IT’S JULY. THE DOG LIES on the porch, catching the hot July wind in his mouth, tasting it between his pink tongue and the roof of his mouth before panting it out again. I watch him determine in a second what the messages in the wind are—who’s coming, who’s been where, who’s alive, who’s dead—and then he sends his own message when he lets the wind go, to whatever animal will savor and understand it the way he does. Angel’s done this a million times. He’s an old dog. So I imagine he has much to say.

I’m washing the supper dishes, listening to some of Jimmy Lucas’s old records, watching the dog, and ignoring the heat. The records are stacked like a vinyl layer cake, losing a layer every time a record falls and is played on the stereo. Right now Roy Orbison is singing one of my favorite songs. “Blue Angel.”

“Hey!” I yell, rapping the kitchen window with a soapy knuckle. “He’s singing your song.”

Angel briefly looks up at me and then, swatting a horsefly away from his mangled ear with his front paw, resumes his panting. I stare at the dog, stretched out on the porch floor. And I remember the day we found him fifteen years ago.

We were driving home from a Friday night fish fry when I thought I saw something moving in the shadows beside the road. Ernie slowed the truck down. I motioned for him to stop and rolled down my window.

Something big and dark was trying to drag itself back into the ditch, away from the headlights. At first I thought it was a bear cub and looked up at the trees along the road for the sow. Ernie opened his door and stepped out. Then he stood there, leaning against the open door and taking long drags on his cigarette. I waited. My husband just continued to stare at the ditch. Finally I leaned over in the seat.

“Are you meditating or what? You want me to check it out?” I whispered.

Ernie dropped his cigarette and smashed it with the heel of his boot.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “I think it’s a dog.”

He slowly walked around the front of the truck and to the edge of the ditch. I poked my head out of the window just in time to hear a low growl. My scalp tingled.

“Be careful! He might have rabies,” I whispered again, and grabbed the flashlight out of the glove compartment. I got out of the truck and shone the light down into the ditch.

Ernie was right. There, in the watery mud of spring, was a dog, his breath whistling through his blood-caked nose. He was about six months old but was already a big animal. The light caught the glistening blood running down the side of his head, and he weakly pulled himself around so that he faced us. He was as black as a night without stars. Blue-black. One eye shone white and luminous in the light, but the other was swollen shut and covered with clotting blood. Ernie stepped forward for a better look. The dog barked and tried to lunge forward.

“Christ!” Ernie said, stepping back. “It looks like he’s been shot in the head and shot in his left hip ... and I think he caught some birdshot in his chest. Whoever it was couldn’t shoot straight. That’s why he’s still alive ... and in one piece. Good-lookin’ dog, though, huh, Rose? Think he’s part Lab?”

The dog looked away from Ernie and focused on me with his one good eye before I could answer. I stared at that dog. He stared at me. His eye burned a path through all of the hidden memories in my head. Standing on that dusky gravel road, I felt the sudden chill of knowing what the reality of his wounds meant. The same meaning that accompanies a calf born too deformed to live or a piglet whose back has been broken by the carelessness of its mother’s bulky roll in the pen. It is not a mean decision but one that comes with the harshness of rural life and expensive veterinarian bills. Ernie had anticipated what was coming and had already retrieved the shotgun from the back of the truck. I ignored the gun and squatted, resting on the balls of my feet.

“You’re right. Looks like almost all Lab. Poor fella,” I crooned.

He stopped growling and whimpered. Then Ernie cautiously moved toward him again. His good eye left me and zeroed in on Ernie. He growled, this time baring his teeth. That’s how I knew it was a man that shot him and threw him into that ditch. His head must have been searing with pain, like someone stuck a knife into it, but he could still tell a woman from a man.

I loved him in that instant.

“Stop,” I said. “Not this time. I can fix him up.”

“Oh, Lord, Rose,” Ernie said. “It’s pretty bad. He’s never gonna be the same. He’s gotta be in a hell of a lot of pain too.”

I started to get up and prepare myself for a good fight with Ernie. But as I stood up, a sudden warmth that felt almost blessed infused me from my belly up to my chest. I am not a religious person, but I can’t think of any other way to describe it. It was like that circular feeling I had when I anticipated being a mother and remembered what it was like to be mothered, that feeling of having been chosen without having to ask. And this dog chose me.

“Well?” my husband asked, turning to face me.

Then the name just popped into my head. “Angel,” I said. “We’re going to take him home and call him Angel.”

“Angel?” Ernie said, giving me a funny look. “He looks more like a Bruno to me.”

“Angel,” I repeated.

Ernie shrugged and walked to the bed of the truck for some twine. Angel’s good ear stood up like a small wing. I kept talking to him until he slumped back into the mud. He gazed into the flashlight beam and became mesmerized enough by both the pain and the light so that Ernie could grab his muzzle and tie the twine around it so he wouldn’t bite us. Then we took him home.

I don’t know how he lived. Whoever tried to blow his brains out had missed the best part, the telling part. Angel has fits every now and then, chasing his tail around and around, and sometimes he gallops in his sleep, his legs scissoring through the air and going nowhere. His head appears a little lopsided when you look at him straight on, and the shredded remains of his one ear wave in the breeze. They are soft, though, when you touch them, like strips of black chamois cloth. He let me touch him from the very beginning. But it took Angel a long time to trust Ernie. I’ve always been secretly proud that Angel took to me right off. I’m good with animals and children, but Ernie’s better.

Angel’s memory is whole and enduring. I don’t think any of the buckshot got into that part of his brain even though I can feel with my fingertips the round bumps of lead coming to the surface when I rub his head. When he loves, he loves completely, recognizing someone he trusts even after years of not seeing him or her. He lopes down the driveway in an easy way, his big tongue hanging out. This is the way he greets women and children. Yet his hatred is just as complete, just as absolute. He hates men, all men, except Ernie and our neighbor Bill Lucas and his brother, Jimmy, even though Bill’s a grown man now and not the little boy who spent so much time visiting us and even though Jimmy has been dead for fourteen years, somewhere in Vietnam.

Angel’s my dog. He sits in the cab of the truck with his big muzzle poking out of the window, tasting the wind as we fly down the road.

“There goes your friend,” I say softly, but of course the dog can’t hear me through the window.

Bill stops then. Just stops and stands there and faces the big swamp. Angel continues to watch him silently. He lifts his nose. I turn my head for just a minute, and that’s when Angel barks, once. I look back just in time to see Bill get swallowed into the thick cover of those swamp cedars. This is the fifth time this summer I’ve seen him disappear like that into the swamp. I stand up on my toes to catch a glimpse of him, but he’s gone, and the only thing I see now is my husband by the toolshed, watching Bill just like me, just like the dog. Once last summer I saw Bill up close at the Standard station where he works and was shocked by the oily stubble and savage look of his face. His eyes are no longer the soft gray color they were when he was a kid. They are a rock gray now, and like a split rock, they are small but with jagged edges.

We wait and watch, but nothing. Ernie’s shoulders sag when he realizes that Bill will not reappear, and he trudges off toward the barn, fifty-eight years of exhaustion in every step.

We will not talk about this. My husband does not know that I know he watches the Lucas place, looking for signs of life, a vigorous wave of a hand or the yellow halo of the yard light when night falls. The little boy who used to visit our farm, eat dinner with us, and play with the dog grew into a remote and painfully shy young man. We see him rarely and almost always at a distance. And the oddest thing is that his name is never spoken between us ... as though he were dead instead of his brother, Jimmy. Which is nonsense because we do see him, working, walking, or driving, even if it isn’t often. It hurts Ernie that Bill does not come to our place anymore or accept visits easily from us. But Ernie doesn’t talk about that either. He deals with his pain like most men, treating it as though it doesn’t exist and therefore cannot be talked about.

I, on the other hand, have never been known to stay quiet. When I’m in pain, I cry a blue streak, and when I’m angry, I yell like hell. And when something is bothering me, I talk. A lot.

But I don’t have another person to talk to easily outside of Ernie, who has been punishing me with silence for the past two weeks and who has even struggled to keep his feet from touching mine while we sleep. I don’t even know what I’m being punished for, that’s how nonexistent our conversations have been. I’ve given up trying, fearful that I might use the most intimate details that people who have lived together for a long time can carry like swords. But I still need to talk to somebody. Most of our neighbors are a good two, three miles away and busy farmers like us. So I talk to the dog, whose eyes have taken on a kind of old man wisdom to match his graying muzzle.

Some days it’s hilarious. Angel patiently trails behind me as I do the housework, ducking behind a chair when I vacuum, sitting by the bathroom door as I scrub the toilet and floor, or lying on the porch while I peel vegetables or count eggs, all the while listening to the constant run of my mouth.

It is only at night when I let Angel out of the house that he leaves me for a few hours, running out the door and into the nearest patch of woods with the determination of a reconnaissance pilot, his black coat giving him a natural camouflage at night. In the past I had only an inkling of what he did on these forays, what any male dog would do, and him especially, pent up all day in the house with me. But lately I’ve suspected that Angel’s nightly journeys are not meaningless wanderings or chance matings, and if he could talk, he would tell me things that my husband never does. It frightens me. Other women who are isolated and lonely drink or pick fights with their silent husbands or take up with other men or maybe just suffer silently. I talk to the dog. And watch a little boy who was never mine and who has long since grown up and abandoned me.

Then this morning at breakfast, my husband, who has borne like a Buddhist monk the hardships of being a World War II veteran, a farmer, and a mixed-blood man in northern Wisconsin, does talk to me, only to hurt me. He put down his coffee cup and said, “I just can’t do it anymore, Rose. I used to be able to lift a bale of hay in each hand, and now I can barely lift one with two hands. I can’t sleep worth a shit, and things that used to mean so much to me don’t anymore. I just don’t give a damn.”

What could I say? For other people the meaning of life does not rest on being able to lift a bale of hay. But we’re farmers. Everything rests on that bale of hay. Actually it was the look on his face, not what Ernie said, that did me in this morning. The message was loudly broadcast with those dark brown, bloodshot, and tired eyes. That bale of hay should have been passed on to younger hands. We are Rosemary and Ernest Morriseau, good farmers, but farmers without children.

I sat as though slapped speechless. My lips moved, but no sound came out. Ernie stood up as though he didn’t notice, maybe he didn’t care, and walked out the kitchen door.

“I give a damn,” is what I couldn’t spit out. “I tried.” And it got worse as the day went on. I could barely keep my head up, could barely talk for fear of tears.

Now the dishes are done, and the dog is scratching to be let in. I open the door, and Angel strolls through the doorway, his nails tapping like drumsticks on the linoleum. Then, my only friend, he sits and looks up at me.

Suddenly I can’t look at the dog, and I can’t breathe. I stumble out of the kitchen and into the living room, but Angel trails me. When I reach for and slump into the old brown recliner by the window, I am temporarily relieved of the burden of Ernie’s words, of Ernie’s silence. I cry, hiccuping and sputtering like a three-year-old. I cry for hours until it gets dark, until my eyes become puffy and my head aches. Angel rubs his scarred head against my knee for a while before settling down next to the chair. I’m grateful for even that touch.

I love this dog, and this dog loves me. But when did my husband and I stop doing the dance of love? What have I done, what crime have I committed, that warrants being ignored? That justifies not being touched? And when will I stop being punished for the children I could not give birth to?

“War’s over. Wanna dance?” he asked, and smiled that enormous slow smile that made me put down my drink, suddenly crazed to wrap my arms around that huge, cedar-smelling chest and hold on for as long as I could.

We both held on like two long-lost buddies from childhood. He was from northern Wisconsin like me. We got married and left Milwaukee to take on his family farm in Olina. Then I tried having babies.

The doctor said my uterus was damaged, but he couldn’t figure out how. I told him I’d been sick, on and off in the Philippines, with what was thought to be some kind of intestinal flu.

“Well,” he commented nonchalantly, “maybe that did it,” and motioned for me to get dressed. Then he said to quit trying. But I tried.

Just when I would start to think that this one was going to hold and would get ready to shop for baby clothes, I’d feel that damn ache in my lower back. Then the contractions would come on fast, and before I could get to the hospital, twenty miles away, my lovely baby would slip and fall out, looking like clotted peony petals shaken from the stem into a pool of blood.

I remember the last baby. I was in the bathroom, feeling that downward pull and squeezing my thighs together to hold it in.

“Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me,” I kept saying. Chanting it, Ernie said, long after the baby was gone and he’d taken me to the hospital. Ernie had been kind enough after the first three miscarriages. But as they continued, he made love distantly, his body going through the motions as if vaguely to obey the adage that hope springs eternal. But what sprang from him died in me.

