I found George on his stoop, naked as the day he was born. The breeze was balmy and fragrant with the mineral scent of damp earth, each gust sending cascades of little droplets tumbling from the maple at the foot of the drive. He was hunched over the low table looking like an old oak stump with his tanned hide hanging in folds over his bony frame the way tree flesh might sag over a loop of biting wire.

 “Lose at cards George?” I called out to him when I was within earshot, unable to help myself smiling at the scene, at his nakedness, the clear bright sun and the rain and the good things it meant for us out here. He didn’t hear me so I sidled up to the porch and attempted a nonchalant pose, leant against one post. “Some storm,” I said, “Lord knows we needed it”. He grunted, peaceably, and so I continued: “Caught you out in the field huh?”

“Fetching the mail,” he said.

“The mail?” I said, my eyes widening as the scene fell into place. “Oh! It’s come then?”

“Sure, it’s come.”

“Well shit, George, tell me! What’s the news? How’s your boy?”

“Come see for yourself,” he said, gesturing at the chair opposite him.

See, since George’s boy had left he’d been waiting on a letter. Just something to let him know the kid was alive and that he’d done OK as a father, and the poor old fool had been wasting away waiting for years now, although he’d never say as much. Now me and George go way back. We’ve been through a lot together, and I guess a part of me had been wasting away just the same, so when I saw the sheaf of letters laid out in front of him, delicately spaced so as no one sheet was touching the other, that part of me just about died, because the rain had ruined them.

They must have come in one of those airmail envelopes with the red and blue candy stripes because along the border of each sheet was a purple smear, fading on the inner sheets to the pale indigo that the sky sometimes gets to of an evening. Some of the pages were really pulped and illegible whilst the lilac sheets were just sodden, the ink all carved up by the runnels of rainwater so as only little islands of script remained and I knew at a glance that they would read like a half remembered dream.

“Oh George,” I said, “I’m sorry buddy,” and to my surprise he propped his grizzled head on my shoulder and wept, naked and leathery as some awful baby. I didn’t mind, it was nothing I hadn’t seen before. When he was done there were two wet spots on my shoulder, like I’d been standing beneath a gutter in need of mending and, thinking how what was good for the crops and the soil and the trees had just about ruined us, I said “I’ll go fetch us a drink”.

We spent the afternoon poring through those letters, piecing together what we could. If the boy had written of anything meaningful, it was all lost. We read a little of the town he was living in, of a friend of his who he seemed sweet on, of jazz music that we didn’t much understand, and some pretty radical politics that we understood even less. George spoke erratically, especially when the rum got lower in the bottle, about his wife, and the boy, and how he’d had to explain it to him when she died and something about the roles being reversed now. I think he was getting at the irony of it all, how he’d once explained death to a boy too young to spell his name and now, all these years later, he’d been hoping that the boy could explain life to a man too old to understand it. But I don’t want to put words in his mouth.

Really, the evening turned out fine, with us drinking and the sun low and pink in the sky where the clouds were whipped into a fine violet lace and George looking more dignified in an old sweater. “What’s next? For you I mean” I asked him. He sighed and sat there a while, saying nothing whilst on the hills little green shoots were coming up anew, gleaming like jewels in a crown of dry yellow gold.