I lifted a corner of the blanket from his face. He was grotesquely, vividly ugly. His skin was lumpy, rough whorls like burn scars. Worse than the woman in the photograph Frank had left. I’d never seen such jaundice, an unnatural dark yellow. Only his cheek and part of his nose were visible, a flat nose, small like a baby’s, with no bridge. How could I have missed that? The memory itself seemed dreamlike. I lay the blanket back across his scarred, bare shoulder and let it fall forward to cover the side of his face again.
I got up. Outside the dining room window, the sky was a solid iron-gray. I had no telephone and the road was out. There was no way to get this poor man to anyone who could help him. I didn’t want to leave him alone.
He must be a soldier, I realized, horribly disfigured from the war. But how had he stumbled naked onto my land and ended up nearly buried in the mud? What was wrong with him?
An unfamiliar scratching sound came from the porch, followed by a sharp bark. I opened the back door and Hobo darted in. He went immediately to the man on the floor, sniffing voraciously and wagging his tail. The barn cat followed, her fur as damp as Hobo’s. Rain blew in with them.
Farm dogs and cats are not let in the house; their jobs are outside. I’d occasionally tried to bring Hobo or the cat in just for the company and to have a pair of eyes to look at while I talked to myself. But Hobo, out of his usual territory, would be shy inside and usually stayed near the door. The cat, an opportunist, always curled up close to the stove or the pantry. Now both circled the man, sniffing him vigorously, and then lay down, Hobo at his feet and the cat near his chest.
I let them stay. The kitchen was more companionable with them there, the man somehow less exceptional. The rush of cold air that had surged in with them dissipated.
Rain drummed, shooting off the roof and hitting the ground in a solid sheet. Dusk fell, but no houses were lit down the hill. The electric poles were down. The only illumination was farther away, the faint light of the mill’s generator.
I knew I should check outside to make sure the drainage was still good beside the house. But first we needed food.
I lit a couple of lanterns, loaded the stove, and, stepping around the man, the cat, and the dog, I began to make some biscuits. While the biscuits baked, I went out to the front porch. Wind whipped the trees near the bank and slanted the rain nearly horizontal. But the runoff sluiced efficiently away from the house. A thin film of ice slicked the floorboards. Carefully, I hurried back inside, feeling oddly calm, aware of the man and how his position in relation to me changed as I moved through the house—behind me as I walked to the front door, ahead of me as I came back down the hall toward the warmth of the kitchen.
The man sighed as I took the biscuits out of the oven. A long, sweet-sounding sigh, but nothing else. He shifted inside the quilts and rolled onto his back. I was relieved to see that the blanket remained across his face.
He had to be hungry. I dragged the cat and the dog outside so I could feed the man in peace. Then I warmed some milk, and set it, the fresh biscuits, some jam, a thick slice of ham, and a bowl of canned peaches on a plate beside him and got down on the floor. I lifted the blanket away from his face again to see if he was awake.
It was hard to look at his face and hard to look away. The whorled scarring covered him—his scalp, temples, face, eyelids, and neck—as if his skin had recently been liquid, stirred by some cruel hand. His lips, though, were normal. Just thin. He had very small ears. All of his features were small and faint, his cheekbones wide, and his whole face flat the way some babies’ are. The way some Chinese and Japanese faces are. I had only seen black-and-white photographs, but the Japanese were called yellow. Were they really this strange a color? Was he a Japanese prisoner brought over after the bomb? I thought again of the woman in Frank’s photograph.
Then