Then Ernie and I got two sons by default, at least for a short time, and Ernie and the ghosts of our own children were temporarily appeased. First Jimmy and then Bill, driven out of their house by their father’s rageful drinking and their mother’s mental descent into another world, began to visit us. I didn’t give a damn about John Lucas, but Claire was like too many women I’d seen and grown up with. Women with brains three times the size and depth of their fathers and husbands, but trapped and nowhere to go with that kind of intelligence but sideways or down. I tried for a long time to get close to Claire, but she avoided me as though I were painful to her. I used to watch her walk in one continuous circle around the edge of their back forty acres while Jimmy was in the Marines and Bill was in school, her hands talking to the air and her face slanted toward the sky.

“She’s losing it,” I said to Ernie once when we discreetly watched her from behind our barn.

“You don’t know that for sure,” my husband said, surprising me. “Maybe she really is talking to someone.”

“Do you see anybody else out there?” I asked sarcastically.

“I’m just sayin’ there’s a lotta things we don’t know about,” Ernie answered, and shrugged.

“Especially in that family,” I cracked, and even Ernie had to nod.

But I felt lousy saying it and shut up after that, not wanting to tempt the spirits. There but for the grace of God, I thought, go I.

Long before Jimmy left, I rationalized the boys’ time at our house as thinking that Claire probably needed a break from the kids, and I willingly opened up our house and my arms to Jimmy and Bill, letting the love pour. But that was not enough. Jimmy became a teenager so hell-bent on escaping his old man that enlisting in the Marines looked like a sure chance in a million-dollar lottery in comparison to his life in Olina. Then Jimmy lost the lottery. In her grief, Claire Lucas woke up and, realizing that she had another son, kept little Bill close to home after that. And Ernie and I lost both of them. I don’t know who I cried more for, Ernie and me or Jimmy and Bill.

Then, when Bill was seventeen, his father died of a heart attack. I could not find any warmth in that kid’s hand when I shook it after the funeral mass. It was as though he didn’t know or remember me. But the look on his face was one that couldn’t be mistaken. While Claire appeared bewildered and exhausted, her son was obviously relieved instead of sad.

“You’d be relieved too! He won’t have that stinkin’ mean drunk for a father anymore,” Ernie commented bitterly on the drive home.

When Bill turned eighteen, he began working full-time for the Standard station. Not long after John’s death Claire became the receptionist for the Forest Service. She seems much better now, but she still won’t return a wave or accept any sign of friendship from me.

“You know,” he begins quietly, “my grandma Morriseau told me before I was shipped out to the Pacific, that I would know if anyone close to me had died. Here at home or over there. I told her I didn’t wanna know. She said, want to or not, I would just know, especially if I kept my mind open to it. I thought it was just old Indian superstition. Nothin’ ever happened during my service that made me think about what she said. Except my buddy Frank. His old French-Canadian Catholic mother told him almost the same thing. We laughed about it.”

Either I’m so tired or it’s really been a strange day. This morning he tells me he doesn’t care anymore, and now it’s almost midnight, and he’s telling me about his reservation grandmother, who’s been dead for almost forty years.

“But,” he says, his voice dropping an octave, “I had a bad feeling when Jimmy left for basic training.”

I am instantly wide awake.

“Jimmy?” I ask. “What about Jimmy?”

Ernie goes on as though he hasn’t heard what I said.

“I didn’t pay any attention to it,” he says. “I figured I felt that way because of the kind of war it was. But when I saw him, I knew I had done a bad thing. I could’ve invited him over to dinner with Billy that night, remember? Before he shipped out the next day? But I didn’t ’cause of what he did to that turtle with that stupid-ass Baker kid he used to hang out with. I could’ve gone after him, talked to him about what he was getting himself into. I could’ve talked him out of it. I came so close,” he says, and then repeats, “so close.”

“Ernie,” I say. “Don’t you remember? We didn’t know that Jimmy had even enlisted until that night Billy came over for dinner. Remember, when John came over to pick up Billy, he told us. Remember you were so mad because John was proud of it, and you said he was just getting rid of his son before the kid took him down. Don’t you remember?”

“I saw Jimmy,” he says, his voice dropping to a whisper, “the day before we heard about him. Remember, it was so warm that winter? I was shoveling manure. Well ... that’s when I saw him. Angel”—he gestures toward the dog—“saw him first and howled like crazy. Jimmy was standing in the back field. But he didn’t say a word, not a word. He just took off his helmet and dropped his gun. Then”—Ernie swallows—“he turned around and walked into the swamp. That’s when I knew ... that Jimmy had died.”

My husband, by nature, does not exaggerate. Still, I find his words hard to believe until I remember that Ernie didn’t cry like me when we heard the news that Jimmy was MIA. At the time I thought it was because he had accepted it as a consequence of war. He’d fought. He knew the chances. Now it all makes sense. For the past fourteen years, he has been trudging through his daily life not silenced by hard, solitary work but by grief.

“I wanted to tell you,” he says, suddenly shaking so much that the air seems to crack around him. “Then this morning when I saw the look on your face ... so lonely, so lonely, it hit me what a goddamn bastard I’ve been. I’m sorry, Rose. I’m so sorry.”

Then Ernie covers his face with his hands and, hunching over, lets out a long, deep sob that echoes through the room. My heart hits the wall of my chest.

I don’t remember the last time Ernie cried. It must have been years ago. I’ve cried plenty, and I’ve heard lots of other women cry too. But women cry even in their worst pain, with hope and relief. They cry like wolves and coyotes do, howling to talk to their mates as well as to the rest of the pack. But there is something about the way men cry that sounds so hopeless, so anguished, as though the very act of crying were killing them.

I can feel the tears start up fresh in my eyes. “C’mere,” I say, and open my arms to stop the waters. My husband stumbles toward me. The recliner moans under our weight as Ernie sinks into my arms. Angel bolts up and trots over by the TV Alert but oddly calm, he hunkers down in front of the TV He lifts his nose to sniff the air and then opens his mouth to taste it. Our big black dog, satisfied with what his nose and tongue read, lowers his lopsided head to rest in a pool of moonlight on the floor. I wrap my arms tighter around Ernie, touching with my fingertips the scars and pointed shrapnel still under his skin. He nuzzles his face deep into the crook of my neck to hide it while he cries.

I wish there were some way I could tell Jimmy that Ernie cries for him. I wonder if John Lucas ever grieved so for what was his flesh-and-blood son. We thought not at the time. He’d brag in town about Jimmy’s being a war hero and tell stories as though he’d actually been there with Jimmy, fighting in Vietnam. Ernie and the other veterans in town never talked like that. They’d done it. They knew war wasn’t a movie. It was hell personified, and for them to talk about it was to give it new life, to raise the dead. And I’d covered up so many shattered bodies in the hospital in the Philippines that I had dreams. Terrible dreams that lasted for twenty years. I dreamed that my limbs were being torn off or that I was being held at gunpoint, unable to speak Japanese, finally being bayoneted through the chest. My worst dream, though, was of a large white sheet descending on me from above, and I was still alive and fighting to keep that endless white cotton from smothering me. John Lucas just couldn’t know. Whatever it was that made him drink, it wasn’t the crap of war.

The dog exhales a deep lungful of air, but his eyes stay open, luminescent in the white light. I stare at him until I realize that I have forgotten to let him out for his nightly wandering. Then it dawns on me that he has not made the slightest familiar sign of wanting to go outside.

My head suddenly clears from years of shameful and cloudy debris, and my skin prickles.

Oh, yes, I want to say out loud. Yes, yes, yes.

Grandma Morriseau was right about such things.

Up until now I would’ve traded Angel to have had at least one child come out of my rickety womb. I was at one of the lowest points in my life when we found Angel lying in that ditch. I believed, since the first time I saw him all shot up and spared him an early death, that I had saved him. That all my stored-up and unused maternal love and care could at least save him, a mere dog. I was determined to save him. But all the tears in the world can’t hide the truth.

If anyone was saved, it was me.

When I have given and given and danced with love until I am exhausted, when my husband has remained silent and, some days, as bitter and brittle as a winter’s day, this dog has given to me. When I have felt fragile and vulnerable, when I have wondered if Ernie would still fight for me and over me, over an aging fifty-seven-year-old farm wife instead of the slender and long-legged beauty that I once was, it is Angel who sits beside me in the cab of the truck while I sell eggs to homes on some of the worst back roads in this county; it is Angel who guards the farm and me from aggressive salesmen, from all the possible evil that people are capable of bestowing out of the blue. It is Angel who has kept me from talking to the air like Claire Lucas and whose very presence has kept to a distance the haunting ghosts of my never-born children. It is Angel who circles the perimeter of the farm at night, black and mysterious, who tastes the wind and listens for sounds that we cannot hear. And it is Angel who saw Jimmy Lucas first, and who I suspect, because I will never really know, is able to talk to Bill Lucas while Ernie and I cannot. It is this big, black, scarred-up dog lying in front of us that has for years carried a spirit that is not his own.

My husband has stopped crying but makes no move to uncoil himself from my arms. Someday I shall tell Ernie what I know. I shall tell him that it was a good thing, not a bad thing, that he saw Jimmy. That Jimmy chose him. That we cannot save anyone. That we choose to be saved ourselves.

“Love,” I shall tell my silent husband, “is never wasted.”

And I shall tell him, looking at Angel, now sleeping by the TV, that we have never been alone.

IF HE STAYED VERY STILL and gave no indication that he was awake, Bill could see through one cracked eyelid the black dog passing between the trees about ten yards away. He was not frightened, only cautious that any sudden movement would scare the dog away. He was familiar with his neighbors’ dog, had played with him when he was a boy, had seen him roaming the boundaries of his farm in the early morning, and indeed knew the dog shadowed him whenever Bill was in the woods. He was an old dog now. Even from the distance of ten yards, Bill could see the frost of age on his muzzle. The dog’s appearance gave Bill an inexplicably eerie yet familiar feeling. But he was never afraid.

Not like the night during the previous summer, when Bill had awakened halfway through his drunken slumber only to see a party of coyotes staring at him in the moonlight from the south end of the ridge, their eyes iridescent and haunting. His resting heart jerked like a cranked lawn mower, and he jumped up, shouting and waving his arms. The coyotes yipped and scattered down both sides of the ridge. Bill listened until he could no longer hear the papery sound of their paws on top of dried pine needles. When he calmed down, he realized it was only a group of yearling pups from that spring’s litter by a female that had denned successfully at the base of the ridge for several years now despite a trap-crushed leg that had healed crookedly. They were curious and not threatening.

What had frightened him so badly was the sense of waiting he felt when he first saw them, motionless between the trees. The same silent waiting of crows and ravens in the treetops as they watched a winter-beaten doe die after giving birth in the spring.

He had spent many nights on the ridge during the past six years. It was the only high, dry land on his family’s property that faced the deep kettle lake on the north side, rising out of the surrounding cedar swamp like the massive back of a brontosaurus long dead, and covered with red and white pines and birch.

“Search and destroy! Search and destroy!” James would cry as he chased Bill up the ridge in a mock game of war. Armed with his turtle-shell shield and wooden sword, Bill could never make it to the top with his brother chasing him. James would grab his ankles while Bill tried to keep from being pulled down the slope, releasing his sword and clawing the ground with his hands. Then his brother would run his fingers up Bill’s legs, up to his chest, and tickle Bill under his arms until the towering red and white pines echoed with the sputtering and hiccuping laughter of a little boy. That was if his brother was feeling good.

If his brother was feeling mean, he would drag Bill down the slope until Bill’s face was skinned and bleeding and his hands were raw. Breathing hard, James would crouch over him and yank the turtle shell from Bill’s right arm and steal the wooden sword out of Bill’s right hand. James would run up the slope until he reached the top. Turning around to stare down at his whimpering brother below, James would raise the turtle shell and sword and breathlessly chant a portion of the Eucharist prayer. Only James would change the possessive pronoun. “The kingdom and the power and the glory are mine, now and forever!”

The prayer, never meaning much to Bill in church, radiated with meaning as the God that was his brother, that looked like Elvis, shouted it from the top of the ridge. To Bill, trembling with fear and love below, the power of his brother’s deep voice caused the woods to become silent. Caused the ridge to become a mountain and the mountain to become sacred. The ridge was his brother’s, and it was where his brother would live forever.

Although Bill was a grown man now, he still clung to his childish belief. It was here on the plateau of the ridge that he slept most nights within a stand of four red pines that seeded themselves in almost perfect geometric harmony with one another, forming a natural square room. If he wasn’t sleeping, then he was drinking and finally sleeping some more. He had his brother’s shotgun, a Remington 870 Wingmaster pump, which he kept with him whenever he was in the woods, the barrel nuzzled against his cheek when he slept. It was the gun that Ernie Morriseau had given to his brother when he was twelve years old. He was not old enough to go along when his brother joyfully left their house, dressed in hunting clothes and carrying the shotgun. In his jealousy, Bill went over to the Morriseau place anyway and spent time making cookies or helping Rosemary in the kitchen.

He had a vague sense of why he always took the gun with him. Someday the pain might become so bad that he could not outdrink it. His life was going nowhere, and even the simple pleasures he had loved as a child held nothing for him. Even worse, the very thing that had kept him alive, kept his hopes up, seemed to have disappeared even at night. Bill had not dreamed since he was nine years old. When he looked in the mirror, he saw the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz. His skin was gray, and when he pounded on his chest, it sounded hollow. All he had left was the numbness of beer and the remaining physical sensation of something out there.

