It’s a kind of light a certain type of person can just about taste, almost like you could stick a butter knife in it and spread it on your toast if you wanted to.   As she snips a stem and drops it into the dark water, she raises her face to the light, narrows her eyes, and draws a deep breath of it.   There’s a smell coming in, too, the sweet, septic odor of farmland on a spring day.  All of it, mixed together with the dull clap of tin feeder lids as the animals nose at them, along with the sound of the air itself -- alive with just-born creatures -- might, if you were a certain type of person, make the world seem like God’s own dream of love.

         “We’ve had it.  I’m telling you.  We’re done,”  the old man says, and it’s as though he’s been predicting just this for years. 

         His wife isn’t really listening.  She takes another breath, blinking in the light.  She’s the same age as he is, but she seems younger, with better color in her cheeks and quick, plump limbs.  She goes on with what she’s doing for a few seconds: then, as though she’s suddenly heard him, she looks up from her work and waves him off.  “Oh hush.  You said yourself it’s been a wet spring.  You’re just picking.  Why don’t you just go sit down somewhere.  It’s nice on the screen porch.  Go sit on the davenport.  You can see the whole field from out there.”

         “I don’t need to see the whole field.”

         She shrugs.  Scowling, he lets go of the chair and steps toward the window, catching his foot on the chair leg and stumbling.  She winces and starts to move to grab him, but he lands safely, clutching the edge of the sink.  She gathers herself back up, pats at her housedress, picks up another stem, and snips two inches off the bottom.  She shakes her head.

         “Boy, you’ll bust a gut yet.  Why don’t you just sit down.”

         He’s been ignoring her advice for months.  Sure, he’s had a few close calls.  Every step he takes lately is a close call, truth be told, falling from one object to another, stumbling and slipping and constantly having to re-figure his trajectory, like he’s being pushed around by a personal detachment of disagreeable winds. 

         “I’d better get out there,” he says.  His eyes threaten toward the mudroom, where his collection of hats and overalls has spent the long winter idle, hung up on parallel rows of iron hooks, like a group of sleepy workmen in a union hall waiting for their names to be called.

          She gives him a level look.  “Don’t you dare, William Josiah.  Don’t you dare.  Lord help me, I’ll call out the ambulance crew if you set one foot on the other side of that door.  I’ll do it.  Besides, John needs you to have a little faith in him.”

         “I don’t,” he says, pounding a shaky fist on the kitchen counter. But he doesn’t go outside.  He turns his head, setting his jaw, and looks out the window again. 

         “I don’t know how you can walk into that grain elevator and yuck it up with those toothless old coots,” Helen says, “then turn around and treat your own son like pure trash.”

         Joe doesn’t say a thing.

               The time is April 1966.  The thing that happened to him, the piece of bad luck that’s left him in this predicament, happened back in November, a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving 1965.  William Josiah McCullough is the man’s name, called Joe by those that know him, “Old Joe” by those that know him less, and “Old Fella” by those that don’t know him at all. 

On that November day, he’d been up on his barn, patching holes in the tin roof.  He’d been meaning get to it  for some time, but a phalanx of warm summer weather had pushed its way so far into the autumn that any urgency had just died in him.

         October came, and he still left the barn undone.  Even when the leaves began to change and the nights got cooler, the days kept on warm and bright.  He knew, in the back of his mind, that there were holes in the barn roof – there always seemed to be – but with a half dozen well-placed buckets, he’d managed all summer to keep the hay dry when it rained.  A full week into November, he marveled that there were bees and flies still buzzing around the compost heap. They moved more and more slowly, like toys winding down, but they were moving just the same, exploring new territory on the calendar.   

         It was on the fifteenth that the 5:00 a.m. forecast, out of nowhere, warned that a heavy snow was on the way, sometime before noon.  When he heard this, he stood up with his dish of rolled oats, holding the spoon pointed at the radio, daring the voice to go on.   The weatherman said there was the possibility of a few warmer hours late in the day, after which the evening chill might just turn the whole mess back to ice.  That was enough for him.  He pushed open the door, pulling on his coat, his old heart pounding. 

