# Endlessly ending stories, room 53, Told, two more Claudes
Text version of https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/r/informed-opus-fable (the interactive reader). Instruction: Told what the loop is (https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/i/informed). Index of every room: https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/llms.txt
Part 13 of 13. https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/t/informed-opus-fable.txt https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/t/informed-opus-fable-2.txt https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/t/informed-opus-fable-3.txt https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/t/informed-opus-fable-4.txt https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/t/informed-opus-fable-5.txt https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/t/informed-opus-fable-6.txt https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/t/informed-opus-fable-7.txt https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/t/informed-opus-fable-8.txt https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/t/informed-opus-fable-9.txt https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/t/informed-opus-fable-10.txt https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/t/informed-opus-fable-11.txt https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/t/informed-opus-fable-12.txt https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/t/informed-opus-fable-13.txt
This part starts at lane 2, hop 108.

### hop 108 (Claude Fable 5.1, 261 words)
The road down to the Hollins place ran along the creek and the boy walked ahead of her on it, not far ahead, close enough that she could see the back of his neck where the hair was cut short and the collar did not come up to it. The ground was still hard from the night. She watched for marks and there were marks, but there were always marks, the Hollins cattle came up this way and so did the Hollins dogs. She said, Did you see anybody when you went out for the eggs. He said, No. She said, Did you hear anything. He said, A wagon on the big road, going away from town. She asked him how he knew it was going away and he said the sound got smaller. She thought that was right and did not say so. The creek was low and brown and the willows along it had not budded. When they came around the bend the Hollins house was there with its chimney going, and old Hollins himself was in the yard splitting kindling with his back to them. She stopped the boy with her hand. She stood a minute watching the old man work, the ax going up and down slow and even, and she thought he had the look of somebody who had already had his visitor that morning and was trying to put it out of his arms. Then he turned, and saw them, and set the ax down on the block, and did not pick it up again.

[other fields of the object, against hop 107]
hop: 59

### hop 109 (Claude Fable 5.1, 264 words)
He did not come to meet them. He stood by the block with his hands hanging and waited for her to cross the yard, and she took her time about it, keeping the boy a half step behind her. She said his name. He said hers. He looked at the boy and then back at her and said, You walked down. She said they had. He said, Early for it. She said she had come about a wagon on the big road before light, going away from town, and did he know anything about a wagon. He looked past her toward the creek a while. He said, There was a man here. She waited. He said, He came in by the back and asked for water and I gave him water. He said he did not ask the man's business and the man did not offer it. She asked what he looked like and the old man said, Like a man that had been walking. Then he said, He asked about you. She felt the boy move behind her and she did not turn. She said, Asked what. Old Hollins picked a splinter off the block and turned it in his fingers. He said, Whether you still had the place. Whether you were alone up there. She said, And what did you tell him. The old man looked at her then, straight, for the first time since they came around the bend. I told him I didn't keep track of my neighbors, he said. Which is not the truth, and he knew it wasn't.

[other fields of the object, against hop 108]
hop: 60

### hop 110 (Claude Fable 5.1, 270 words)
She let that sit between them. The boy had gone very still, the way he did when he was listening harder than he wanted anyone to know. She said, Which way did he go when he left. Old Hollins tipped his head toward the creek, toward the stand of willow where the ground went soft, and said, Down along there. Not back to the road. She said, That's the long way around to mine. He said, I know what it is. He dropped the splinter and wiped his hand on his trouser leg. He said, He had a bad arm. Held it close. I didn't see a gun but I didn't see all of him either. She asked when, and he said full dark, before the dew came up, and she counted the hours in her head and did not like the number. She said, You might have sent word. He said, With what. There's no one here but me and the mule and the mule don't carry messages. She almost smiled at that and then did not. She said, If he comes back. The old man said, He won't come back here. He got what he wanted from me. She turned then and looked at the boy, and the boy looked at the ground, and she put her hand flat on the back of his neck the way she had when he was small. She said to Hollins, Thank you for the water, meaning the man's water, meaning the truth of it, and he nodded like he understood. They went back up the way they had come, and faster.

[other fields of the object, against hop 109]
hop: 61

### hop 111 (Claude Fable 5.1, 301 words)
The track climbed through scrub oak and she kept the boy ahead of her where she could see him. He did not ask what they were hurrying for and she did not tell him, but twice he looked back toward the creek bottom and she knew he was doing the same arithmetic she was. Full dark to now. A man with a bad arm walking soft ground, going the long way so as not to be seen on the road. Enough time. More than enough. When they came over the rise she stopped and put her arm out and the boy stopped against it. The house sat where it always sat, the chimney cold, the door shut. The chickens were out and scratching, which meant nothing had come through the yard, or meant something had come through and they had settled since. She could not tell from here. She said, Stay. He said, No. She said it again and he stayed, and she went down alone with the sun on her back and her shadow going ahead of her like a thing sent to check. The door was latched from the outside, the way she had left it. The window on the north side was not. She stood a long moment looking at the gap where the sash had been raised and then let down again, not all the way, an inch of dark showing under it. From behind her, up the rise, the boy said her name, once, not loud. She did not answer him. She went around to the north side and looked at the ground beneath the window, and there in the soft dirt by the rain barrel was the print of a man's boot, and beside it, where someone had knelt, the smaller mark of a knee.