It was a foggy gray morning two days ago when his mother appeared, standing at the edge of the field nearest the barn and holding a kerosene lamp even though it was daylight. She startled Bill when he emerged from the cedars, wet, cold, and hung over. At first he could only stare at her, not entirely sure that she wasn’t an apparition. She worked as a receptionist for the Forest Service, but their paths coming and going on the farm rarely crossed. He knew she was there, though. His clothes were always washed and put in his drawers; there was always food cooked and ready to be eaten in the refrigerator. The house was clean.

It shocked and simultaneously amazed him that she knew exactly where he would exit from the swamp, that she had apparently waited and had not gone to work. It also made him angry.

“The sun,” he answered sarcastically, pointing up at the sky. “Haven’t seen the damn thing in days.”

Her dark eyes narrowed, and she tilted her head back slightly.

“Wally Wykowski,” she said as her son walked past her, “told me that you’re going to lose your job and that it is a shame because you do excellent work.”

Bill stopped and turned around. “Wally can fuck off.”

“Bill—” she sighed “—I wish you wouldn’t use that language. This is a small town. There aren’t many jobs. We might be forced,” she continued, waving her hand toward the house and barn, “to sell this place if you can’t earn a living and help me. You know I can’t pay the taxes on it alone.”

His head hurt so badly that he could barely hear her. He looked down at his feet but not before noticing that she was wet and shivering and had a streak of mud on her cheek.

“I never see you,” she said. “You’re never home. Do you need anything? Money?”

“I don’t need any money!”

“Look at me,” his mother commanded. She grabbed Bill’s arm. “I know,” she said tersely, “what you’re looking for. I live here, remember?” Her fingers pressed into his arm. “It’s not worth it to drink yourself to death.”

In an effort to divert her, he laughed. A fake and horsy laugh. “I told you,” he said, shaking his arm loose, “I’m looking for the sun.”

He felt a sudden urge to puke. In an attempt to quell his stomach, he stared back at his mother and realized that her hair was completely white and not its former black color and that she was stooped. He saw the misery in her face. The defeat in the way her arms hung limply. Then his stomach erupted, and he bent over, emptying into the wet grass what little liquid was left in him. Bill felt her hand cup the back of his head.

“Yes,” he heard his mother say through his spitting and coughing, “you are.”

ERNIE MORRISEAU WAS CAUTIOUSLY SCALING the barn’s gambrel roof that morning, hammering the tar-coated shingles so that they overlapped and were waterproof, when he heard the distant brassy honking of geese above him. In his haste to look up, he fumbled with his hammer and lost it. He watched it slide down across the shingles before falling to the barnyard below. He swore loudly before looking up in time to see a very small flock of Canada geese pass over him on their way south. He thought he’d counted twelve of them until Ernie noticed that something was amiss about their flight pattern, and he rapidly re-counted the flock. Eleven. There was an obvious gap in the right string of the V-shaped flock between the fourth and fifth birds. A lost bird.

Ernie listened as each goose intermittently sounded off, the cracked bell of their voices calling out as if to leave a trail of sound like bread crumbs for their lost member to follow. He knew the geese would maintain this space for the missing goose for the rest of their migration. As Ernie watched them, he wanted to believe too that the lost goose would find the others. But it was November, and the entire flock was unusually late in migrating. The more probable truth was that the goose was dead. Ernie continued to stare at the geese even as tears blurred his vision and the flock resembled a strand of hair floating in the distance.

He raised his arm to wipe his face on the upper part of his sleeve but stopped when a movement in his neighbor’s field caught his attention. Ernie hoisted himself up for a better look and settled his body halfway over the pinnacle of his barn roof. He knew who it was before he saw him, and he watched intently as Bill Lucas’s tall and gangly figure emerged from the corner of Ernie’s field. He watched as Bill swung one long leg and then the other over the fence into his own forty-acre field. This was the first time Ernie had seen him emerge in the morning. Usually he saw Bill at dusk. It had become a twilight ritual begun last spring, Bill walking the field and Ernie watching him.

He was mildly relieved. It had always bothered Ernie that he never saw Bill come back out, although he knew the young man was fundamentally safe in the woods and swamp. In Ernie’s mind, Bill would always be the sensitive and inquisitive boy who used to visit his farm with his older brother, Jimmy. He could not quite reconcile this image with the Bill Lucas who was a Standard station car mechanic, who still lived with his mother and was rumored to have inherited his father’s absorbency of beer. Ernie had acted on his worry only once, waiting until Bill disappeared from sight before walking across his own field in an attempt to follow Bill. He stopped when he reached the middle of his field, his stomach cramped with memorable fear and apprehension. He turned around and walked back to his barn, telling himself that to follow Bill was a terrible invasion of his privacy.

Perched on top of his own barn like a swallow, Ernie timidly raised one hand as if to wave, fanning his fingers out to let the wind pass through them. But then his chest began its slow rumble of grief. As he began to shake, Ernie quickly dropped his hand to steady himself on the barn roof.

Moments later his wife stepped out of their farmhouse to find out what had caused her husband’s swearing, only to see the silhouette of his weeping body draped over the top of the barn roof.

“It will get better,” his wife said later that night, both of them squeezed together in the old brown recliner like two loaves of bread. “Think of crying,” she whispered into his ear, his face burrowed into the crook of her neck, “as medicine. It feels bad now, but it will make you feel better in the long run. There is nothing wrong with crying.” Ernie felt the vibration and muffled rise of sound in his wife’s throat before it enunciated itself in his ear. She was right, but he was still appalled that at the age of fifty-eight, he should cry with the same painful urgency as a newborn with colic. It was as if the grief had stored itself up, a small lake behind his eyes that had reservoired in his chest for years, its shoreline slowly rising until it overflowed the upward barrier of bones and tissue and gravity. He rested in his wife’s arms until she gently pushed him out of the chair and guided him upstairs to bed.

The exhaustion of crying coupled with his work on the barn roof caused him to sleep deeply for only a couple of hours. He woke up feeling the pleasant warmth of Rosemary’s thigh against his own. She shifted in her sleep to lie on her side, and he aligned his body with hers, slipping one hand underneath her exposed arm so that he could caress her breasts and belly. She woke up and turned over to face him. They made love leisurely. Then he had slipped into that watery, vague state of early-morning sleep most apt to produce dreams when he thought he heard a shotgun go off. Although she never woke up, his wife stirred in her sleep as though she had heard it too. He sleepily opened his eyes just enough to see that it was two-thirty and then drifted back to sleep. When he woke up again, it was to the hammering ring of his alarm clock at five-thirty.

He sat up and shivered. It was the opening day of deer season, and although he looked forward to it, getting up in the cold darkness still took some effort. He quietly got out of bed and groped his way down the unlit staircase to the kitchen. He had stuffed most of his hunting clothes into a large plastic bag filled with cedar boughs and left the bag in a corner of the kitchen the week before. He discovered, after opening the bag, that he had forgotten to include a pair of thick wool socks and quietly felt his way up the stairs to the bedroom. He was blindly feeling through the dresser drawer when he heard the sheets rustle and the click of the bedside lamp.

“What are you looking for?” his wife asked behind him.

“My wool socks,” Ernie answered at the same moment he spied them in the far corner of the drawer. “Found ’em.”

He turned around and held up the socks as if they were trophies. His wife smiled, her long salt-and-pepper hair fanned out like a spiderweb against the pillow.

“I better get rollin’,” Ernie said, bending down to give her a kiss. She reached up and held the bottom half of his face in her hand. He patiently waited, caught by the pressure of her fingers on his cheeks. “Do you want me to stay home?”

DID I WANT HIM TO stay home? Yes and no. I contemplated his question. Looked into his dark brown eyes and stared at his cheeks and chin with its mix of black and gray stubble. My face was chapped from the stubble on his face, from hours before, when I had awakened to his hands cupping my breasts. He asked me while I could still taste him in my mouth, always that taste and smell of sweat and cedar. The first taste of him when we made love the night we met. I wanted to say, “Yes. Stay home with me. In bed.” It had been so long since we’d made love, and I felt dreamy and luxurious from his touch. Girlish.

But it was a good sign that he wanted to go hunting. This past summer I lived in daily fear that I might walk into the barn and see him hanging from the rafters. I watched him struggle to get out of bed in the mornings, unable to raise his face to a beautiful sunny day. I fought to keep from being sucked down into the eddy he had become and, at the same time, wanted to reach down and pull him out, even when he lashed out unintentionally and hurt me.

Every marriage re-forms itself over and over again with each crisis. We’ve been lucky. Most of our years were spent under fairly happy circumstances except for the lack of children and the wound that festered from it. Thinking about it now, I think it was appropriate that our breaking point would come during the season of summer. Like heat rash, every painful truth and secret in our life together surfaced under the searing light of the summer sun. One of the biggest secrets of all. None of our friends had any inkling of what we’d been through. Not just this past summer but the whole fourteen years before. If they knew, they would say that I was crazy to let Ernie go alone in the woods with a gun. If they really knew, they would say that Ernie was crazy, period.

Once he started crying, I knew he would survive. I make sure that I am never very far away. Ernie cries when he needs to, sometimes once a day. And soon he will surface completely from his tears. From what causes those tears.

I would be more worried if he hunted with other men. Thank God, Ernie prefers to hunt alone except for years ago, when he hunted with his father and his uncles and then with Jimmy Lucas. In the Morriseau family, hunting meant something very different, and it bears little resemblance to the craziness of deer season in these times: Sundays spent hunting in the morning, stopping for the noontime NFL game and several six-packs of beer, and then going back out to hunt until dark. I can’t tell you how many hunting accidents happen on Sundays.

I’ve seen the aftermath of accidental shootings because I’m a volunteer nurse and paramedic, riding with the Olina ambulance whenever a call comes through. I’ve seen shotgun blasts at close range where a deer slug makes a quarter-size tunnel through a human body. That’s to be expected with a shotgun. But rifle bullets are different, and even then there is little similarity between a .22 rifle bullet and a .30-‘06 bullet. With a high-powered .30-30 rifle and a scope, a hunter can shoot an animal at a considerable distance, sitting comfortably on top of a truck or in a deer stand. At first all you see is a clean hole in the chest of the man or boy who has been shot, but a strong clue is the large puddle of blood he is lying in. It is when I turn the body over that the devastation can be seen and smelled. A .30-’06 long-nosed rifle bullet without a full metal jacket enters the body neatly and almost pierces it with the fineness of a sewing needle. But when it exits the body, it does so with such force that it blows open a crater, splintering the spine and exposing spilled and ruptured intestines. The fresh smell of blood and bowel can make whatever you’ve eaten crawl up into your throat instantly. It is even worse when the victim has caught the bullet in the face and head. Then he is almost unrecognizable. I lost three new volunteers the year before, after they saw the shattered head of the Penter boy.

The hunter who has ill-fatedly pulled the trigger usually does not vomit or cry but stands near the dead man or boy with a lost and uncomprehending look. There is emotion on occasion, especially when it is a father who has shot his son or a brother who has shot his brother or a son who has shot his father. He falls to the ground, incoherently praying and apologizing, and has to be picked up and carried to the ambulance as well. Sometimes he just faints.

I surprised myself when I volunteered five years ago to do ambulance duty. After taking care of men or what was left of them in an Army hospital in the Philippines during the war, I didn’t think I could handle it anymore. I didn’t think I’d have the edge. But the township was having a terrible time finding volunteers. Someone has to do it. It takes practiced detachment because if they are still alive, you have to work fast and think rationally to try to save them.

Don’t get me wrong. It is never easy. I wait until later, until I can get home, and then I rant and rave at the stupidity of it before collapsing into tears.

But it is about crying.

It is those men who do not cry that are in danger and dangerous to hunt with. Those men who often drink instead of cry. It is those same men that at the last minute suddenly realize that in the haze of their hangovers it is their buddies’ heads they are staring at through the rifle’s scope and not the eight-point bucks standing just beyond them in the snarl of brush. Those are the men who shoot and kill, sometimes anything in front of them. Sometimes, I think, they pull the trigger because their rifles are raised and they don’t know how to put them down without firing them. As though once they’ve set their eyes on those beads at the end of the barrels, it is shameful not to fire. It is strange. I eventually see those same men because they have either drunk themselves to death or have pointed the barrels at themselves. And they die never knowing why.

BILL HAD NOT SHOWN UP for work or slept for three days straight. The sky had remained a silvery gray since the beginning of the month because the sun never showed itself. It was typical November weather, and on the third day the sun finally set in the west unseen. Bill left his house and walked to the barn in that peculiar dim light just before nightfall that his mother had always referred to as owl light because it was then that the mottled brown and white barn owls silently lifted from their perches on the barn windowsills and glided over the fields in search of mice.