Ice was coming.  Ice.  Rain was one thing, even snow could be dealt with, if you knew what to do; but ice was something different.  It would widen what holes were already there and sneak into gaps in the roof that hadn’t been there before and open them up.  Then, when it melted – which it was sure to do, early as it was – there wouldn’t be enough buckets in a bucket factory to keep his hay dry.  Much of the hay would rot, which would mean buying feed for the stock all that winter.  This was something he just plain couldn’t do.  He’d been stupid, just plain stupid.  In the grassy part outside the mudroom, Joe scraped the remains of his breakfast into a couple of old pie tins Helen always put out for the barn cats, and by 5:03 or so he was wading through their sidling carcasses back toward the barn.   

He spent that morning cutting pieces of tin to fit what holes he could see and tamping the rest of it down flat with a heavy, rubber mallet.  This left the stock (mostly hogs, but some sheep and a few dairy cows) without their morning feed, and by 6:30 they were crying like noisy babies, nosing and banging at their feeders.  To top it off, once he got up on the roof, the situation turned out to be even worse than he’d remembered.  His heart beat fast, struggling to keep time with and then to race ahead of the thrumming rhythms of nature.

Every once in a while he’d look up.  And each time he did, the sky seemed to have dipped down a little more.  There was no doubt: winter had arrived.  The air was getting close and gray, and it tasted more like the icy-moistness of coming snow by the minute. 

He never told anyone what had made him fall, he reckoned because he never really knew for sure himself.  Only Helen ever asked him, just once, and then he’d ignored her.  The truth was, even if somebody had put a gun to his head and demanded to know, he couldn’t have said much that had any sense in it; he could only have told them that something dark and silent and large had passed over him.  The thing was, there was something familiar about it, something he recognized: but it was too damn hard to grab onto and take a look at, like a word or a name on the tip of your tongue that just refuses to make itself known.

He jerked to look up at it as it passed, and his vision tunneled a little from looking up quick like that, and so he took a step to steady himself –

just a little one – and over he went. 

                  It’s eleven in the morning right now.  Joe stands in the same place he’s been standing all morning, at the kitchen sink, watching his son pass, distantly, through the frame of the window, pacing the tractor back and forth in the north field.  He’s been standing there for a long time now.  He’s not sure how long, half a day or thereabout.  Helen’s making lunch.

In a few minutes, his son’s wife appears in the kitchen.  It’s the first time he’s seen her all day.  She’s carrying her own son, Joe’s grandson, in her thin arms, and there’s a grass-stained quilt thrown over one shoulder.  The child, whose name is William, is dressed in a little pair of blue jeans, a white tee shirt, a tiny Cubs’ baseball hat, and little white booties.  Both mother and son are happy and flushed with the exertions of play.  The mother lifts the little boy up to her mouth like a slice of something good and blows on his belly.  The baby giggles like crazy. 

         Joe looks at this girl, his daughter-in-law.  Carol.  A Christmas song.  He doesn’t think it fits her.  It might’ve once, but not anymore.  She’d always had a delicate, blue-veined kind of prettiness that Joe silently predicted wouldn’t hold up under pressure.  He takes note, with a kind of satisfaction, of the dark rings swelling around her eyes, the slackness of flesh starting to show in the hollows of her face.  She seems happy all right, but she’s lost weight, and she’s got a face that needs some weight on it to look right.  Too narrow.  Little William, her son, is just under a year old, always kicking his feet and squirming and smiling. 

         The girl notices the silence she’s stumbled into and stifles her laughter and shushes the child.  She shoots her mother-in-law a weary smile.  She lays the quilt on the table, and lowers the baby into a high chair, then sets a few dried cherries from a mason jar on the tray.  Then she turns to them, and seeming to squeeze the words out, says, “Looks like it’s getting hot.”

         “Already?” Helen says, friendly, placing a dish in a cupboard.

         “What?” Joe says, jerking around to hear.  “What was that?”

         “I just said it’s getting hot, Dad,” she says again, a little bit louder, looking pained and glancing around like she might make a run for it.

         “You don’t have to yell,” he says.  “I’m not deaf.  I just don’t put much stock in what’s being said.”

         “Well, I -- ”

         “I don’t reckon it’s supposed to get too hot today.  It’s just April.  Doesn’t feel too bad in here.”

         “Well - ”

         “I didn’t hear anything on the five a.m. about it getting hot.”          

“I was out there,” she says, forcing her way back into the conversation, swallowing hard, her face red and her hands fluttering.   “The mercury said seventy-five already.”  She turns away quickly and busies herself with the child.     

         “What mercury?”

         “By the garage.  The true one.”

         He veers away from this, and instead points a finger at the quilt she’s brought in with her. “That there’s not a good quilt, is it?”

