Chapter Three

The distance from the House on Sycamore Street to Rebekka’s farm could be cut considerably if you went around by the creek and stepping-stoned it in the autumn or waded it in spring. That was David’s invariable way, although in spring, pants were sure to get soaked, along their edges, even if he crammed them halfway up along his upper leg.

Rebekka always kept an extra pair of trousers hanging in a closet under the stairs. Knee ones, long since outgrown by Stevey.

They fitted Davey, who never failed to rebel against them, in a comic hit-and-miss fashion, garment and boy seeming to evade each other at all usual points of contact.

A little later, when Steve was at State Agricultural College, his room, up under the eaves, was practically David’s, with a closet for extra bits of David’s clothing and a nightshirt for those occasions when, for one reason or another, David slept at his sister’s house.

Paula, Rebekka’s first, was nineteen when Davey was six.

That meant, as in the House on Sycamore Street, here was a forest of grown-ups. Except Leslie. Who had a face that was delicately hung on, like a pear from its branch. A face that quivered with nervous little ecstasies at what it saw.

You could lie on your stomach alongside of Leslie, even though the forest of years was between, and play with lead soldiers and try to make an A-shaped formation with them as Henry had read out loud from Carlyle’s _French Revolution_.

But never for long.

Suddenly Leslie would grab one of them out of formation and wrap him in a handkerchief and want to play a game called “Angel in Heaven.” Pshaw! That bored David. To him a soldier was a soldier.