure don’t need anybody to Send Out for him some help when it comes to that sort of—But for a long time now, a year, since we heard about her killing herself—No, no that can’t be, it’s—ah— it’s just that all this with the union, and then Lee too, he’s throwed off kilter a little bit. He’ll come back around, if he’d just—like anybody else destined to responsibility, like any of the chosen people—learn he’s got to dig what he knows already, then everything’s gonna be fine again—oh yeah—gonna be prime ... All this imprecise, rough-shingled thinking while the October sun pushed through the smoky blue layers of October sky, to bravely look toward November...and the black rat-pack of clouds, hiding on the horizon, seemed as far away as January. Joe Ben scooted gradually along the peak of the roof, face bright orange, eyes clear green with white showing all around the pupil, and as he moved jerkily along, tacking down the new cedar shingles, he liked to look back occasionally at the bright contrast of new wood lined against old—the line ragged and rough, but bright nevertheless. He would study the line a moment, then set to again, hammering away at his rough-split shingles and whittling his rough-tooled thoughts, certain sure that everything would come along fine, be a gas, turn out prime...if you just held your mouth right and accepted what you knew already was gonna hafta be done. You bet! And if the joke was on Joe he was determined to be the first to laugh as well as the last to admit it. At Viv’s call to lunch Joe climbed down the ladder, content that h............