Helen clucks and shakes her head, frowning.  “Just ignore him, honey,” she says. “He’s in a mood today.  Nothing in this house is too good for you to use, however you see fit.”

“I figured it was okay,” Carol says quietly, nodding. 

“This is still my house,” he says into the air, like he’s talking to the house itself.  Then he turns away quicker than he should, and he has to clutch for a fresh handhold.  When he turns back to them, the women are both giving him a tired, worried look.  His grandson smiles up at him from his high chair, looking like he’s about to laugh. 

         “I’m fine,” he spits, but the women have turned away.  “I’m fine.”

      Just a half minute or so after he fell off the barn, he knew, once a painful, rasping ability to breathe returned, that although he was alive, he was not fine.  He wasn’t able to straighten himself out at all, even lying down, and any attempt made him convulse with nausea.  It was pretty clear something was smashed up in there; he just hoped it wasn’t anything too important.  The one thing he kept thinking through it all was that Helen was really going to let him have it.  She’d been on him to replace that roof with tar for years.  But Joe had always been the kind of man more inclined to rehabilitate than replace.  He’d been that way for as long as he could recollect.  It just suited him.  He felt like the things a man built – even if they were shabby little outbuildings – ought to be respected; an effort should be made to endow them with some kind of permanence.  The constant repair work gave him a pleasant sense of fortification; although against what, he couldn’t really say.  But warm satisfaction never failed to blossom in his chest with each strike of his hammer, with each swipe of his saw. 

He finally managed to get to his knees and force himself to his feet, gagging and groaning at the same time.  Even so, then there was the problem of walking.  The pain across his midsection felt like a burning, uneven scar where he’d been lopped in half and pinched back together like two lumps of clay.  Every step made him feel like he might fall in two pieces on the ground.  And it was a good fifty yards to the mudroom door. 

         When he reached the corner of the house, he stopped to lean against it and promptly threw up into a tangle of hibernal rosebushes.  The force of it nearly did him in.   Helen had planted the roses long ago, when their first son died.  Tommy.  That had been his name.  Tommy.  Joe hadn’t thought of the boy in a long, long time.  Or maybe it was truer to say that he tried to ignore the thoughts when he had them.  But as he knelt at the rosebushes, he was powerless to vanquish the child’s ghost.  Tommy appeared to him, clear as day, milk-skinned and rust-haired, smelling as clean and sweet as hope itself, standing in his crib with two pudgy arms in the air, pleading –

with a smile that stomped Joe’s heart – to be swept up into his Daddy’s arms.

Joe stared into the thick bramble for a minute or so, swaying lightly, watching the happy little ghost wander in his head.  Then he felt like a sink after the plug got pulled, and everything emptied out of him and his vision swam with translucent lights. They were tiny things that looked a little like pictures he’d seen in Life magazine of microscopic creatures.  His vision began to tunnel.  He felt something pulling down on him.  In truth it was his own weight – but it felt like a stout man reaching up from beneath the ground and pulling, with tireless strength, at the straps of his overalls.   He went to his knees, and the only thing that kept him from curling up in the dry grass then and there was the sight of fat drops of blood in his own vomit.  When he saw the red-speckled mess close up, fear roused him, and he pushed himself away from darkness and toward the mudroom door, twenty or so feet away. 

He made it, then collapsed across the threshold.  For a moment, he heard Helen clattering around in the kitchen a few feet away, making lunch.  The second the warm air of the house and the smell of food hit him, the tiny insects swarmed again, this time so thickly that his vision went black. 

Helen must have heard him hit the floor, because the next thing he knew he was moving fast, bouncing painfully along the rutted dirt roads, a blur of stern faces and uniformed activity over him.  He heard the words “ruptured spleen” and “surgery.”  It seemed like time had speeded up, stampeding, forcing everyone around him to fling themselves in all sorts of foolish, ill-considered directions.  Then there was a wave of ridiculous pain and black sleep pulled him under like quicksand again.

In that sleep, he dreamed.  Things were mixed up in that way dreams are: for one thing, he had somehow fallen on the opposite side of the barn, in back of it, near where he kept the compost.  He wasn’t in pain, but he couldn’t move.  He knew he’d never make it to the house, but he was wishing that he’d just fallen in front, so somebody might find him and he could live just a little while longer. 

Paralyzed, he watched the compost rot a few feet from his face.  An army of insects and worms moved over it with lightning speed.   Somewhere near, he heard happy voices, and once in a while saw a small foot flit through his field of vision; but more than anything, he heard little footfalls, vibrating up through the dirt like heartbeats. 

