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Paul ran for the woods. Kasiak followed slowly, with the storm at his heels. They sat beside each other on stones in the shelter of the dense foliage, watching the moving curtain of rain. Kasiak took off his hat—for the first time that summer to Paul's knowledge. His hair and forehead were gray. Ruddiness began on his high cheekbones and shaded down to a dark brown that spread from his jaw to his neck.

"How much will you charge me for using your horse to cultivate the garden?" Paul asked.

"Four dollars." Kasiak didn't raise his voice, and Paul couldn't hear him above the noise the rain made crashing into the field.

"How much?"

"Four dollars."

"Let's try it tomorrow morning if it's clear. Shall we?"

"You'll have to do it early. It's too hot for her in the afternoon."

"Six o'clock."

"You want to get up that early?" Kasiak smiled at his gibe at the Hollis family and their disorderly habits. Lightning tipped the woods, so close to them that they could smell the galvanic discharge, and a second later there was an explosion of thunder that sounded as if it had destroyed the county. The front of the storm passed then, the wind died down, and the shower fell around them with the dogged gloom of an autumn rain.

"Have you heard from your family recently, Kasiak?" Paul asked.

"For two years—not for two years."

"Would you like to go back?"

"Yes, Yes." There was an intent light in his face. "On my father's farm, there are some big fields. My brothers are still there. I would like to go there in an airplane. I would land the airplane in these big fields, and they would all come running to see who it was and they would see it was me."

"You don't like it here, do you?"

"It's a capitalist country."

"Why did you come, then?"

"I don't know. I think over there they made me work too hard. Over there, we cut the rye at night, when there is some moisture in the air. They put me to work in the fields when I was twelve years old. We get up at three in the morning to cut the rye. My hands are all bleeding, and swollen so I can't sleep. My father beat me like a convict. In Russia, they used to beat convicts. He beat me with a whip for horses until my back was bleeding." Kasiak felt his back, as if the welts still bled, "After that, I decided to go away. I waited six years. That's why I came, I guess—they set me to work in the fields too soon."

"When are you going to have your revolution, Kasiak?"

"When the capitalists make another war."

"What's going to happen to me, Kasiak? What's going to happen to people like me?"

"It depends. If you work on a farm or in a factory, I guess it will be all right. They'll only get rid of useless people."

"All right, Kasiak," Paul said heartily, "I'll work for you," and he slapped the farmer on the back. He frowned at the rain. "I guess I'll go down and get some lunch," he said. "We won't be able to scythe any more today, will we?" He ran down the wet field to the barn. Kasiak followed him a few minutes later, but he did not run. He entered the barn and began to repair a cold frame, as if the thunderstorm fitted precisely into his scheme of things.

Before dinner that night, Paul's sister Ellen drank too much. She was late coming to the table, and when Paul went into the pantry for a spoon, he found her there, drinking out of the silver cocktail shaker. Seated at the table, high in her firmament of gin, she looked critically at her brother and his wife, remembering some real or imagined injustice of her youth, for with any proximity the constellations of some families generate among themselves an asperity that nothing can sweeten. Ellen was a heavy-featured woman who held her strong blue eyes at a squint. She had had her second divorce that spring. She had wrapped a bright scarf around her head for dinner that night and put on an old dress she had found in one of the attic trunks, and, reminded by her faded clothes of a simpler time of life, she talked uninterruptedly about the past and, particularly, about Father—Father this and Father that. The shabby dress and her