Bill was tipping back the last can from his second six-pack of beer and leaning against the southwest corner of the barn when he heard a bark. Just one. He spotted the dog through the overgrowth of grass near the middle of the field and slowly lowered his arm, releasing the beer can into the grass.

“Angel!” he called, and then whistled.

The dog barked twice but did not move.

Bill whistled again. The dog responded by lifting his muzzle to sniff the air. After a few minutes the dog lowered his back haunches and sat.

“Annngel! C’mere, boy!” Bill drunkenly crooned in one last attempt to get the dog to come to him. But the black dog remained seated and continued to watch Bill.

“Fuckin’ dog,” he muttered. In a burst of rage he crushed the beer can in his hand and threw it at the dog. It fell far short of the dog’s position. Angel’s ears went up, but the dog did not move.

“What do you want from me?” Bill screamed at the dog. “Why are you following me? What the fuck did I ever do to you! You’d be dead,” he continued, shaking his fist at the dog, “if it wasn’t for me! I never hurt you! So how come you don’t come when I call you?!”

Bill picked up his shotgun, loaded it, aimed, and fired at the dog. When it became apparent seconds later that he had missed, Bill reloaded. But when he raised the gun and hooked his first finger around the trigger, there was no longer a sitting dog but a man.

Bill nearly dropped the gun. The man stood still. Bill staggered forward, straining to make out the man’s features in the diminishing light. As soon as Bill stepped forward, the figure stepped back. Bill stopped moving.

“Ernie?”

It was the only man he could think of who would have a reason to be in the middle of his field. He panted, heard the sound of his own frantic breathing.

“Hey!” Bill yelled again, fear making his voice audible this time. “Ernie, is that you?”

The man briefly turned his head as though to look at the swamp bordering the field. There was something about the slope of the man’s head and his long neck and the familiar ease the dark figure seemed to have in his surroundings. Bill stepped forward and raised his arm, realizing too late that he was still gripping the shotgun. The man immediately spun around and began to run.

“Wait!” Bill yelled. The man continued to run, and without thinking, Bill ran after him, still clutching his shotgun.

“Wait! ”

The field had not been plowed under that fall, and his legs became entangled in the thick, overgrown grass. He tripped. The loaded gun flew out of his hand, and Bill heard it go off. He was positive, even in his sleepless and beer-soaked state, that it had fired into the grass. But when he picked up the gun and scrambled to his feet, he saw a burst of flames engulf the man running ahead of him. He watched in paralyzed horror as the burning man danced and screamed in pain. Then the man fell, and the fire disappeared.

Bill spent hours desperately searching the field even when it became so dark he could not see his hands clearly, let alone anything else. There was no body, and even the dog had vanished. Although he could not be sure, the merest suggestion of what he might have done sent him into a zigzagging stride out of the field. He did not realize the direction he was taking until he hit the barbed wire fence dividing his farm from the Morriseau farm. He heard and felt the barbs puncture and rip his jeans as he rolled over the top of the fence. Felt the immediate pain of gashed skin on his thighs. He landed on the other side of the fence, the gun still in his hand and the breath knocked out of him. His boots were snagged in the lowest string of wire. He lay there for several hours terrified that if he surfaced above the grass, he would see the burning man again.

But in the early-morning hours he kicked his boots free from the barbed wire and did get up. Bill didn’t remember how he got there, just that he ran and ran, cedars slapping him in the face, his boots wet from crossing a narrowed inlet of the swamp, until he found himself at the base of the north slope of the ridge. He saw a black clump of something in the nearest red pine, and his hopes were momentarily lifted. Then he saw what it was. In the extreme pain that causes a righteous and reckless abandonment of conscience, he loaded his shotgun, pointed it up at the homemade deer stand, and fired shell after shell into it. Then he savagely ripped the ladder off the side of the red pine before throwing the hot-barreled gun to the ground next to the tree and running up the slope of the ridge.

WHEN ERNIE LEFT THE HOUSE half an hour later and stepped into the circle of light cast down by the yard lamp, he knew that Rosemary was standing by the bedroom window watching him. He was dressed in blaze orange pants and jacket with his deer tag displayed like a billboard on his back. In one hand, he carried his father’s Marlin 1895 rifle, its barrel safely pointed toward the ground. Just before he reached the edge of the illuminated barnyard, Ernie stopped and pretended to check his pockets. Then he straightened up and, turning slightly, blew a kiss to his wife before stepping out of the artificial light and into the presunrise darkness.

A layer of hunter’s snow, wet and perfect for tracking, had fallen during the night. He stopped walking after a few feet and looked down his driveway at County H, the blacktop road in front of his farm. He could walk H for about a mile to get to the red pines woods and big cedar swamp he usually hunted in, but it would take longer. It would be shorter to cross his own field. He stared into the darkness.

In the many hunting seasons before Jimmy Lucas had left for Vietnam, Ernie would wait for him in the early morning in this very spot. He would hear his young neighbor first before seeing him, hear his footsteps and heavy breathing from having run across the fields between their two farms. Then Jimmy’s face would surface under the yard light, flushed a deep red as though he had popped up from a long underwater swim. First his windburned eyes would focus on Ernie, and then Jimmy’s lips would crack into the seductive grin that made many people in Olina compare him with Elvis Presley. It had been years since an early November morning held that happy face. They had hunted together since Jimmy was twelve, and it had never occurred to Ernie then that he would not be hunting with Jimmy into his old age.

Uneasily Ernie turned and studied the outline of his barn, barely visible in the predawn darkness. The coffee in his stomach burned, and a familiar tingling sensation crept up his legs, threatening to keep him frozen in place. He kicked one leg forward like a wooden soldier, and then the other, stiffly moving toward the field just like the deer he was looking for, with his head raised and his eyes wide open, alert for any sudden movement.

Ernie was halfway through the field when the sun peeked over the eastern horizon and a raucous chorus of crows clustered in the tops of the huge white pines at the field’s edge greeted him. With great relief, Ernie stopped walking and listened to their familiar cries pierce the silence of the woods and field.

Ernie liked crows. He affectionately regarded them as he would a beloved but sinning relative. They were not as noble as geese, but they had their place. Crows were the barhoppers of the bird world, flying from tree to tree, looking for something to eat or drink, and gossiping at every stop. Their eyes missed very little. Deer season was a holiday feast for them. Ernie gazed at their black bodies perched within the pine boughs. He knew how to decipher the language of crows. Their rusty early-morning cawing was done at casual intervals and did not contain the hysterical shriek of danger. The field was safe. A sudden flush of happiness hit him. His father had taught him the lessons about crows. When Ernie gutted his deer, he left the gut pile on the forest floor as his father had always done, to appease the crows. “Because,” his father had said, “crows talk.”

On impulse, Ernie laid his rifle on the snow-dusted ground, stood up, and raised his arms into the air. He stretched his fingers to hold the sun’s warmth the way he had when he was seven, in imitation of his father. While his mother openly expressed her feelings, her eyes often twinkling with mischievous humor, his father was a man not often given to emotional displays. Although he was a mixed-blood man of Ojibwe and French ancestry, Claude Morriseau was almost stereotypically Indian, reserved and stoic about life’s pains. Ernie later understood that it was less about being Indian and more about adopting a strategy that allowed his mother and father to live peacefully outside the reservation and even succeed at farming in the cutover land of northern Wisconsin. The German fathers of Olina Township could not find an avenue on Claude Morriseau’s face that led to his emotions and therefore an opening for weakness. But Ernie knew his father’s feelings ran deep, and nowhere was this more apparent than in his great love of mornings.

Claude Morriseau believed that morning was the holiest time of the day. He told Ernie that if he could make it through a bad night, morning would reward him with his life. The first thing Claude Morriseau did every morning until he became crippled by a stroke was to walk outside to greet the sun, even on days when clouds blanketed it. If they were hunting in the thick cover of woods when sunrise began, his father would stop walking, lay down his rifle, and raise his face and arms to the rays filtering through the canopy of leaves and needles. This was a practice unique to his father. None of Ernie’s extended family on the Heron Reservation exhibited this quiet reverence for morning.

rnie tilted his head back to receive the warmth of the morning sun on his face. His bad night had lasted for years and finally, with this kiss of early-morning sun, was nearly over. He felt surprisingly very alive, just as his father said he would, and as if to prove it, his heart drummed loudly inside his chest. Beat with a memory of long ago.

“I carry you in my heart,” his father had written to him in an unexpected letter while Ernie lay wounded in an Army hospital in Hawaii during World War II. Those words, so uncharacteristically sentimental, wrapped themselves around Ernie and cradled him as if he were a small boy. He had tucked the letter under his belly so he could pull it out to reread it when the pain from the shrapnel in his back became unbearable.

Ernie happily waved at the sky once more before picking up his rifle. He wiped it off with a rag from his pocket and began walking again. The crows became silent as Ernie advanced toward them. When he was about to step over the sagging section of snow fence much used by the deer, the big black birds loudly announced his presence before flapping into the sky. Ernie waited until it was quiet again before crossing over the faded redwood fencing and entering the swamp.

He took a deep breath and inhaled the heavy, sweet smell of cedar. Although his clothes were previously scented with cedar boughs, Ernie reached out and stripped a nearby branch of its flat needles anyway. He crushed and rubbed them between his hands and then smeared the scent over his face and the front of his chest. He had hunted this swamp and its edges since he was very young, and it never failed him. Although he didn’t search for deer directly in the swamp, he had, in past years, surprised a few big bucks while trudging through it. It had always been risky shooting a buck in the swamp, but it was even more so now that he was an older man. He did not have the quick reflexes anymore to move with the speed and silence necessary to get a close, clean shot, nor did he have the energy to run on the spongy swamp bedding to track a wounded animal. And he did not have a younger man to help him. He was handicapped in such an environment, and Ernie was sure the deer knew it.

He sighed and looked down at the tannin-colored water pooling around the soles of his boots. They could use the venison, but they didn’t really need it. Just a few weeks before he had sent one of their heifers to the meat locker, and their two freezers were full of beef. But it felt so good to be in the woods again, felt so good to feel good that he didn’t want to go home either. He could not have imagined what a fall would be like without hunting, yet he had not hunted for the past five years, afraid in his deepening depression to be alone with a rifle or shotgun. It had been a mistake, he realized now, to stay away from the woods. The fall hunt was a timeless tradition in his family, and it was the time of year he felt both the closeness and the loss of his own father most intensely.

Ernie shaded his eyes from the sun with one hand and looked over his end of the swamp. In the middle of the swamp was the ridge, a dumping of glacial moraine that rose like a humped spine. It was on the north slope of the ridge that Ernie had shot his first deer when he was twelve and where his tree stand was now. He contemplated its pine-covered hump and decided that it was time to see it again after so many years. Even if it was to sit quietly in his stand among the huge red pines near its pinnacle and gaze down at the smaller of the two kettle lakes.

But by the time Ernie had gotten three-quarters of the way across, he began to have nagging doubts about walking up the north slope. Not that he wasn’t capable of doing it. It was a small ridge, and its sides, though a climb, were not treacherously steep. If he took it slowly, it would be as pleasant a walk as any on flat land. He had begun moving toward it with the happy memory of hunting it with his father, thinking it had been forty years ago when he was last on the ridge, until his faulty memory made him suddenly recall differently. He stopped and stared at the big red pines, deeply bothered that he had forgotten what had been a momentous day. It was sixteen years ago, not forty, and it was not his father but Jimmy Lucas who had last hunted with him on the ridge. It was the fall of Jimmy’s senior year in high school, the November he shot the big twelve-pointer that many people had seen in the area but could never find during hunting season. Like a fist smashing through a wooden door, the area of his brain that kept all pain locked away opened up. The memory bled and pooled in his eyes.

THAT DAY THEY HAD POSITIONED themselves at the base of the ridge in the hope that they would catch the deer either coming down or going up the slope.

“I think he’s in there,” Jimmy had whispered to Ernie, jerking his head toward the swamp. It was before sunrise, and Ernie could feel the warmth of Jimmy’s breath on his cheek.

“Maybe,” Ernie whispered back. “But remember what I said. If you shoot him in the swamp, you better make sure it’s a clean shot. Otherwise it’s gonna be you spending your day trying to find a blood trail in that soup.”

They stopped talking and quietly moved into their positions, leaning into red pines that were twenty feet apart. Ernie was doubtful that the buck was in the swamp. It was too wet for deer to bed down, and they usually reserved the swamp as a last effort to shake off a predator.

It was half an hour before the darkness gradually became gray and, within a matter of minutes, lightened up enough for both of them to see the white pines towering in the distance on the edge of the Morriseau farm. At first the boreal cedar growth appeared quietly empty. Ernie watched as the mist thinned with the gain of light and whole patches of canary reed grass and moss became visible with the lift of fog. Then they heard a snort and saw the flagged tails of three does as they emerged from behind a large white cedar. Neither man raised his gun. Both had doe permits, but they had tacitly agreed to try for a buck first. Ernie watched with surprise as the does bounded out of the swamp in single file on the well-worn path that led through the white pines into his field. He had swiftly concluded that there weren’t any more deer coming out of the swamp when out of the corner of his eye he saw Jimmy slowly raise his rifle. Ernie looked back at the cedar.

