Circle of Three by Patricia Gaffney Page B

rough as sandpaper, with big knobby bumps on the knuckles, it felt like holding an old sock full of stones.
    “Why, you do, too,” he said, “I’d’ve known you anywhere,” and turned red under his beard stubble. He had on work clothes, denim coveralls under a filthy beige wind-breaker, and clunky, mud-caked boots. “How long have you been back home?”
    “About three years now. We’re living on Leap Street, Ruth and I. We—I lost my husband in August, I don’t know if Jess told you.”
    “He surely did, and I was sorry as I could be.” His face got even more crinkled and wrinkly. “I know how it is.” How? How could he know how it is?
    “Thanks,” Mom said quickly. “Well, what’s all this?”
    As if we didn’t know. Jess told us all about it that time he came over and tried to get Mom to take the crazy ark job. This guy’s father, Eldon, used to be a tobacco farmer back in the 1970s, and he was fairly rich and also sort of a wild man, he played cards and drank a lot and ran around on his wife. Then he got stricken with lung cancer, which is pretty ironic, and on his deathbed he converted to religion because of a dream. He made God a promise, or more like a deal—if He would spare his life, he’d give up his sinful ways and start a new church based on the story of Noah. And to glorify the Lord he’d build an ark, fill it with animals, and sail it on the Leap River for forty days and forty nights. Well, sure enough, God spared his life, so he had to start a religion called the Arkists. But unfortunately for him, he never did get around to building the ark, and now he’s dying again, this time for real because he’s like eighty or something. So he got his son to say he’d do it for him because otherwise he’ll go straight to hell, and the only problem is that Landy’s bitten off more than he can chew because hardly any of the other Arkists are helping and time’s running out, which is where Jess was hoping Mom would come in. I think all these people are totally nuts.
    Landy started showing Mom his handiwork, which was pretty pitiful. “I’ve only done four so far,” he said, dragging boards or something out from under another sawhorse, these flat wooden shapes painted brown, gray, and yellow. If you looked hard, you could tell the gray one was an elephant and the yellow one was a giraffe, but the two brown ones could’ve been anything.
    “Bears, right?” I guessed.
    His shoulders drooped. “This one is. That one’s a kangaroo.”
    “Oh, yeah. Very nice,” I said politely. “But don’t you have to make two of everything?”
    He ducked his head and rubbed the back of his neck and mumbled.
    “Pardon?”
    “Uh, that’s under discussion. Hoping to get around that. Still debating.”
    “Landy, how’s your father?” Mom asked.
    “Not too well. Heart trouble. He’s weakening every day.”
    “I’m so sorry. Is your mother still living?”
    “Yes, she is. Yes, she is.”
    A man of few words. I looked around for something to do. This part of the barn was Jess’s workshop, cluttered with tools and pieces of machinery and workbenches and different kinds of saws. Power saws, lots of them—so why was Landy using a handsaw? For that matter, why was he using Jess’s barn, why not his own? He supposedly lived next door. “Are you also building the ark?” I asked.
    “Ha,” he said, and did the head ducking thing again. He was either really shy or not all there.
    Jess said, “That’s still on the drawing board,” and he said it so straight and firm, so matter-of-fact or something, it was like, well, at least there’s one completely sane person here. “In fact, it’s literally on the drawing board. Come and look.”
    We went over to one of the workbenches, where there was a big sheet of drafting paper with a drawing of an ark on it. It had the pointy ends and the flat-roofed box on top like you always see in pictures of arks. I had a lunch box in third grade with an ark and all the