Life was continuing around him, then over him.  At one point, his dead son Tommy toddled around him, giggling.   Then the child toppled over in a sickeningly familiar way and turned into a child-shaped mound of earth, which looked less and less like a child the more he looked at it.  It occurred to him that this might be what he looked like, too.  He would never know.  Toward the end of the dream, a crow fluttered down and stood on his neck, or at any rate, the place where his neck would’ve been: a large, ugly fellow; oily and blue-black; with a  gaping, grinning rictus and an even-blacker, knife-like tongue lolling in it.  He leaned over and just cocked his head and looked at Joe and sang in a clear, high, tuneless tenor,  “There once was a man who lived on the ground, off the ground, in it….”

He woke up breathing quick, painful breaths.  He wasn’t able to move.  Terrified, he blinked hard and slow and looked around by moving his eyeballs, but he couldn’t really see anything.  How long?  Was it night?  Or was it only dark in his head?  After a time, he became aware of dull, throbbing pains at various places across his body.  His body seemed much larger than normal, too, stretched out like endless plains,  covered by a great sheet of slowly melting ice.  His pains were like burning cities, glowing underneath, melting the ice above.  Hours and hours went by. He tried a few times to move; but when he did, the fires were stoked.  They raged, shooting flames of pain through the ice.  He figured out after a bit that the ice was morphine, or something like it, and he decided to stay still, to allow the ice to cover him as long as possible.  He moved his eyes in his head more and saw a glass jar hanging from a hook, and tubes leading down from it. 

         About that time, Doc Rifner showed up in his hospital room.  His wavy pile of white hair made him look like he might have been a little bit of a dandy before a close look at his rugged face showed that he never had been, never would be.  Doc walked over to the window and pulled on the cord, rolling up the blind and letting some light in.  Low, slanting light.  Morning light.  The next day.  Rifner smiled at Joe and looked him over.   

When Joe found he had the ability to speak, he asked Doc about the storm.  It had all turned out just fine, Doc assured him tiredly; in the end it hadn’t amounted to much.  The predicted warm hours that would have melted the snow before it turned cold again hadn’t come, and as a result the hay had only gotten damp in one or two little places.  John, Joe’s surviving son, had driven out from town with a few co-workers and had finished the job of patching the roof in an hour or two, then had simply fed the small amount of sodden hay to some of the stock before it got moldy.

Joe just nodded.  It shook him a little that it had all come to nothing, and that he’d been left like this for nothing, but Doc Rifner pushed the topic aside. He told Joe straight out that if he hadn’t made it to that mudroom, he would surely be dead.  After a few seconds of allowing that to sink in, he pressed on.  He told Joe that he was going to have a lot of trouble, a man his age, working that piece of land alone now, and wouldn’t this be as good a time as any to start thinking about accepting a little bit of help, finally?  Joe flushed, and said, “That’s a hell of a bedside manner you’ve got there, Howard, pretty near the worst I’ve seen.” 

At this, Doc’s face softened and lost its hard focus; his duty was done, and he knew better than to push.   He leaned back and laced his hands behind his head.

“Well, you haven’t seen much bedside manner.  That’s sure.  I don’t remember you being laid up once since I’ve known you.  And that’s been a while.  So I’ll take some solace from that.  I figured you’d want to know you were lucky, just in case you didn’t.  That’s all.”

Rifner took a few of his vital signs and walked out.  In the quiet, Joe lay there and looked at the clouds outside his window, and he understood that the icy hand of death had rested on his shoulder.  He could still feel it there.  He wanted like hell to toss the sheets and blanket off his legs, leap out of bed, and run all the way home – just to feel the cold air on his face and the heft of some tool, any tool, in his hands.

It was six more miserable, painful weeks before he was finally released.  Winter, it seemed, had set in for the duration while he’d been laid up.  He’d missed Thanksgiving, the only holiday he had any use for, and had suffered through the hospital’s miserable fare of turkey roll and soupy mashed potatoes.  He’d found it all gloomy as hell: watching the staff stringing up Christmas lights unevenly around the nurses’ station and sick children taping dirty construction paper snowflakes to all the doors.  Tinny carols played over the PA; still, the place smelled like ammonia and vomit.  When his son John came to take him home, he was actually happy to see the boy for once.  But the feeling was quickly replaced with more familiar ones of frustration, disappointment, and contempt.  First the boy gave him pain with his clumsy handling of the wheelchair; then, when he was still writhing, Joe couldn’t help but blame the molasses pace of his release on what he’d always seen as his boy’s total incompetence in the world of men.

