They talked until three in the morning, the two of them, in the kitchen, with the stove ticking and the calf, which Arne had brought in after midnight because it was shivering, asleep on a pile of feed sacks by the woodbox with Fly curled against its back.
Albin told him the rest. That he had walked over on the fence line because the phones were out and he knew the snow would be wet and he knew what the beam looked like. That he had found Notch down in the alley and turned wrong, and the lantern had been smashed when the loft came down, and after that he had worked in the dark for an hour by feel, and called out for help twice and heard nothing back but the wind. That it was Dieter who had painted the door. That he had found the can in the boy's pickup the next morning and had driven him to Mullen to turn himself in to Ed Vlasak, and Ed had sat the boy down and told them both that Arne Tolstad had already said he didn't know who'd done it, and there was nothing to charge; and Albin had understood that Arne knew perfectly well, and had been ashamed for his son and for himself, and had not known what to do with it.
"I should have made him come out here," Albin said. "And paint it out himself. I didn't. I let you do it. I was glad you had to. That's the truth." He looked at his hands. "You want to know how I felt on those steps, Arne. That's how I felt. Glad. For about a month. And then I wasn't, and I didn't know what to do with that either."
Arne told him about Ardell Fenske, and the review, and the hay base. He told him about the passbook in his coat pocket and whose money it was. He told him about his father and the windmill, and it sounded so small said out loud in the kitchen at two in the morning that he could hardly stand to hear himself. Albin listened to all of it without saying a word.
"I don't know if I'd have done different," he said finally. "That's the hell of it. In your boots. With Fenske across the desk. I'd like to think I would. I don't know."
"I never thanked you," said Arne. "For Ilse."
Albin looked at him.
"For sitting with her. Two years, and I never said it. I couldn't. I've been mad at you for two years, Albin, because it was you there and not me. And I couldn't say that either."
Albin was quiet for a long time. The calf by the woodbox sighed in its sleep.