Another thing the Peasant habitually did was take care of the old folks throughout the county, the ones who’d been around since he was a boy. Mr. Sales, who lived next door, carved horses and put together halters and all the rest of their tack out of leather and metal scraps, and it was all accurate and to scale. The Peasant would hang out with him, just talk. He had draft horses and work horses and horses pulling carriages, accomplished naive folk art, dunno if it ever went beyond making stuff to give as presents to friends and neighbors and the waitresses at a local restaurant he flirted with well into his 90s. The Peasant visited Bessie often, and a couple more over in Portland, and the rest of them, and there seemed to be a lot.

Including Uncle Bill. He lived in a trailer across the field. He’d always lived there. When my mother and the Peasant and the rest of their siblings were kids, there’d been a house and a family there. Now there was just this filthy old guy and his dogs living in a rusty trailer in front of the house, which was falling down and no longer inhabitable, and several mangy ponies living in the barn next door.

The Peasant liked to take us along on our visits to Uncle Bill. He encouraged us to call the guy Uncle Bill although he was no relation because that made mother crazy. I mean, he was dirty. Mom seemed, in retrospect, to believe he was morally dirty as well, which he may well have been, this strange old hermit. But maybe not, who knows. It is true that the dogs slept in his bed, especially on cold nights. And it is true that my father came home once from having conversed with Uncle Bill, and said, “As I was talking to him, a mouse ran out of one of his pocket and around his neck and ducked back into his sweater up at his collar, and he didn’t even act as if it were anything unusual.”

Developers have bought that whole section of land and tore everything down a long time ago. Now they are fighting with the county over zoning, they want to build a mall, and put a Target right where our old house was. Uncle Bill, he’s dead now but I don’t know when he died or whether he was still living at home when he did, I suppose so. As far as I know he had no redeeming qualities, but you can never be sure about that either.