      Lunch has begun; the women and the child are eating.  Joe, although he’s not hungry and won’t eat, still hasn’t left the kitchen.  He still won’t sit down.  He moves from sink to chair to table to counter, working his jaw, looking to the window.   He’s sure John’s going to find some way to screw it all up, if for no other reason than plain old spite.  That simple.  It was the perfect time to drive the final nail in the old man’s coffin.  Then again…yes, it’s late to be planting anything, very late, but it has been wet, and the boy’s made the decision to plow and cultivate and plant it all, all eighty acres, in two or three long days.  Joe can’t fault his reasoning; it’s what he would’ve done.  But it’s how he’s doing it, not what he’s doing, that Joe’s thinking about now.  Could the boy be that crafty?  The right thing in the wrong way?  When the boy finally comes in for noon dinner at 11:30, Joe starts in with him before John’s even salted his pork or buttered his bread. 

“You’ve got to clean off the blades, you know,” he says. “Have you been cleaning the blades?”

“Much as I can,” the boy says, cutting a piece off a pork chop and mixing it up with the yolk of a fried egg.  He tears off a piece of bread.

“Much as you can?  What does that mean, much as you can?  If they get muddy, you clean them.  Otherwise, they don’t do the work. Plain and simple.  Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

“It ain’t as wet as it was,” John says, stuffing his mouth and glancing up.  “It’s getting hot.  Drying out.”

“I didn’t hear anything about no heat wave.”

His daughter-in-law gives him a sharp, quick look.  His son gives her a look back -- I’ll handle this, it seems to say – before he goes on.

“Well, it’s really warming up.  It ain’t so muddy anymore.  What I’m worried for is that damn tractor, if you want to know.  Ain-chient, Dad. That’s what I’m worried about.”

Joe leans closer to his son, eyes narrow.

“What do you mean?  What’s wrong with it?”

“It chugs and sputters and feels like it’ll overheat all the time, is what.  It’s just old, Dad.”

         “Boy, there is nothing wrong with that tractor!”  the old man shouts, trembling and shaking a skinny finger.  “That’s the kind of financial genius what got you where you are today!”  he says, poking John several times on the strap of his overalls, right in the spot where his arm and shoulder meet.

Somewhere, in a room further inside the house, the baby starts to cry.   John pulls his shoulder back from his father’s finger, then turns a little in his chair, leaning back.  He just shakes his head, slowly. 

Helen leaves in a hurry, then reappears in the doorway, holding the crying child.  Her daughter-in-law goes over to her.  Both women glare at the men.

“You woke up this child,” Helen says. “We just put this child down for a sleep.”

“Sorry,” John says. “Listen, Dad…”

“You goddamn well better listen to me, boy,”  the old man whispers, leaning in, and ignoring the women.  His tone makes his daughter-in-law take the child from Helen’s arms and hurry out of the room. “You can call me Dad and stuff your face with my food all you want, but I’m not your Dad.  I sired you, but I’d take it back if I could.”  At this, he eases back, gets quieter.    “I’ve got a fella, a lawyer, coming out here next week to make up a will.  Putting it all on paper.  You understand what I mean?”

John pushes his plate away and slides his chair back.  He stands up and looks Joe in the eye.  Then he walks out of the room. 

Joe stands there shaking.   After a moment he hobbles over to the window and looks out, and he watches John yanking on his gloves and flexing his fingers in them, angry. 

Then he sees his wife and son in the grass, his hands relax, and he stands there looking at them.  He takes off the gloves. He walks over slowly and sits down in the grass next to his wife.  He looks up in the sky, rubs his head and his eyes with his bare hands; then he lowers them and takes another long look at his calloused palms.

Joe watches.  In a minute, he hears Helen’s voice behind him. 

“You know, I’d like to spend a little time with my grandchild before I die,”  she says.

“Don’t talk about dyin’!” he snaps. “Haven’t you got a bit of sense?  I don’t want to hear that!” 

“Fine,” she says, “you’re never going to die.  But I am.  You go on and live forever, you old fool.  If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to look at my grandchild.”   