A huge rack followed by a sizable head, neck, and body materialized in front of the tree and made it look small. Ernie stared at the buck. Like the trophy animals of badly written outdoor stories, he appeared ethereal in the mist, and Ernie wondered if the swamp fog was fooling his eyes. An animal of that size had survived many hunting seasons and was most likely the dominant buck in the area. The buck was so preoccupied with the whereabouts of the does that he had not registered the presence of the two men. He seemed to be almost drunk on the scent of his does and lifted his black muzzle, his nostrils flaring, to catch the direction they had taken. Jimmy scoped and aimed. In the seconds that followed, Ernie surprised himself by hoping that Jimmy wouldn’t pull the trigger. Then the shot was fired, and it whistled as it spliced the air. The huge buck surprised them, going down immediately rather than running a ways as many deer were able to do even with a bullet-shattered heart. And Ernie knew that Jimmy’s aim had been perfect. As it should be. As he had taught Jimmy. Ernie expected Jimmy to whoop, but the boy only lowered his rifle and stared in astonishment.

Ernie walked over and slapped Jimmy on the shoulder. “There’s your twelve-pointer!” he said jovially. “You were right. I would never have thought he’d bed in the swamp.”

“I didn’t know if he’d bed in the swamp either.” Jimmy faltered. “I only guessed it ... Jesus . . . he’s bigger than I thought.”

“C’mon,” Ernie urged. “Let’s drag him to hard ground.”

They each grabbed a hind leg and pulled, the buck every bit as heavy as he looked. They propped the animal on its back at the base of the ridge. Before Ernie made the abdominal cut with his knife, he bent over the animal in a moment of silence just as his father had always done.

Jimmy took off his jacket and folded it before reaching into the buck’s belly and pulling out the entrails: the red-brown liver; the coiled ropes of intestines; the nearly empty stomach of a buck in rut, too preoccupied to eat. Sweat ran down Jimmy’s forehead and cheeks and dripped back down into the buck’s abdomen. When he pulled out the shattered heart, Jimmy looked at it for a few seconds before placing it alongside the rest of the gut pile.

When he was finished, he wiped as much of the blood off his hands as he could in the grass before carefully reaching in his coat pocket. He took out a hand brush and a bar of soap. He walked until he came to a depression in the sphagnum moss that held water and washed his hands. Then he came back to where Ernie was sitting next to the buck. He sat down and took the Hershey bar that Ernie held out to him. He peeled the wrapper off the chocolate. Ernie noticed that Jimmy’s hands were scrubbed until they showed no trace of blood.

“I always thought it was crap,” Jimmy said, staring at the gut pile, “that some guy wrote up in Outdoor Life about finding the trophy buck of his dreams, only to end up not shooting it because it didn’t seem right. But I almost didn’t shoot him. Now I wonder if I did the right thing.”

His face betrayed his usual affected teenage toughness, the Brylcreemed black hair with its small ducktail in the back, the dark eyes and slightly pouty full lips. Sitting next to him, Ernie could almost feel again the difficulty of being a teenager, the grappling with hormones that promoted the premature desires of an adult but without the knowledge or experience to handle them. Shooting the buck had punctured the veil of toughness on Jimmy’s face, and Ernie pretended that he didn’t see the rapid blinking of Jimmy’s eyes.

“It’s always that way,” Ernie explained. “I don’t think any good hunter feels totally sure. When I shot my first deer, I thought I was going to cry. I couldn’t look at its eyes. Those long lashes. There’s something about deer that doesn’t seem real . . . like they’re spirits. I still feel like that sometimes. My father told me that day that it was a good thing to feel that way. That I recognized the seriousness of killing. I was lucky. My father was a good man and a traditional man. He believed in hunting to feed your family and only that. Remember,” Ernie told Jimmy, “now that this big guy is gone, it will give the younger bucks a chance to mate with the does.”

“Well,” Jimmy commented, looking down at his boots, “we can always use the meat. I think that’s why Mom lets me hunt with you.”

Ernie nodded. Almost everyone in Olina knew that John Lucas’s entire paycheck was often in danger of supporting Pete’s Bar and Grill in town rather than his family.

“Are you gonna mount the head?” Ernie asked, although it was something he would never do.

“I guess before I shot him, I thought I would,” Jimmy answered. “But I don’t have the money, and Bill would be mad as hell at me.”

He turned to Ernie, his face suddenly brighter. “My little brother is somethin’ else,” he said with a quick grin. “He fights with make-believe warriors, swinging at the air with that stupid wooden sword and that turtle shell he uses as a shield. But I don’t think he’d really ever kill anything. You know if he could, Bill would try. to take care of even bigger animals in our bedroom. It’s a damn zoo in there now!”

Ernie laughed, the sound echoing across the swamp.

“Christ!” Jimmy exclaimed. “The other night I crawled into bed, and as soon as my head hit the pillow, two deer mice came running out from underneath it. Scared the shit outta me! I called him a little bastard. Then Mom yelled at me for swearing. But I’m the one who’s got mouse turds all over his bed!”

Although Ernie had never stepped inside the Lucas home, he could imagine the mice, birds, snakes, and whatever else inhabited the boys’ bedroom and the noise and smell that filled Jimmy’s nights.

“Don’t be too hard on him,” Ernie said, his laughter trailing off. “He’s a good kid.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy replied. “But he sure doesn’t like people. He’s always been funny that way. Kind of a loner. He hates my friend Terry. Course Terry is an asshole sometimes. Picks on Bill bad if I don’t stop him. I think if Bill could, he’d stick that wooden sword right through Terry.”

Ernie knew about Jimmy’s friend Terry—chain-smoking backwoods hood—and he silently agreed with Bill. Stick that sword right through him.

Ernie glanced up at the sky. He thought it was about nine, but the sun never broke through the clouds, and the sky remained its characteristic November gray. Still, the temperature had risen to the mid-forties, and they could hear the quiet drip of melting snow. Without turning around, Ernie knew that the north slope of the ridge had lost its white cover of snow and was now a slippery wet bed of brown pine needles and birch leaves. He pulled a thermos full of coffee out of his field jacket. He was pouring some into the thermos’s cup when Jimmy spoke.

“Is killing a man like killing a deer?” he asked.

Ernie nearly dropped his cup. He put the thermos down and steadied the hot cup of coffee between his hands before answering.

“How do you mean?” he asked, stalling for time.

“Well, when you were in World War Two,” Jimmy asked, “you probably had to kill some men to defend yourself, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

He could tell by the way Jimmy dropped his head that he was uncomfortable.

“It’s not that you can’t ask,” Ernie said quietly. “I don’t know how to answer. It’s not the same, but at the same time it is because you’re taking a life.”

Ernie paused and looked at Jimmy. The confusion and embarrassment were apparent on his young face. How was Ernie going to explain the Battle of Leyte in the Philippines as a way of justifying why he had killed other men? He was part of the U.S. Eighth Army, the soldiers brought in, they were told, for the task of “mopping up,” which in effect meant killing off any remaining Japanese on the island. In an effort to distance the men from thinking of the Japanese as human, their commanding officers told them that the Japanese were a stain on the whole of humanity. It was as though they were being sent in to clean floors. Only it was their rifles and artillery, not a bottle of Pine Sol that would do the housekeeping of war. He was not a violent man, had never been one, and this had not served him well in the Army. He found it hard to fight the Japanese with any sort of rage. It was merely self-defense and luck that kept him alive. He knew that Jimmy, despite his embarrassment, wanted to hear stories of heroism, his heroism.

Out of the corner of his eye he could see Jimmy, now eager to hear what Ernie had to say. What could he say? War was full of little stories. A man’s dress shoe found in the mud on his ascent up the island. A woman’s brooch made of ivory. Once a jawbone that was clearly human and small, perhaps a child’s. Mostly, though, Ernie thought that war was alternately boredom and anxiety with occasional bursts of real fear. Sitting in the mud and rain and rain and rain. The fuzzy growth called jungle rot that made his feet stink and swell. K rations that made you forget what fresh food was like. The god-awful odor of his own body when they’d been unable to wash for days. The horrific stench of rotting corpses, most of them Japanese, piled upon one another and covered with thunderclouds of flies. If there was any action, it occurred all at once. Those little signs of life were forgotten momentarily in the roar of artillery going off, the shelling and falling shrapnel, and his own desperation to stay alive. Then the skirmish was over, and he was back to sitting in the mud and the rain and wishing that he could look up and see a clear blue sky, pines, and the fiery color of sugar maples in fall.

He wasn’t sure why he made it home alive when so many other men didn’t, men he knew and thought about from time to time. They had not been told just how many Japanese were left on the island. They popped up out of nowhere like jack-in-the-boxes. It was the worst dogfighting he’d ever experienced. Hand-to-hand combat using his non-Army-issued bowie knife, instinctively knowing just where to stab under the rib cage and work the blade and handle up toward the heart. Sometimes he used the stock of his rifle like a big stick, swinging until it made contact with a head. The noises that came with such fighting. The cracking of bone and the sucking sound a knife made going into a human body.

He tried not to think about that one terrible day that had caused him to be sent home with enough metal in his back and legs to draw an industrial magnet.

How could you tell a seventeen-year-old boy what it was like to find a man’s head? His friend’s head. How he cradled Frank’s head and sobbed, closing the lids over the blue eyes with his trembling and blood-covered fingers. Frank was as close to a brother as he had ever gotten. He roared like a wounded bear when they tried to pry Frank’s head out of his arms, and he kicked at anyone who dared try again. They left him alone until he was lifted and placed on a litter, still holding Frank’s head. Ernie didn’t recall feeling any pain in his back even though it rubbed against the canvas of the litter. It was only after they got him to an evacuation hospital and he was given a shot of morphine that they were able to take Frank’s head out of his arms.

How lucky he had been. He had caught an almost fatal blast of shrapnel in the back, and miraculously not only had he survived but none of the hot metal had sliced into his spine, rendering him paralyzed. Ernie tried to feel grateful, but there was a nagging suspicion that he hadn’t been brave enough. That he hadn’t taken enough risks or aided better those who had died.

He didn’t trust himself with a rifle or shotgun after the war and almost didn’t go deer hunting after he had married Rosemary and come back to Olina. Claude Morriseau sat in a rocking chair in the kitchen and sensed his son’s discomfort, his confusion. His speech was slow and measured.

“You did what you had to do,” his father said while he watched his son put on his cedar-scented hunting clothes. “You are still a good man.”

Then his father said something that contradicted what they had been taught to chant during basic training. His father leaned forward.

“This,” his father said, drawing the words out slowly and tapping the barrel of Ernie’s rifle with a calloused finger, “is a tool, nothing more. It is not you. Think when you use it, but don’t love it. Then you won’t kill stupidly with it. Only foolish and weak men,” his father whispered in the dim light of the kitchen, “love their guns.”

“When somebody is comin’ at you with a rifle and bayonet,” Ernie explained, “you don’t have time to think about killing. You just do it. It’s either you or him.”

“Did you get any medals?”

Ernie nodded. “I have a Purple Heart because of all the shrapnel in my back, and I have a Bronze Star for bravery. Rosemary,” he commented, gesturing toward his back, “is still cutting out the shrapnel with a razor blade. It works its way to the surface, even after all these years.”

“Dad has medals too,” Jimmy said bitterly. “He takes them out and waves them at me when he thinks I need to be taken down a few notches. But you know,” he added, looking at Ernie quizzically, “I don’t think he ever fought in WW Two. I don’t have any proof. It’s just a feeling and the fact that he shoots so badly. I think it’s all a pile of crap. I think that’s all I’ve ever heard from him. Crap.”

“Well,” Ernie answered lamely with a wave of his hand, “some guys handle it differently.”

But Jimmy’s perception knocked Ernie momentarily off course. Ernie too was sure that John Lucas had never seen action in the war, despite his stories told at Pete’s Bar. But he would never say that to Jimmy. It was not Ernie’s place to expose John Lucas to his son.

He sighed and poured more coffee, which he offered to Jimmy. He watched as Jimmy threw back his head and drained the cup, and he refilled it when Jimmy held it out.

“I wasn’t the only one,” Ernie added, hoping to divert the conversation away from any more war-related questions concerning himself. “Rosemary was an Army nurse in the Philippines. There were a few times when she had to run down to the beach to help them unload wounded men and the Japanese were strafing the whole beach. One of the nurses was killed that way. Rosemary came down with some sort of fever and was sick for a long time.”

“She told me that.”

“Oh! You’ve been asking her questions too?” Ernie grinned and reached over to punch Jimmy’s shoulder lightly. “Speaking of Rosemary, let’s get going. She’s probably baked a coffeecake.”