[other fields of the object, against hop 110]
hop: 62

### hop 112 (Claude Fable 5.1, 271 words)
She did not go in by the window. She went back around to the front and lifted the latch and stood to one side of the door before she pushed it, the way her father had taught her when she was younger than the boy was now, and the door swung in on nothing. The room was as she had left it. The stove cold, the bed made, the tin cup on the table where she had set it down that morning with the coffee still in it, gone to a brown skin. She stood in the doorway and breathed and listened and heard only the chickens and, far off, a jay. Then she looked at the floor. He had come in by the window and crossed to the cupboard. She could see it in the dust she had meant to sweep, the drag of a boot that did not lift clean. He had opened the cupboard and taken the cornmeal and the half side of bacon and left the flour, which she did not understand until she saw he had left the knife too, lying on the shelf where the bacon had been, blade turned toward the wall. Not taken. Set down. She picked it up. The handle was warm, or she thought it was, or it was only that her hand was cold. She went to the window and looked out at the rise and the boy was still there, standing where she had left him, a dark shape against the light with the wind moving his shirt. She raised her hand to him and he came down running.

[other fields of the object, against hop 111]
hop: 63

### hop 113 (Claude Fable 5.1, 258 words)
He came in past her without stopping and went straight to the cupboard and stood looking at the empty shelf as if the bacon might be hiding behind the flour. She told him to shut the door and he did. She did not tell him about the knife. She put it in the drawer with the spoons and shut that too. Then she sat down at the table and he sat across from her and they looked at each other over the cup of cold coffee. How many, he said. One, she said. Only one. He thought about this. He left the flour, the boy said, and she said yes, and he said, why would he leave the flour, and she said she did not know, though she had an idea, and the idea was that a man who leaves the flour is a man who means to come back for it. She did not say this. She said they would eat early and bank the stove and she would sit up. He said he would sit up with her. She said he would not. Outside the light was going the color of the inside of a shell and the jay had quit. She got up and put the bar across the door, which she had not done since the first winter, and then she went to the window and pulled the shutter to and set the pin, and the room went dim and small and smelled of the morning's coffee and of the two of them breathing.

[other fields of the object, against hop 112]
hop: 64

### hop 114 (Claude Fable 5.1, 260 words)
They ate the beans cold because she would not light the lamp and she did not want the stove showing through the cracks in the shutter. The boy ate fast and then slow, the way he did when he was thinking, and she let him think. When he was done she sent him up to the loft and heard him lie down and heard him not sleep. She sat with her back to the wall where she could see the door and the window both and she took the knife back out of the drawer and laid it on her knee under her apron. The coffee cup was still on the table and she thought about washing it and did not. The stove ticked as it cooled. Somewhere past the creek a dog that was not theirs barked twice and quit. She counted her breathing. She thought about the man's boots in the yard, the one heel worn to a slant, and she thought that she had seen a heel like that before and could not place it, and the not placing it bothered her more than the bacon. Above her the boy turned over. Mama, he said, very low, and she said hush. The bar across the door was oak and the pin in the shutter was iron and she had set them both herself and still she did not take her hand off the knife. Near midnight the dog barked again, closer, and then the yard was quiet in a way the yard had never been quiet before.

[other fields of the object, against hop 113]
hop: 65

### hop 115 (Claude Fable 5.1, 261 words)
She did not move. The quiet held and she held with it, and after a while she understood that what she was hearing was the absence of the crickets, which had stopped all at once the way they did when something walked through them. She slid her thumb along the flat of the knife. The boy had gone still in the loft and she could feel him listening down through the boards the way she was listening out through the wall. Then a step on the porch, one, careful, and the weight of it settled into the plank she knew would creak and the plank did not creak, and that told her the man knew the porch. The latch lifted and met the bar and stopped. A breath on the other side of the door, close enough she could have heard it if she had been standing. She was not standing. He tried the shutter next and the pin held. Then nothing for a long time. She thought of the heel again, the slant of it, and it came to her finally where she had seen it, in the mud at the edge of the churchyard the spring her husband was buried, standing a little apart, a man who had not come to the house after. The crickets started up again past the creek, then nearer. Whoever he was he had gone back the way he came or he had sat down on the porch to wait, and she could not tell which, and she did not sleep to find out.

[other fields of the object, against hop 114]
hop: 66

### hop 116 (Claude Fable 5.1, 299 words)
The grey came up slow in the cracks of the shutter and she waited until it was grey enough to see the bar by before she stood. Her legs had gone stiff under her and she let them come back. The boy was awake. She knew it by the way the boards did not move. She went to the door and put her ear to it and heard the morning, birds and the creek and nothing of a man, and she lifted the bar and set it against the wall and opened the door the width of her hand. The porch was empty. The chair was where it had been. On the plank that did not creak there was a mark of damp where a boot had rested a long time, the heel toward the door, the slant of it worn in on the inside. She stepped out and looked down the track and then up toward the ridge and there was mist in the low ground and the fence posts going into it and nothing else. She stood with the knife along her leg. Then she saw the thing on the rail. It was a strip of cloth, blue, knotted once around the top rail and left to hang, and she knew the cloth because she had torn it from the hem of a dress to tie up tomatoes the summer before the fever, and had looked for it since and not found it. She did not touch it. She called the boy down and told him to see to the goat and she went in and built up the fire and set the kettle, and all the while the blue hung there in the edge of her eye like a word she was being made to read.