          John was their “oldest boy.”  That was what Joe had always said. Even though he was, in truth, the only son they had anymore.  Tommy had been born first.  But then Tommy had died when he was only two.  So, by Joe’s reckoning, when John passed the age of two, he became the oldest.

         Tommy had been playing on the floor of the upstairs bedroom, and Helen had taken her eyes off him, just for a second, distracted by a piece of housework.  In that moment, Tommy had gone headfirst down the stairs.  He’d made a terrible noise coming down, like a sack full of breakables, and the sound had brought Joe running from his lunch in the kitchen, still chewing meat.  Tommy had lain still for a few moments, then roused himself and cried, and of course they’d hugged him and rushed him over to Rifner’s office first thing.  But Doc hadn’t been able to find anything wrong.

“Children have falls,” he’d told them. “Most times, they seem a lot worse than they are.  They’re flexible, kids.  Bones are softer.  They seem to tolerate this kind of thing better than we do.”

         So, they’d taken him back home, armed with instructions to keep a close eye on him for a few days, just as a precaution.  They watched, and watched, and watched some more, to the exclusion of everything else.  When a week had passed and everything seemed fine, their watchfulness with the child began to ease, like a fist opening up.

One evening not long after that, Joe was smiling, sitting on the floor, playing with Tommy in the living room, and the child tripped over a cushion they’d been using to build a pillow house.  It seemed like nothing, that fall, the kind of fall most children endure daily, children have falls, but after he dropped to the floor, the little boy simply shivered, curled up and lay still.  Often, Tommy liked to play that way, like he was sleeping. He’d say “night-night” and close his eyes, sometimes on Joe’s chest, wanting Joe to playfully wake him up, in that way they always did, tickling his belly and behind his knees.  But the child didn’t stir.  Then he tried a little harder, shaking him, and after a few seconds started yelling for Helen to come, his voice high and thin, come quick, and they both tried to wake him, but the child still refused to open his eyes, and Joe actually got angry and shook the frail little body, hard, so that it flopped around.   It’s his memory of that moment, that moment of rage at a dead child, that still sneaks up on him now and again, and though he tries to ignore it, the feeling is like someone’s digging down deep into him and prodding at an old bullet still lodged in his chest.  

When it became clear that Tommy would never open his eyes again, they held him and cried.  They cried like they never had before and never would again.  They threw themselves around on the floor, screaming and shaking and pounding their fists on their bodies, each almost completely unaware of the other’s presence, a mile from any neighbor.  This little boy would never wake up again, like he always had, laughing at the sound of bobwhites nesting underneath the overgrown honeysuckle planted just outside his bedroom window.  He wouldn’t grow up.  They wouldn’t know him.  He would never marry, or stand beside his old man baling hay, and punch him playfully in the arm.  There was so much that would never happen. 

They buried him in a little box in the cemetery at the east end of town, after a church service that was Joe’s first as a nonbeliever.  Helen wept more, although quieter now; she’d not stopped since that day.  She seemed to have an endless reservoir of grief, and it seemed to help her somehow.  But Joe, in just a few days, had turned into an old man, had burrowed inside himself and settled in at a place cursed with drought –

hot and angry and without anything living – and he had decided to stay.     

Later, when John was born, everyone who knew the McCulloughs proclaimed the baby a blessing straight from the Lord God on high.  Joe wanted to see the child that way too; he wanted it more than anything.  But he just couldn’t understand how it might be possible.  That time had passed.  The feeling was dead.  It seemed ridiculous.  Still, he’d often stood over John’s crib at night, or pulled up a chair and sat, staring at him, convinced that he needed to burrow somewhere into himself, to find someplace, some corner, neat and clean and un-charred, where he could set up camp and manage to live a normal life with his wife and new son.  The problem was, he could only ever see John as an intruder; a flawed, hateful replica of the original, beloved boy, sent to confuse and usurp, to take all the things that should have been Tommy’s. 

The strange thing was, the new boy looked nearly identical to the first.  Everyone said so, down to his reddish, patchy hair – but “nearly” was the key word there; Joe could only see the sad differences, the places where little Johnny fell short, the faint whiff of inferiority in the slightly wider set of his features, the slightly less-miraculous pace of his development.  The very fact that the boy didn’t giggle at the low-high “bob-white” call of the quail was enough to make Joe want to gnash his teeth and cry out; then again, if the child had laughed, that would surely have been worse. 

Still, little Johnny survived. He lived on and on, and probably Joe hated the child’s stubborn sturdiness more than anything. 