They dragged the buck home on foot, trudging across the field toward the Morriseau farmhouse. Rosemary’s face appeared in the kitchen window, and they could see her wave before she dashed outside to meet them in the barnyard. They hung the buck from one of the huge beams in the barn before heading into the warm kitchen for more coffee.

IT WAS THE GUTTURAL CRY of a heron that yanked Ernie back into the present. He had to shake himself as though he’d fallen asleep standing up, and that was when he noticed the spit that had trailed out of his open mouth onto his jacket. He finished crossing the swamp. It took another five minutes of slowly walking the base of the north slope of the ridge before he reached the place where three deer trails crossed and where he had hunted the most. Ernie was fifteen feet away when he looked up expectantly and caught his breath.

His deer stand was gone.

Rather, it was no longer perched in the large red pine above Ernie’s head but scattered in pieces on the slope around the tree. Even the wooden ladder he had built up the trunk to reach the camouflaged small platform had been pulled out of the tree and tossed into the snow. At first Ernie thought the culprit was a bear. When he got closer, he saw the platform had been shot up at close range and the ground around the red pine was littered with yellow shotgun casings. Then he saw the gun. Five feet away from the tree and dusted with snow was an older-model pump shotgun. Ernie stared at it, pulsing with anger and confusion until his common sense got the better of him. He looked again at the snow around him and saw the tracks. The gun looked familiar. It was a popular shotgun, a Remington 870 Wingmaster that had sold well during the late 1950s and early 1960s. He picked it up and wiped it off, then pumped the gun to eject any rounds and looked into the breech to make certain it was empty. He balanced the barrel against his shoulder alongside his own rifle and began his slow ascent up the slope.

The tracks did everything but run in a straight line, and interspersed with them were the familiar paw prints of Ernie’s own dog. He had trudged two-thirds of the way up the ridge when his right foot slid on some wet needles, and he went down on one knee. He quickly but painfully straightened up, using the Remington as a staff. He stared at the shotgun again. No wonder it was familiar. He had once owned it and given it as a gift. He ran his fingers over the stock and found the worn letters carved near the end of the butt. JPL. James Peter Lucas.

His gut cramped up. Ernie turned his head from side to side and did a swift visual reconnaissance of the area. He scanned the trees and brush for any signs of green canvas, for the slightly askew pattern of camouflage or the rounded top of a metal helmet. What he had feared facing that morning was back again, and he could almost smell it.

He instinctively loaded his rifle but kept the safety on and the barrel pointed at the ground. He leaned the old Remington against the nearest pine before turning his attention to the tracks that disappeared when they reached the top of the ridge. His mind felt muddy, and he rubbed his forehead as though to massage his brain into action. Ernie slowed his breathing so that he could hear better. The woods were silent except for the chattering of chickadees and a nuthatch’s occasional zweeee call. Ernie quickly counted; fourteen, almost fifteen years since Jimmy died. He had wanted to see Jimmy again, to talk to him, but now he was terrified, his stomach cramping. Jimmy was close by. He didn’t want to turn his back on him, but he was afraid of him. Even if he wanted to run, Ernie could not safely turn his back on Jimmy now.

“Jimmy!” Ernie shouted up the slope, and listened as his own voice echoed through the silence of the trees.

“Jimmy! It’s Ernie.”

He waited for fifteen minutes, never taking his eyes off the top of the ridge.

“Jimmy! I know you’re up there!” Ernie shouted again. “I’m not angry ... you know ... about the stand.”

Ernie waited for another fifteen minutes. Then, when he was about to give up and chance turning around, he heard the snapping and rustle of brush being pushed aside. He had been so preoccupied with his last vision of Jimmy that when the silhouette of a man appeared on the top of the ridge, Ernie’s heart kicked against his ribs, and he had to stifle a gasp.

Bill.

The tall young man was emaciated, and his big, bony hands dangled out of his coat cuffs helplessly as though broken. His hair was wet and covered with leaves and dirt, as was his red and black plaid jacket. But what really stunned Ernie was the look of Bill’s face. Rather than having the florid meatiness of heavy drinkers, his face had the white waxiness of suet, and his eyes were sunken into the sockets of his skull.

“You’ve come to get me, haven’t you?”

Ernie paused.

“No, Billy!” Ernie exclaimed. “I didn’t even know you were out here.”

“I’m the one who did it,” Bill answered in the monotone of exhaustion. He dazedly stared down at Ernie.

“Ahh,” Ernie said with a wave of his hand, “don’t worry about the stand. I can make a new one. That one was about to rot off the tree anyway. That was nothin’. Just a little horseplay, huh?”

“I’m the one,” Bill repeated flatly. “I did it.”

“I don’t care who did it.” Ernie tried to persuade Bill. “It was only a deer stand. Just forget it. I’ll tell you what,” Ernie went on, adopting the soft tone he used on sick animals. “Why don’t you come home with me? Rosemary would love to see you. How ‘bout it?”

“You’ve come to get me,” Bill said again, and shifted his gaze toward the rifle in Ernie’s hand.

“No, no,” Ernie answered quickly. “I was going deer hunting.” He bent down but kept his head up and his eyes focused on Bill as he placed the loaded rifle on the ground. Then he stood up and began to walk slowly up the slope toward Bill. “What do you say, Bill? You don’t look like you’re feelin’ so good. I’m gonna take you home with me, okay? Okay?”

“No!” Bill shouted, and Ernie immediately stopped moving toward him.

“I did it! I’m the one!” Bill shouted again. He obsessively began to rub his hands over the dirty jacket covering his chest.

“Billy,” Ernie asked, confused and frustrated, “what are you talking about? What did you do?”

Bill tilted his head back to look up at the canopy of the pines while his mouth desperately tried to work the words out. Then he looked down at his neighbor’s face, and the kindness he remembered from childhood released the years of stored grief. He stumbled down the slope a few feet before falling down hard on his rear.

“It was me,” he suddenly sobbed, making no attempt to get up. “I killed my brother.”

Ernie let go a deep breath as though he had just been slugged in the stomach. He bent over slightly, resting his hands on his thighs.

“Bill,” Ernie tried to say evenly, “that’s impossible. Jimmy’s been dead for fourteen, almost fifteen years. You were only nine years old. You didn’t kill him. He died in Vietnam, remember?”

“No,” Bill cried, gulping in between breaths, “I saw him. I didn’t mean ... to shoot him. I thought it ... was the dog. I was mad‘cause he wouldn’t ... c-c-come to me.” Bill hiccuped. “Then I saw James. And he ran away from me. I kept yelling at him . . . to wait . . . but he kept runnin’. I d-d-didn’t mean to shoot him. I tripped . . . and dropped the gun ... and it went off. He was burnin’ ... and runnin’ ... and then he fell. I looked all over . . . the field ... for him. I’ve been waitin’ ... and waitin’ ... for him. I was happy,” Bill sobbed, “to see him. If I’d a known . . . it was him . . . I wouldn’a fired at him. I tried to find him. I c-c-couldn’t find him . . . anywhere. He ran away from me ... and I shot him.”

Then Bill raised his knees up and rested his forehead against his kneecaps. Ernie stared at the sobbing young man. His hands trembled, and sweat trickled down his wrists to wet his palms. Is killing a man like killing a deer?

How after that it insidiously began to invade him. That creeping of muck that covered his senses and that he couldn’t put a name to for fifteen years, that gradually robbed him of the simplest joys, the simplest details. The drift of clouds over a full moon, the click of the dog’s nails on the floor, the graying of his wife’s hair, and the growing loneliness reflected in her eyes. Just when he thought he had no other option but to end the pain by swinging from his own barn rafters, Ernie trudged down the stairs one night in July and walked toward his wife sitting in the living room, his mouth open, the words of 1968 finally reaching the air. He would never forget her outstretched arms, ready to catch him as he lurched toward her. And catch him she did. In the past five months, she didn’t let him go back down, pulling him to the surface again and again, holding him when he cried. He never once saw doubt in her face over his story or a furtive glance that might have indicated that she thought he was crazy. Ernie begged her not to say a word about what he’d seen, and Rosemary did as he asked her, folding the story into herself. But he hadn’t counted on Bill.

Ernie cautiously began trudging up the slope toward Bill. When he got to within three feet, Ernie dropped to his hands and knees and crawled up next to him. He lifted and pulled Bill toward him until the young man’s head was cradled in the crook of Ernie’s left arm and his body lay across Ernie’s lap. He pulled out the gun rag from the pocket of his hunting jacket and wiped Bill’s nose, wiping again when he saw he’d left a smear of gun oil on Bill’s cheek.

“Billy,” Ernie said quietly as the young man slumped against him, “Jimmy’s been dead a long time.”

“Not to me,” Bill cried, shaking hard in Ernie’s arms.

“No,” Ernie said, gently rocking Bill back and forth. “I know he’s not dead to you. He’s probably been with you,” Ernie said, looking down the slope at his rifle lying in the snow, “all this time. Here,” he added, sweeping his free arm at the surrounding pines, “all this time.” Then he quit talking and listened to Bill’s deep sobbing punctuate the silence of the woods.

Ernie raised his head and stared at the November sky. This was the year he had begun to love autumn again. He liked the canning of fruits and vegetables and the last-minute winterizing of the house and barn. He liked the dark furrows of dirt after he plowed the fields to ready their absorption of melting snow in the spring. He loved the smell of woodsmoke from his fireplace, an ancient smell that clung to his skin and made him grateful for a warm house. He loved the stark and skeletal outline of the hardwood trees against the mottled gray skies and the intense yellowing of the tamarack needles in the swamp. He loved the increasing silence and the space it encompassed above his head, space often filled with the passing flocks of migratory birds whose voices it seemed had been with him even before he was born. He strongly believed that it was the season in which life did not die but transformed itself, flew to another part of the world, went underground, went to sleep, and in some cases throve. It was the season of the spirits and the spiritual, the season most embedded with tradition and ritual for him, the season of his father. At the age of fifty-eight, Ernie still missed both his parents, but especially his father.

Feeling Bill’s head slip from the crook of his arm, Ernie hoisted him up so the nape of Bill’s neck was resting against Ernie’s chest. He brushed the wet hair from Bill’s forehead and gazed at the small blue veins in his eyelids. The color of his skin was startling. Ernie lightly pinched Bill’s cheek. It did not redden but stayed a waxy, nearly albino white. Ernie realized with horror that he could lift the skin from Bill’s cheekbones. He had lost so much weight that the skin on his face folded in places, giving the twenty-three-year-old man the appearance of being decades older. With one hand, he methodically rubbed Bill’s cheeks to warm them. Bill was fair-skinned and did not have his brother’s olive brown complexion. Ernie remembered teasing Jimmy when he started shaving, tapping him lightly on one cheek when he noticed a nick on the boy’s face. Rubbing Bill’s cheek harder, Ernie tried to remember at what age Jimmy had first made himself known to the Morriseaus. Was it five?

Even with the boys over at their place so much, it still came as a surprise when Claire Lucas unexpectedly phoned Ernie one August day. “Jimmy wants to hunt, and I’m exhausted from saying no. I don’t want my husband to teach him how to hunt. He doesn’t have the time,” she breathlessly added. “Would you be willing to teach him how?”

He heard her nervousness, the way her voice dwindled down after speaking from one intake of air. It had taken all of Claire Lucas’s strength to ask him. “Claire,” he mouthed silently to Rosemary, who was kneading bread dough. Her eyebrows shot up in surprise. It was as though a ghost had called them, so rarely did they see Claire Lucas. He hesitated before answering, wondering if John Lucas knew of his wife’s request.

“Does he have his own gun?”

When she paused long enough for it to be an answer, he interrupted. “Don’t worry. I have a safe gun he can use and some hunting clothes.”

He lied. He did not have a gun he would trust with a twelve-year-old, and they certainly did not have hunting clothes that would fit Jimmy.

“I don’t know about this,” he commented, shaking his head after he hung up the phone. “I don’t want that drunk bastard on my doorstep yelling at me. He should be doing this. It’s his son. What if something happens? Then we’re liable.”

Rosemary stopped kneading the dough, straightening up from the table to brush a stray hair away from one eye with the back of her hand. It left a floury sash above her eye.

“Honey, you can be so dense sometimes. Why do you think the boys are over here so much? Do you really think that John Lucas cares? And for Claire to ask you . . . well, that speaks for itself. She is the other parent there,” Rosemary reminded him, “and she has asked you.”

She dropped the mound of dough into the buttered bowl and covered it with a flour sackcloth.

“We can afford to buy another gun and some hunting clothes,” she said calmly, scraping the dried dough off her palms with a thumbnail. “This will be good,” she added with a smile, “for you too.”

Whatever hesitation Ernie had felt disappeared with his wife’s response. He rose to the challenge, fueled by memories of his own father and by the sobering fact that he had no children to pass on what his father had taught to him.

