He remembered that late one afternoon she led him to the front-room window because he had asked a question about the Bible: how Adam was created from the dust of the ground. I was six or seven. And she was about to give me proof. Her dress was brown and gray – thrush-colored. Her hair was thick and black, the gray already streaming through it. She had something to show me at the window. The light came up from the snow in the street, otherwise the day was dark. Each of the windows had colored borders – yellow, amber, red – and flaws and whorls in the cold panes. At the curbs were the thick brown poles of that time, many-barred at the top, with green glass insulators, and brown sparrows clustered on the crossbars that held up the iced, brown wires. Sarah Herzog opened her hand and said, “Look carefully, now, and you’ll see what Adam was made of.” She rubbed the palm of her hand with a finger, rubbed until something dark appeared on the deep-lined skin, a particle of what certainly looked to him like earth. “You see? It’s true.”