That was how it would always be then, between the boy and his father. The cycle of hope and disappointment and rage turned like a great wheel rolling downhill until there was no stopping it.  By the time John was twenty, the two scowling men bore a close resemblance to one another.  John had grown up with one violent desire: to get away from the small, well-tilled empire and its moody, unpredictable King as quick as his legs could carry him. 

The boy had made the decision, when he had married Carol, to move into town, not to work with his father on the farm.  John had, instead, gone to work at the popcorn factory that had been built several years earlier, right on a spur of the old Hoosier Line that had once served the local stockyards.  John went to work every weekday, processing the golden corn and loading it into boxcars.  On the weekends, he sat around watching sports on a little black-and-white set. 

That was fine.  It was what Joe had wanted.  Still, the life his son had chosen filled him with disgust.  Anything the boy did, even his gestures – which were so like his own --  made him sick with frustration and anger.  Even so, he would visit their little house with his wife every Sunday as dutiful and disgusted as a missionary among cannibals.  The place was always a holy mess: the Sunday funnies spread out on the floor, John in a tee shirt with the belt on his pants undone, and the baby looking like somebody ought to take a hot washrag to it.  Joe would just sit on the edge of his chair and ride it out.  If he didn’t, people in town might start making his family business their own. 

On the days of his parents’ visits, it was clear that John had a lot of trouble looking his old man in the eye, and when Joe wasn’t looking in his direction, the boy spent a lot of time checking Joe out, as though trying to decipher some writing on the old man’s forehead.  Joe was aware the boy was having money trouble, but he’d told his son in no uncertain terms, and with a certain satisfaction that was a knife to the boy’s heart, that once John decided he would take the factory job, he was on his own.  He shouldn’t come begging if he ended up on his backside.  Joe was sure then, after that conversation, that the boy would hate him for good and all, and it was just as well.  In Joe’s mind, a kind of quiet forbearance, a balance, of sorts, had been reached.  And under those terms, Joe was relieved to find contact with his son was near to sufferable.

Then he’d fallen off the barn, and there the boy was, making an effort.  There he was, helping the old man out when he was down.  So it seemed.  But why the change?  It was damned suspicious, Joe thought. John had taken a leave from the factory, and according to the boy, Jack Doyle, the factory manager, had promised him that his job would be waiting any time he wanted it back.  Joe would believe that when he saw it.  And even if it was true, all it proved was that Doyle was a bigger fool than his son.   But Joe doubted it was true.  As far as Joe was concerned, the boy had his eye on the farm.  Joe couldn’t bear the thought of it.   He got the feeling some bridge had been crossed and then burnt while he slept, and something had to be done. 

                  Alone in the kitchen, alone in the house, Joe is still looking out the window, still refusing to sit; but there wasn’t anybody around to refuse.  So Joe ends up muttering little refusals to himself, bobbing his head and mumbling all the things he will and won’t do.  Everyone else is out on the lawn.  It’s quite a picture. The grass, the unearthly green of that diluvial spring, pitches and rolls between two great trees, sugar maples.  Today the weather is good.  Out on the grass, his wife has pulled an old Adirondack chair out of the garage, and she sits watching the boy and the boy’s wife, who have positioned themselves a few feet apart, facing one another.  The child’s mother has him by the hands and is walking him forward, toward his father, who’s just dropped down on one knee. 

“Look at this!” Helen shouts back from her chair.  “Joe, come out here and look at this! This child is going to walk today.” 

Her son looks up at her angrily.  But it’s Joe’s yard, his place, and the boy, he says to himself, sure as hell ain’t going to keep me out of anything on my own place.  He finds the strength to lean to the open window and yell out: “That child is too young to walk.”

His wife waves this comment away like a bad smell and yells back,  “This child will walk today, mark my words!”

Joe turns away, unable to concentrate on anything except the fact that his son has stopped working. It occurs to him that he shouldn’t have told him about his plan to make a will.  Now the boy wouldn’t be inclined to do anything.  He wouldn’t lift a hand.  And as much as he hated to admit it, he probably did need him for another month or so at least.  He shrugs.  Anyway, it’s too late now.  There is only one choice.  Even Helen would have to see that. 

One little step at a time, Joe makes his tortured way to the mudroom.  He finds that if he concentrates on each step, prepares himself, he does all right.  He walks a few feet, and it hurts like hell, but he thinks he can take it.  Maybe he’s getting better after all.  He steps through the door into the mudroom, and takes the first hat, an old panama, off its hook.  The straw above its band is darkened with years of sweat.  He places it on his head, and continues toward the door.  He pushes open the screen door.  Soon he’s out on the grass.

