The Beginnings of a Story about Joseph

The beginnings of a story about Joseph. I don’t know where it’s headed. Perhaps I will sit down to continue it soon. But, for now, the rough sketches of an entry-point: 

Joseph was a fine man born in the latter part of spring. He was always working in the fields, growing wheat, until the time he was eighteen. At eighteen, he was called away to war and rode in a boat that carried him overseas and dropped him on shore many miles from home. He was a good soldier, tidy and loyal and not inclined to dispute. He simply did his job without remark and each night he came back to his bunk and fell into heavy and dreamless sleep. Sometimes, on Mondays, he wrote letters home, to his aunt and his uncle who raised him (for his parents had died when he was three years old). He wrote simple and affectionate lines, never filling more than a page or two, undramatically sending his love and relieving any fears that he was underfed or underslept, &c. &c. And then, at last, after many months—more than a year—the war tapered off to a few diffuse skirmishes and Joseph was sent home. He was nearly twenty by then and his aunt and his uncle, after making sure all his limbs were intact and his belly full of biscuits and cream, started to talk to him of marriage. Joseph, it happens, was a handsome, if solemn, man. His chin was cut clean and sure and his eyes were deep and brown. No one could pretend that his was an unattractive face; although, for some, its solemn expression marred the beauty and made it undesirable.

Joseph stayed mostly quiet through the whole affair. His aunt stuffed him with gossip about the girls from town—how they admired his curls, how they blushed when he walked into the post office to send some letters—and he would smile at his aunt obligingly, saying little. From time to time his uncle shot him a look of compassion, but he, too, had decided that marriage was the only happy fate for a young man. Joseph, always dutiful, nodded his head and did not protest.

One day, while Joseph was out in the fields (for he had returned to his old work of growing wheat), a great gust of wind blew across the earth.

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