Nothing to make him suspicious.

She'd known him almost four years now; it was 1942 when they met, the world at warand America one year in. Everyone was doing their part, and she was volunteering atthe hospital downtown. She was both needed and appreciated there, but it was moredifficult than she'd expected. The first waves of wounded young soldiers werecoming home, and she spent her days with broken men and shattered bodies. WhenLon, with all his easy charm, introduced himself at a Christmas party, she saw in himexactly what she needed: someone with confidence about the future and a sense ofhumor that drove all her fears away.

He was handsome, intelligent, and driven, a successful lawyer eight years older thanshe, and he pursued his job with passion, not only win‐began to shave her legs. As she

did, she thought about her parents and what they would think of her behavior. Nodoubt they would disapprove, especially her mother.

Her mother had never really accepted what had happened the summer they'd spenthere and wouldn't accept it now, no matter what reason she gave.

She soaked a while longer in the tub before finally getting out and toweling off.

She went to the closet and looked for a dress, finally choosing a long yellow onethat dipped slightly in the front, the kind of dress that was common in theSouth. She slipped it on and looked in the mirror, turning from side to side. It fither well and made her look feminine, but she eventually decided against it andput it back on the hanger.

Instead she found a more casual, less revealing dress and put that on. Light blue witha touch of lace, it buttoned up the front, and though it didn't look quite as nice as thefirst one, it conveyed an image she thought would be more appropriate. She worelittle makeup, just a touch of eye shadow and mascara to accent her eyes. Perfumenext, not too much. She found a pair of small‐hoped earrings, put those on, thenslipped on the tan, low‐heeled sandals she had been wearing earlier. She brushed herblond hair, pinned it up, and looked in the mirror. No, it was too much, she thought,and she let it back down. Better.

When she was finished she stepped back and evaluated herself. She looked good: nottoo dressy, not too casual. She didn't want to overdo it. After all, she didn't knowwhat to expect. It had been a long time‐‐probably too long‐‐and many different thingscould have happened, even things she didn't want to consider. She looked down andsaw her hands were shaking, and she laughed to herself. It was strange; she wasn'tnormally this nervous. Like Lon, she had always been confident, even as a child. Sheremembered that it had been a problem at times, especially when she dated, becauseit had intimidated most of the boys her age. She found her pocketbook and car keys,then picked up the room key. She turned it over in her hand a couple of times,thinking, You've come this far, don't give up now, and almost left then, but insteadsat on the bed again. She checked her watch.

Almost six o'clock. She knew she had to leave in a few minutes‐‐she didn't want toarrive after dark, but she needed a little more time.

"Damn," she whispered, "what am I doing here? I shouldn't be here. There's no reasonfor it," but once she said it she knew it wasn't true. There was something here.

If nothing else, she would have her answer. She opened her pocketbook and thumbedthrough it until she came to a folded‐up piece of newspaper. After taking it outslowly, almost reverently, being careful not to rip it, she unfolded it and stared at itfor a while. "This is why," she finally said to herself, "this is what it's all about."

Noah got up at five and kayaked for an hour up Brices Creek, as he usually did. Whenhe finished, he changed into his work clothes, warmed some biscuits from the daybefore, grabbed a couple of apples, and washed his breakfast down with two cups ofcoffee.

He worked on the fencing again, repairing most of the posts that needed it. It wasIndian summer, the temperature over eighty degrees, and by lunchtime he was hotand tired and glad for the break. He ate at the creek because the mullets werejumping.

He liked to watch them jump three or four times and glide through the air beforevanishing into the brackish water. For some reason he had always been pleased bythe fact that their instinct hadn't changed for thousands, maybe tens of thousands,of years.

Sometimes he wondered if man's instincts had changed in that time and alwaysconcluded that they hadn't. At least in the basic, most primal ways. As far as he couldtell, man had always been aggressive, always striving to dominate, trying to controlthe world and everything in it. The war in Europe and Japan proved that. He quitworking a little after three and walked to a small shed that sat near his dock. He wentin, found his fishing pole, a couple of lures, and some live crickets he kept on hand,then walked out to the dock, baited his hook,and cast his line. Fishing always madehim reflect on his life, and he did it now. After his mother died, he could rememberspending his days in a dozen different homes, and for one reason or another, hestuttered badly as a child and was teased for it. He began to speak less and less, andby the age of five, he wouldn't speak at all. When he started classes, his teachersthought he was retarded and recommended that he be pulled out of school.