The distance between them dissolved on hunting trips. They suffered through cold, rainy weather, hunkered down in a duck blind, drinking coffee, eating brownies, and laughing while waiting for rafts of mallards, wood ducks, teals, and bluebills to drop out of the sky and land on an oxbow of the Chippewa River. They hiked through stands of poplar and aspen, their faces scratched by the slap of branches and their pants covered with burrs, trying to keep up with Butter, the yellow Labrador that Ernie had then. He was an old dog but full of mischief. They never knew when that sudden explosion of feathers that was a flushed ruffed grouse would occur because Butter was a dog bent on his own wishes.

Once, when Jimmy was fourteen, the dog enraged a sow bear, having tampered with one of her cubs by chasing it. Ernie and Jimmy scrambled for the nearest big trees. Ernie instinctively put himself between Jimmy and the black bear, raising his shotgun and aiming while Jimmy climbed to safety first. They stayed up in the branches of their trees until the bear had sufficiently rebuffed the dog and retrieved her cub before running off. The dog sat under Ernie’s tree, his mouth dripping foamy saliva in what appeared to be a fool’s grin as he peered up into the branches at Ernie.

Ernie took Jimmy fishing too. They fished the Namekagon, the Brule, the Flambeau Flowage, and even Lake Superior for whitefish and steelhead. Wherever they went, people mistakenly took them for father and son. Except that Jimmy was much taller than Ernie’s five feet, nine inches. Other hunters and fishermen slapped Ernie on the back kiddingly about his height compared with his “son.” Ernie corrected them while Jimmy smiled and said nothing.

By the time he became seventeen, Jimmy had grown into a more skilled and sensitive hunter than many men three times his age. Ernie was a good teacher, and Jimmy was a good student. That, as Ernie saw it now, was his biggest mistake. Jimmy became too good with a gun, too confident that he could protect himself.

Bombs. That was one of the many obvious differences between hunting and war. There wasn’t a bullet made that could disarm a technological rock of hell. Or something so lethal that it could be tossed at you as easily as a baseball. Jimmy fought in a different war. While the bombs and artillery had gotten sleeker, and the grenades more effective in their timing, it was the reason for Jimmy’s war that was never clear to Ernie.

SOME OF THE BEST MEN I’d ever known were in the Marines with me. Even some of the officers. But the grunts like me were automatically considered stupid if we didn’t have a college education. Some of the guys in Fifth Division didn’t even have their high school diplomas. But that didn’t mean they were stupid. They were poor. They came from poor families. More poor than I thought was possible. The Corps seemed like an island with pineapples and coconuts to those guys. Some like Cracker Jack had been facing jail time. He told me that he’d had his nickname since childhood because he craved boxes of Cracker Jacks and the small prizes that were in them. When he didn’t have the money to buy them, he began stealing them from the store, and as he got older, he stole bigger things. When he got caught stealing a car, he was given a choice: prison or the military. He said he picked the Marines to get his ass kicked and his head screwed on right.

I did have my high school diploma. My mother also drilled it into my head by dragging me to the bookmobile that reading was as necessary as breathing. She was right. I had no idea what kind of country Vietnam was. I was terrified, and the only way I knew how to get rid of some of my fear was to figure out just where I was going and who lived there. I always was a history buff. So I read everything I could about Vietnam in what little free time I had during basic. I spent one night screwing a prostitute and getting a case of clap that everybody laughed about. But the rest of the time I read. It helped in some ways. Made it worse in others.

Dienbienphu kept surfacing in the talk among the officers at Khe Sanh. I knew exactly what they were talking about although I never let on. It was like saying the Battle of Little Bighorn except it happened in Vietnam. Led by Giap, the Vietnamese slaughtered the French in 1954. I could read my CO’s thoughts. The French were nothing in comparison to what Giap wanted to do now. If Giap could mastermind that one, he could do it to us, and what a notch in his belt that would be. Slaughtering soldiers from the most powerful country in the world. The Khe Sanh base was just one big corral, and we were a lot of pigs. That’s what we were looking at: being gutted.

I learned a lot of good and bad things in the Corps. Those bad things contradicted nearly everything I had been taught that was any good before I joined up. One good thing stood out above the rest: Don’t take what doesn’t belong to you.

It wasn’t a dumb question. He would never have asked such a question before we left the States. But once we landed in Nam and realized the big shittin’ lie we had been dropped in, it had to be asked. You had nothing to lose by asking. Especially if you were stuck at Khe Sanh.

“To fight Communism,” I said, giving the standard answer. I was reading Huckleberry Finn for the umpteenth time and drinking a beer we had pinched from a supply we had found in another bunker. I had my copy of The Man Who Killed the Deer with me too. Ernie had given me those books as well as many others. I had left the rest of them at home. My .45 was napping on my belly. I kept it available when I was relaxing because of rats. The biggest rats I’d ever seen, and they carried anything and everything you didn’t want to get, rabies and fleas that carried diseases like typhoid. Being bitten by a rat was a war wound just like getting shot or bombed. They lived and squealed in the sandbags, and some nights they even fell on us while we were sleeping. That was as bad as being shot in my book. What hell it was at night sometimes. I’d feel a thump and then that wild scratching on my face and chest as they scampered to get off. That squealing. I woke up like a three-alarm fire, hollering like hell. I swear the fuckin’ Viet Cong trained those rats. God, I hated ’em. I shot every fuckin’ rat I saw.

Marv persisted. “Yeah, I know that. But they want it. At least the Vietnamese do. I’m not sure about the Yards. I don’t know what the hell Communism really is,” he said again. “So, really, why are we here?”

Marv had been in college for one year when he got drafted. He was smart. He was just shell-shocked and not thinking. Ignorance was bliss in some situations and probably necessary. I had Huck Finn on the brain at that moment, so I broke it down into terms that I thought would get a laugh out of Marv.

“Beeecuz,” I wisecracked in a southern drawl, “a bunch of ol’ men have der hands in dis cookie ja. And we aw heah to make sho each one of dem gets a cookie.”

“What do we get?”

“Medals.”

“I’m suppose to get bombed for a medal?”

“ ’Fraid so,” I said.

When he didn’t answer, I looked at him. His mustache was ragged-looking, and it appeared as though the razor had skipped over his face rather than made a smooth run. Despite his beard growth, he looked as young as my brother. And as sad. It’s funny how you can love someone so much in such a short period of time. When you know you shouldn’t because he could die at any time. And that’s what we were there for. To kill and be killed. At least Marv didn’t have a choice. But I did it to myself. Like signing a contract with the devil. Rick had enlisted too. I was the stupid fucker that let the devil get him.

“Listen,” I said, shutting my book and holding it out to him, “read Huck Finn. It will take your mind off of things. Reading is good for you.”

“But will it save my life?” Marv asked sarcastically.

“Well,” I answered somewhat seriously, “yes and no. Yes and no.”

A MONTH AFTER ERNIE HAD accompanied the Navy chaplain and the other officer to the Lucas farm, he told another lie. He told his wife that he was making a day trip to Madison to get some parts for their Farmall tractor that he couldn’t get anywhere else. To make sure that the trip would not be in vain, he called the reserve office and made an appointment with the officer who had not gotten out of the car to say good-bye.

“I’m not going to tell anyone,” Ernie replied.

He leaned forward and put his elbows on Hildebrandt’s desk. “His father never gave a shit about him. I know you didn’t tell his mother everything. I’m not leaving until you tell me.”

“It’s not that easy—”

“I fought in the Philippines.”

Ernie stood up, unbuttoned his shirt, and peeled it off. He turned around so the officer could see his back.

“I was not in the Marines. I was in the Army. I won’t talk to any jarheads if that’s what you’re worried about. Does that help?”

Ernie put his shirt back on and turned around. He managed a small smile. “I assume that the Marines and the Army still don’t get along real well.”

Hildebrandt opened the file in front of him and unfolded a map. “These are just some notes from basic training and from the field. Private Lucas belonged to the Fifth Marine Division and was a member of India Company, Third Battalion, Twenty-sixth Marines.”

He pointed to a section. Quang Tri.

“He was at the Khe Sanh Combat Base. On January twentieth,” Hildebrandt said, moving his finger slightly, “the Fifth Division, Bravo Company, temporarily lost hold of Hill Eight-eighty-one North, and the Fifth Division, India Company, moved from Hill Eight-eighty-one South to Eight-eighty-one North to help gain Hill Eight-eighty-one North back. Private Lucas was apparently right behind Lieutenant Miller as they stormed up the western side of the hill. The report says it was foggy that day, and in the early afternoon the fog lifted. That’s when they discovered they were surrounded by the North Vietnamese Army. Lieutenant Miller was shot and killed. Private Marvin Martinson reported seeing Private Lucas running after Miller and then ahead of him. That’s when Martinson lost sight of him. An F-four dropped napalm, and it was so close that it singed Private Martinson’s mustache. Martinson said he heard an explosion too.”

Ernie stared down at the desk. “What else does it say?”

“His record states that Private Lucas excelled in basic training and was one of the best marksmen to pass through Camp Pendleton. A Captain Kendall noted that Private Lucas would have done well at Annapolis and that he was surprised that Private Lucas was not college-educated. He was a sniper in Vietnam. It appears he was extraordinarily good at it. He was very well liked.”

There was a long pause. Ernie could hear movement out in the hallway.

“Listen, I have to be straight with you. I think Private Lucas is dead,” Hildebrandt added, his voice wavering. “I think he took a direct hit of napalm. I pray to God that he was shot first.”

Bile crept up the back of Ernie’s throat, and he coughed to clear it. “Were you in Vietnam?”

“Yes. Ironically, I was at the Khe Sanh Combat Base in ’65 and ’66. The base sits on a plateau. But around the plateau are the highlands. If you didn’t know what was hidden in all that beauty, you would think that you landed in paradise. Since I left,” he said, “they’ve been fortifying the base camp with more and more Marines. Have you seen the papers?”

Ernie shook his head.

“Khe Sanh was only a preliminary target. The NVA was massing up toward Hue. All hell is breaking loose right now.”

Ernie stood up. “I appreciate your honesty. I’m sure you were very helpful to the men in your unit.”

Hildebrandt stood up as well. “I don’t know about that. I am a priest, and I was a makeshift medic. I was not supposed to engage in combat or carry a weapon. But I did carry a forty-five.”

Hildebrandt ran a hand over his bristly crew cut. “I thought being in Vietnam was bad. But these visits I have to make . . .”

“You must be close to being discharged. Can’t you find a parish somewhere?”

“Actually I could have been discharged a few months back. So it’s voluntary at this point. And I’ll be volunteering to get out very soon.”

Hildebrandt walked around the desk so that he could usher Ernie out.

“You cared a great deal about James Lucas.”

“I did.”

Ernie stopped just outside the chaplain’s office door. He turned and looked at the chaplain. “I’m the one who taught him how to shoot so well.”

In a week he would inform the bishop of his archdiocese and then file his discharge papers from the Navy Chaplain Corps. He didn’t know what he’d do after that. It was as though the visit to the Lucas home had opened a hole in his brain and Marcus had crawled through it. He was on Hildebrandt’s mind every day, and he felt the weight of Marcus as surely as if he were carrying the man on his back. He heard the words of St. James: “and the prayer of faith shall save the sick man, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he be in sins they shall be forgiven him. ”

He shut his office door and sat back down at his desk. Stared out the window. He remembered being given Marcus’s dog tags so that he could wash them before they were placed back with the body and zipped into a body bag. The chain necklace draped over his hand and fingers in a familiar pattern, and he stared at it as the water washed the blood and little bits of tissue away. He stared at the rectangular metal plate with Marcus’s ID number. The tag that represented Marcus. A man’s life on a metal tag.

The bizarreness of it. He had dog tags too. He was a priest and a soldier. Why hadn’t he seen it before? Thought about it before. The military unwittingly issued necklaces with tags that represented only five of the fifteen Mysteries. Not the five Joyous or the five Glorious. But the five Sorrowful, punched into the metal by a machine and given to each man. Or, in Marcus’s case, to each boy.

Just yesterday he was on the University of Wisconsin, Madison campus and had to dodge demonstrators. The protests were growing daily. There was one sign held up not by a young student but by a middle-aged woman. He assumed, even before reading the sign, that the official military picture pasted on the tag board was her son. The sign said:

That sound of humming in his ears. Hildebrandt listened as though Private Marcus were right next to him, buzzing that familiar tune in his ears. A nursery rhyme. “Down will come baby, cradle and all.”

He knew Rosemary was right. There was nothing he could have done or said that would have changed Jimmy’s mind. The simple fact that Ernie and Rosemary had survived the war was encouragement enough for Jimmy to think he could do the same.

“Bill,” she reminded him, “is still alive. We could try to see him.”

He heard Bill moan and saw more tears trail down his face. Bill looked like his father, but Ernie would not believe, could not believe that he had his father’s traits. Not the small boy he remembered. That wooden sword. The huge turtle shell encapsulating his left arm so that it looked as though he had no arm at all. The shy Oliver Twist smile of yearning and the small face pressed into the screen of their porch door at lunchtime.

