A Vocation and a Voice

A boy who has run off with two vagabonds learns the roads and the campfires and Suzima's singing, then takes his vows and sets himself to building the wall around the enclosure, stone on stone, higher than a man, until her voice comes over it one afternoon and he goes. The stories Chopin gathered here are all that vault: people who look hard at the life laid out for them and step clean off it.