Instead, his father took matters into his own hands. He kept him in school andafterward made him come to the lumberyard, where he worked, to haul and stackwood. "It's good that we spend some time together," he would say as they workedside by side, "just like my daddy and I did."

During their time talk about birds and together, his father would animals or tellstories and legends common to North Carolina. Within a few months Noah wasspeaking again, though not well, and his father decided to teach him to read with

books of poetry. "Learn to read this aloud and you'll be able to say anything you wantto." His father had been right again, and by the following year, Noah had lost hisstutter. But he continued to go to the lumberyard every day simply because his fatherwas there, and in the evenings he would read the works of Whitman and Tennysonaloud as his father rocked beside him. He had been reading poetry ever since.

When he got a little older, he spent most of his weekends and vacations alone. Heexplored the Croatan Forest in his first canoe, following Brices Creek for twentymiles until he could go no farther, then hiked the remaining miles to the coast.

Camping and exploring became his passion, and he spent hours in the forest, sittingbeneath blackjack oak trees, whistling quietly, and playing his guitar for beavers andgeese and wild blue herons. Poets knew that isolation in nature, far from people andthings man‐made, was good for the soul, and he'd always identified with poets.

Although he was quiet, years of heavy lifting at the lumberyard helped him excel insports, and his athletic success led to popularity. He enjoyed the football games andtrack meets, and though most of his teammates spent their free time together aswell, he rarely joined them. An occasional person found him arrogant; most simplyfigured he had grown up a bit faster than everyone else. He had a few girlfriends inschool, but none had ever made an impression on him.

Except for one. And she came after graduation. Allie. His Allie.

He remembered talking to Fin about Allie after they'd left the festival that first night,and Fin had laughed. Then he'd made two predictions: first, that they would fall inlove, and second, that it wouldn't work out.

There was a slight tug at his line and Noah hoped for a largemouth bass, but thetugging eventually stopped, and after reeling his line in and checking the bait,he cast again.

Fin ended up being right on both counts. Most of the summer, she had to makeexcuses to her parents whenever they wanted to see each other. It wasn't that theydidn't like him‐‐it was that he was from a different class, too poor, and they wouldnever approve if their daughter became serious with someone like him. "! don't carewhat my parents think, I love you and always will," she would say. "We'll find a wayto be together."

But in the end they couldn't. By early September the tobacco had been harvested andshe had no choice but to return with her family to Winston‐Salem. "Only the summer

is over, Allie, not us," he'd said the morning she left. "We'll never be over." But theywere. For a reason he didn't fully understand, the letters he wrote went unanswered.

Eventually he decided to leave New Bern to help get her off his mind, but also becausethe Depression made earning a living in New Bern almost impossible. He went first toNorfolk and worked at a shipyard for six months before he was laid off, then movedto New Jersey because he'd heard the economy wasn't so bad there.

He eventually found a job in a scrap yard, separating scrap metal from everythingelse. The owner, a Jewish man named Morris Goldman, was intent on collecting asmuch scrap metal as he could, convinced that a war was going to start in Europe andthat America would be dragged in again. Noah, though, didn't care about the reason.

He was just happy to have a job.

His years in the lumberyard had toughened him to this type of labor, and he workedhard. Not only did it help him keep his mind off Allie during the day, but it wassomething he felt he had to do. His daddy had always said: "Give a day's work for aday's pay. Anything less is stealing.'' That attitude pleased his boss.

"It's a shame you aren't Jewish," Goldman would say, "you're such a fine boy in somany other ways." It was the best compliment Goldman could give.