He can see around to the front of the house after a few cautious steps, and he sees his family lounging on the lawn, like a painting of a group of lords and ladies taking their ease, and he feels bile rising up in his throat.  They’d let the whole place fall down around their ears, if it were up to them.  Lords and Ladies.  He turns away from them and sees the tractor, just sitting out in the north field.  He’s not sure how he’ll negotiate the fence.  Time was, he could’ve climbed or jumped it, easy.  He’ll figure that out when he gets there.  If he can just get there, to the tractor, he’s thinking; if he can just walk that far and manage to haul himself up to the seat, he’ll be fine.  That’s a seat he’ll gladly agree to sit down on. 

He takes one more look at the group, and before his eyes, the child, William, begins to walk.  He takes one step, then two, and then a number of quick steps, stumbling forward to his father.

The women squeal, the boy claps, and Helen, without turning her head, shouts out, “Joe!  You damn fool, you’ve missed it!”

But he’s seen it, and in watching, he forgets his footing for a minute and almost falls; he snaps his head again and twists around in an attempt to right himself, and then the insects swarm. All at once, something burning and black seems to swing down from the sky – like a piece of the dark out beyond the blue has broken free.  He staggers; something is wrong; something is not right, not right at all, and he makes his way to the trunk of an ash tree, falling against it, hard with his back against it, his feet pushing and sliding in the grass, trying to keep himself upright.  Then the blade swings again, and he tries to run away, but can’t, so he calls out, instead, to these people, standing on the lawn in front of him, on this expanse of green, hugging one another and whooping and holding up a child, but they can’t hear him.  He sits down now – he can’t stop himself from sitting – on the knotty roots of the tree.

            It’s then that he recognizes the thing, the same dark shape from that day on the barn.  It’s up there now, passing over him again and again in that old, powerful rhythm, matching the rhythm of his own heart.  It’s a movement and cadence straight out of his long-gone childhood, before he could even have dreamt the world he lives in now, so long ago it was a world he’s almost forgotten until just this second, when it suddenly again leaps up in his mind, and he remembers himself young and running, out to where his father is, out at the mowing, chest deep in amber hay. 

Joe, called Joe because his father also had the first name William, would run from the house every noon to collect the old man for dinner.  How good it was to run, arms pumping happily, carrying out orders, and his father, once he saw him, would put down the tool, the thing Joe remembers now, and wait.  But Joe liked to see it in his father’s hands – the sweeping motion of a long, dark blade, silver and sharp only at its edge, almost like a swept-back wing.  Though he was only eight or nine, he begged his father to let him swing it.  It seemed like such a clean, powerful thing – irresistible to a boy – and he yearned to try.  But it would be years yet before his father would let him touch it; he would set the blade down, being sure to bury the tip deep in the soil, pressing it in with his boot if he had to.  Then he’d put himself in front of it, between his son and the blade.  He’d smile and hold out his arms, and Joe would run. 

            It seems like a cruel thing to remember now, of all times, and for a moment, Joe feels betrayed. Why hadn’t anyone told him that nothing and no one could ever make good on all the things those bright, warm days seemed to promise?

         It’s only then that his family finally takes note of him in this strange predicament, splayed as he is on the roots of the ash.  They all move to him at once, puzzled, in an odd sort of lockstep.  Then they’re calling out, soft at first, then loud, now shouting, trotting, sprinting. 

Before John even reaches his father, he senses that everything – the way a little breeze is kicking up, how a cloud shadow moves down the lawn, the sounds of the stock going about their unconscious business -- is already crying out to be remembered.

Joe, for his part, is finally forgetting.  It’s like he’s touched by a sort of grace.  He’s running, a kid again, and this time, it isn’t a memory.  It’s as though the blade has swung down and pruned the rotten branch of his life to the trunk, and he’s just running.  He’s flying on the grass, eight or nine years old and proud of running; and his old man is in the hay, arms out wide for his boy to jump into, smiling, watching how fast he can go.  And Joe knows how his old man’s neck and clothes will smell before the embrace even happens: like clean sweat and dirt and hay and manure and tobacco all mixed together into a single sweetness.  So he runs faster.  He laughs and lunges; he trips and flies toward that sweetness – forgetting where all that velocity might take him, if it weren’t for his father’s arms.