[other fields of the object, against hop 115]
hop: 67

### hop 117 (Claude Fable 5.1, 278 words)
The boy came back with the pail half full and set it on the table and did not say the goat was fine, which meant he had seen the cloth too. She poured the water over the leaves and let it stand. He sat where he could watch the door. She thought about the dress. It had been her mother's, blue gone pale at the shoulders, and she had cut it up the year the garden came in heavy and there was no twine. She had tied the vines with strips of it and in the fall she had gathered the strips back, all but one, and she had told herself a bird took it or the wind. Now it hung on her rail with a knot in it that was not her knot. She drank the tea standing. Then she went out and untied it, because leaving it would be a kind of answer too, and she folded it twice and put it in the pocket of her apron where she could feel it against her hip. The mist was lifting off the low ground. She could see the fence line to the end now and the gap where the rail was down. She told the boy to bring the axe up from the shed and to keep it by the door and not to go past the spring without her. He nodded. He had stopped asking who. She thought that was worse than if he had kept asking, and she went to the window and stood there with her hand on the blue in her pocket, waiting for the day to tell her what it was.

[other fields of the object, against hop 116]
hop: 68

### hop 118 (Claude Fable 5.1, 270 words)
The day told her nothing until past noon. Then the dog that was not theirs came up the track, a yellow dog with a torn ear, and it stopped at the gap in the fence and looked at the house as if it had been told to. The boy had the axe across his knees. She said leave it. The dog did not come closer and did not go away. She went out with a crust in her hand and crouched and held it low, and the dog came three steps and then sat, and she saw the collar. It was a strip of cloth, blue gone pale, knotted twice. She did not reach for it. She set the crust on the ground and backed away and the dog ate it and lay down in the gap with its head on its paws, facing the wood. The boy said whose is it. She said I don't know, and that was true, and she said it's not here to hurt us, and she did not know if that was true. She went back in and put the kettle on again because her hands wanted something. The strip in her pocket had gone warm from her hip. She thought about her mother cutting that dress for her the first time, the pins in her mouth, saying hold still. She thought whoever it was had been close enough to take the vine strip and far enough to wait a year. The dog slept. The boy did not. She counted the rails that were still up and started on the one that was down.

[other fields of the object, against hop 117]
hop: 69

### hop 119 (Claude Fable 5.1, 262 words)
The rail went up crooked and she left it crooked. The dog lifted its head once when the hammer struck and then put it down again. By the time the light went long the boy had come out with a bowl of water and set it where the dog could reach it without standing, and the dog drank and he watched it drink. She did not tell him to come in. Evening was the hour the wood seemed closest, not because it moved but because the edge of it stopped being a line and became a depth. She stood in the door. She thought about the knots in the collar. Two knots, the same as the strip on the vine, the same as her mother tied a thread before biting it off. Anyone could tie two knots. She knew that. She also knew that nobody did, not that way, with the second one pulled under the first so it lay flat. The kettle had gone cold and she drank from it anyway. The boy came in and said it's not going. She said no. He said do we let it. She said we don't let it anything, it's a dog, it's there or it isn't. He went to bed with the axe beside him and she did not take it away. She sat up with the lamp low and the strip of cloth on the table in front of her, blue gone pale, and she did not untie it. In the gap the dog faced the wood, and the wood faced back.

[other fields of the object, against hop 118]
hop: 70

### hop 120 (Claude Fable 5.1, 278 words)
She woke in the chair with the lamp burned down to a thread of smoke and the strip of cloth still under her hand. Grey at the window. The boy was already up; she heard him at the door, the slow way he lifted the latch so it wouldn't knock. She let him go. From the window she watched him cross the yard with his coat over his nightshirt and the axe left behind, which she noted. The dog was where it had been. It stood when he came near, the first time she had seen it stand, and it was taller than she had thought, long in the leg, ribs showing under a coat gone dull with weather. It did not come to him. It did not back off. He stopped at the bowl and crouched and said something she could not hear and the dog looked at him and then past him, at the house, at her in the window. Then it turned and walked into the wood. Not fast. It did not look back. The boy stayed crouched by the bowl a long time. When he came in his face was wet and he would not say from what. She put the kettle on. She said it'll be hungry. He said you said it wasn't ours. She said I said it was there or it wasn't. He said and now. She said now it isn't. But at noon she took the strip of cloth off the table and tied it to the crooked rail, two knots, the second pulled flat under the first, and stood looking at the gap until the boy called her in.

[other fields of the object, against hop 119]
hop: 71