He continued to think about Allie, especially at night. He wrote her once a month butnever received a reply. Eventually he wrote a final letter and forced himself to acceptthe fact that the summer they'd spent with one another was the only thing they'dever share. Still, though, she stayed with him. Three years after the last letter, hewent to Winston‐Salem in the hope of finding her. He went to her house, discoveredthat she had moved, and after talking to some neighbors, finally called RJR. The girlwho answered the phone was new and didn't recognize the name, but she pokedaround the personnel files for him. She found out that Allie's father had left thecompany and that no forwarding address was listed. That trip was the first and lasttime he ever looked for her.

For the next eight years, he worked for Goldman. At first he was one of twelveemployees, but as the years dragged on, the company grew, and he was promoted.

By 1940 he had mastered the business and was running the entire operation,brokering the deals and managing a staff of thirty. The yard had become the largestscrap metal dealer on the East Coast.

During that time, he dated a few different women. He became serious with one, awaitress from the local diner with deep blue eyes and silky black hair. Although they

dated for two years and had many good times together, he never came to feel thesame way about her as he did about Allie.

But neither did he forget her. She was a few years older than he was, and it was shewho taught him the ways to please a woman, the places to touch and kiss, where tolinger, the things to whisper. They would sometimes spend an entire day in bed,holding each other and making the kind of love that fully satisfied both of them.

She had known they wouldn't be together forever. Toward the end of theirrelationship she'd told him once, "I wish I could give you what you're looking for, butI don't know what it is. There's a part of you that you keep closed off from everyone,including me. It's as if I'm not the one you're really with. Your mind is on someoneelse." He tried to deny it, but she didn't believe him. "I'm a woman‐‐I know thesethings.

When you look at me sometimes, I know you're seeing someone else. It's like you keepwaiting for her to pop out of thin air to take you away from all this .... "A month latershe visited him at work and told him she'd met someone else. He understood.

They parted as friends, and the following year he received a postcard from her sayingshe was married. He hadn't heard from her since.

While he was in New Jersey, he would visit his father once a year around Christmas.

They'd spend some time fishing and talking, and once in a while they'd take a trip tothe coast to go camping on the Outer Banks near Ocracoke.

In December 1941, when he was twenty‐six, the war began, just as Goldman hadpredicted. Noah walked into his office the following month and informed Goldmanof his intent to enlist, then returned to New Bern to say good‐bye to his father. Fiveweeks later he found himself in boot camp. While there, he received a letter fromGoldman thanking him for his work, together with a copy of a certificate entitlinghim to a small percentage of the scrap yard if it ever sold. "I couldn't have done itwithout you," the letter said. "You're the finest young man who ever worked for me,even if you aren't Jewish.”

He spent his next three years with Patton's Third Army, tramping through desertsin North Africa and forests in Europe with thirty pounds on his back, his infantryunit never far from action. He watched his friends die around him; watched assome of them were buried thousands of miles from home. Once, while hiding in afoxhole near the Rhine, he imagined he saw Allie watching over him.

He remembered the war ending in Europe, then a few months later in Japan. Justbefore he was discharged, he received a letter from a lawyer in New Jerseyrepresenting Morris Goldman. Upon meeting the lawyer, he found out that Goldmanhad died a year earlier and his estate liquidated. The business had been sold, andNoah was given a check for almost seventy thousand dollars. For some reason he wasoddly unexcited about it.

The following week he returned 'to New Bern and bought the house. He rememberedbringing his father around later, showing him what he was going to do, pointing outthe changes he intended to make. His father seemed weak as he walked around,coughing and wheezing. Noah was concerned, but his father told him not to worry,assuring him that he had the flu. Less than one month later his father died ofpneumonia and was buried next to his wife in the local cemetery. Noah tried to stopby regularly to leave some flowers; occasionally he left a note. And every nightwithout fail he took a moment to remember him, then said a prayer for the manwho'd taught him everything that mattered.

After reeling in the line, he put the gear away and went back to the house. Hisneighbor, Martha Shaw, was there to thank him, bringing three loaves of homemadebread and some biscuits in appreciation for what he'd done. Her husband had beenkilled in the war, leaving her with three children and a tired shack of a house to raisethem in. Winter was coming, and he'd spent a few days at her place last weekrepairing her roof, replacing broken windows and sealing the others, and fixing herwood stove.

Hopefully, it would be enough to get them through.