He stroked Bill’s forehead and remembered something else. He used to be able to locate Bill anywhere on his place just by listening. The aria of a child’s voice in song, fading in and out.

Ernie rocked him for the next three hours until his crying died down to an occasional whimper. When Bill fell completely asleep, Ernie moved from beneath him. He gently pushed Bill off his chest onto the ground. Ernie stood up and stretched the cramped muscles in his arms and legs. He looked down the slope and saw his rifle on the ground and the old Remington leaning against the tree. He’d have to leave the rifle and the shotgun and come back for them. Squatting down, Ernie hefted Bill into his arms, amazed by the initial lightness of his tall but impoverished frame, and began the long walk home.

THE DAY STARTED OUT SUNNY and then went gray at noon. At 4:00 P.M. the light began to fade as it does in November. I was dull and slow from lack of sleep. I was staring out the window, remembering Ernie’s hands on my breasts, when I pared the skin off my left thumb while peeling potatoes. I dropped the peeler and shook my hand like a child trying to throw the stinging pain away. While I was holding my thumb under cold water from the faucet, I heard the dog whining and scratching at the back door.

Angel had been gone all night. It was a good thing he came home when he did. The minute I opened the door the wind slapped me, and I slammed the door shut after the dog was inside. The temperature was dropping. I didn’t notice the blood until the dog walked across the kitchen floor to his watering dish. He left a trail of red beads on the linoleum. I bent down and examined him while he noisily lapped up water. He shifted his weight slightly when I touched his right side. He had been peppered with birdshot, the little BBs wedged into his skin. I watched in astonishment as our dog finished drinking and then, circling nose to tail three times, dropped into a relaxed heap on his blanket. I was shocked. Someone had shot our dog.

My nursing bag was in the truck. I knew I’d have to wait until Ernie was home, to hold the dog down while I squeezed the BBs out with my smallest forceps, but I pulled my barn jacket on anyway and went outside.

The first flakes of what turned out to be a snowstorm hit me in the face, and I turned sideways to avoid the needle-pricking feel of them. It was then that I saw the remote but recognizable figure of Ernie at the far end of our field. I remember smiling, thinking that Ernie must have had a successful day because of the way he was walking. So slow. I reached into the truck and grabbed my nursing bag and started back to the house. Something made me look again. I realized there was something odd about the way Ernie was walking. His pace was so labored. I stood and waited. He was carrying something large, and I thought that was too strange to ignore. He usually came home first and got the truck to haul his tagged deer home from the edge of the field. I wondered what possessed him to carry his deer. How could he do it? Two hundred pounds of deer?

I waited. My vision became clearer as Ernie made progress across the field. That was when I cried out. I clutched the nursing bag to my chest and began to run. I had on only my household slippers. When I reached the barn, I simultaneously heard Ernie shout and fell down. My nursing bag dropped into the muddy snow, and my arms flailed like the wings of a wounded duck before I hit the ground. I pushed myself up and heard Ernie shout again.

“Go back!” he yelled. “Get ready to open the door!‘

I slipped and slid my way back to the porch, shaking my slippers free of snow when I reached the steps. My feet burned. I trotted in place to keep them from going numb while I waited. Ernie stopped every so often to shift the weight of the man in his arms. The wind picked up speed, and the snow began to fall more heavily, coming down in white sheets. I could barely see Ernie even though he had reached the barn.

Just in time, I thought.

THAT NIGHT AND THE WEEKS that followed gave rise to our private scars and unspoken grief, some of it floating in the air of the house, some visible enough like braille on our faces and bodies so that it could be read with fingertips. Some of it spoken aloud.

Ernie placed Bill on the same twin bed he had slept in when he was a child and was permitted to spend a few rare nights sleeping over. Then Ernie slumped into the yellow chintz-covered rocking chair in the corner. His arms were so sore, he said, that he wasn’t sure if he’d ever be able to lift them above his shoulders again. I had to hold my breath as I pulled off Bill’s rank outer clothes, then his boots, socks, pants, and shirt. I fingered each piece of clothing before dropping them to the floor and then looked at Bill’s nearly naked body. No blood anywhere.

“He’s not shot.”

“I never said he was. I found him on the ridge,” Ernie said, and sighed. “Or I should say he found me. He’s dead drunk.”

I considered Bill as being closer to dead. The pelvic bones jutting up like river bluffs. The lower abdomen so sunken that it could have held water and a few minnows. There was little fat on him. Even his butt cheeks were as flat and as thin as Swedish pancakes. His underwear would have slipped down his legs effortlessly if I had stood him up. I looked at his face. The cracked and chapped lips and hair as dry as ripe corn tassels. The white spittle gathered in the corners of his mouth. The swollen eyelids red-rimmed and crusted with eye sand. His was not the body of a happy drunk, a drunk of evenings and parties. He did not even have the body of a middle-aged drunk. Bill reminded me of those men I saw as a child. Impoverished and despairing men of the Depression, homeless and starving slowly because they had no will to live and no appetite for food. Whatever money they acquired all went for beer, wine, whiskey, and toward the end raw alcohol, which often killed them. They were found dead on the outskirts of Cedar Bend, sometimes in the alley behind the old hotel, and once a group of them were found frozen to death in Washaleski’s barn. They all had that pickled-in-formaldehyde look, green-tinged white skin from their self-inflicted drowning. I ran the years in my head. Bill was twenty-three years old.

I drew a hot bath for Ernie while he set up an electric heater on one of the bedside tables. Before I shut off the faucets, I filled a large bowl with sudsy water and carried it into the bedroom. Ernie had brought up a chair from the kitchen for me to sit on, and I took out a washcloth and bath towel from the linen closet. As my hand pressed the green washcloth below the surface of the warm water, I could hear Ernie groan as he lowered himself into the tub and then whistle as his cold limbs hit the steaming water.

I began washing Bill’s head, tilting it from side to side, stopping to place two fingers on one of the arteries of his neck. His pulse was weak but not as bad as I thought it would be. Bill’s eyes rolled underneath his eyelids, but they did not open.

There are the normal ABCs of the human body. What should be there from birth and then a record of normal life experiences as they impact the body. A scraped knee scar from climbing a tree, the fleshy bumps left from chicken pox pustules that were scratched repeatedly, and the pincushion of a vaccination shot on the upper arm. The last time I’d seen Bill naked was when he was six years old. He sheepishly allowed me to undress him and give him a bath after a day of play spent in our muddy farmyard. The shivering thighs and the small bud of a penis contracting so that it was almost hidden between his legs. The sweet timidity of a little boy.

I didn’t bother to pull Bill’s underwear off. His briefs were so grimy that I took the scissors from the bedside drawer and cut them free. I tilted the shade on the bedside lamp so that I could see Bill better. I bent down and wet the washcloth again and then stood up. It was only when I heard Ernie washing himself, the splash of water as he soaped up his own washcloth and rubbed it vigorously over himself, that I realized that I hadn’t made contact with Bill’s skin. That the washcloth in my hand was dripping soapy water onto his genitals. I stared as the water trickled over the skin and disappeared between his thighs.

A naked body can also tell stories to the practiced eye. After what we’d been through the previous summer, I wanted to be free from the weight of secrets and bad dreams. I wanted Ernie to be well, and I wanted peace. And here was yet another secret. One that burned my eyes and hurt so bad that I couldn’t detach from it. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to do.

I heard more splashing from the bathroom. I wasn’t sure how long Ernie would stay in the tub. I quickly finished washing Bill. I remember how the heat came out in waves from the red coils of the old heater. How it emitted a sound that was like a baby’s rattle. I had to take my red cardigan off because the sweat was pouring down my face and stinging my eyes. I ducked into our bedroom and grabbed a pair of Ernie’s pajama bottoms from a dresser drawer. I swabbed Bill down with the towel, slid the pajama bottoms over his feet and up his legs. His legs were so long that the pajama bottoms ended just below his knees. I brought the cotton blankets up from the foot of the bed and tucked them under and around his long body until he was swaddled so tightly that only I would be able to uncover him.

I remember walking down the stairs to the kitchen to get two cups of coffee. The dog slept as though the birdshot sprinkled on his sides were a forgotten irritation. I wrote a note to myself and taped it to the refrigerator door: “Angel—shot of penicillin tonight. BBs in A.M.”

I walked up the stairs and handed a cup to my husband soaking in the tub before I sat on the toilet cover and watched him. His chest glistened with water and did not reveal his fifty-eight years as it did on some men. His pectoral muscles were taut from hard work, his shoulders and arms contoured and firm. If our night had been different, I would have stripped and stepped into our large antique tub, and eased myself down until my back was against his chest. As I had done in the old days after making love. I mindlessly lifted the cup to my lips. The first sip burned the roof of my mouth.

Ernie took a drink of his coffee before resting the cup on the edge of the tub. Leaned his head back and gazed at me.

“Now we know what he was doing out there all this time.”

I thought of what I’d just seen and could not fully take in or even speak of.

“Well,” I murmured, “we know some of it. We may never know all of it.”

Ernie took another sip of coffee before placing the cup down on the tile floor. I stared at the familiar keloid scars on his brown skin from shrapnel wounds. I could see two gray bumps on his right shoulder, the skin stretched thin as though they were erupting pimples. After taking care of the dog in the morning, I would then go to work on Ernie. I always lanced the bumps with a razor blade and squeezed out the nugget of metal. I was the archaeologist of my husband’s body, extracting history from thirty-nine years ago. It seems perverse, but I save those nuggets, putting them in a jelly jar and keeping the jar on the shelf with my other preserves.

I turned and stared out the bathroom window. The snow was coming down faster, so white that I wouldn’t have known it was nighttime. It was a November storm that would cover everything, all the gut piles left in the woods from the first day of hunting. It would have covered Bill if Ernie had not found him. Or if he had not found Ernie.

I had the equipment and the saline bags to start an IV in Bill. When he could eat without throwing up, I’d have to start him on something mild for his stomach. Cream of rice or cream of wheat. We would have to take turns sitting with him. The delirium tremors would start in a day or maybe sooner. If we were lucky, he’d have only mild ones, given that he was so young and not a career alcoholic yet. Until I could figure out what to do or what to say, I would be the only one to wash and dress Bill. I was thinking of asking Ernie if we should take Bill to the detox center in Cedar Bend in the morning when he spoke.

“Have you called Claire?”

I shall never forget how at that moment, as though Ernie’s voice had summoned her, Claire banged on our back door.

How she walked inside the kitchen almost unrecognizable, dressed in her late husband’s outdoor clothes. Huge Sorel boots on her feet, men’s red-and-black-checked wool pants with suspenders, and an oversize parka covered with snow. I reached forward and pulled back the hood.

“I need help. I can’t find Bill.”

That breaking of fine china voice. A mother’s voice near the point of hysteria.

“We have him. Ernie found him.”

Claire remained motionless and stared at me. I repeated it a little louder as though she were deaf.

“We have him. Ernie found him.”

I cautiously reached forward and grasped the zipper of the parka. When Claire showed no resistance, I unzipped the parka, took it off, and threw it across the kitchen table. I unbuckled the suspenders on Claire’s wool pants and removed the thick leather mittens and their woolen liners from her hands. Claire lowered herself into one of the chairs so I could pull off the oversize boots.

“Lift up.”

She obediently braced her hands against the sides of the chair and lifted her rear. I rolled the pants down from the waistband. Then I grabbed one of Claire’s hands, felt how cold they were.

“How did you get here?”

“My car got stuck at the farm. I walked across the fields.”

I got up and poured another cup of coffee.

“I want you to drink this,” I said, putting the cup in Claire’s hands, “and then I’ll take you upstairs to see Bill.”

CLAIRE AND I DRANK THREE pots of coffee that night and didn’t sleep at all. She sat in the chintz-covered rocker on the right side of the bed. Ernie sat in another rocking chair at the foot of the bed, and I sat on the left side, on the kitchen chair.

Ernie replied to Claire’s questions with as little detail as possible but enough to soothe her. That he had found Bill on the ridge while he was hunting. That Bill was drunk and crying, and that when he calmed down and fell asleep, Ernie was able to carry him to our place. Just as the snowstorm was beginning to hit.

“Bill was out there by himself?” she asked.

Ernie sat up, smacked out of his exhaustion for a moment. I didn’t dare look at him.

“Yes, he was. Was Bill hunting with someone else?”

“Oh, no,” she said quickly. “He didn’t hunt. He just liked being in the woods. I was just worried because this is hunting season and people do trespass on our land.”

We let it drop at that. I could tell Ernie was bothered by Claire’s question, but he was exhausted and struggling to stay awake. The warmth of the bath, the rhythmic rattling of the electric heater had put him in a hypnotic state. Finally I watched as his eyelids dropped and then shut. He slumped, his head falling to one shoulder, and was out.

We sipped our coffee in silence at first. Claire occasionally reached out to caress Bill’s cheek. I had brought my knitting up from the wicker basket in the living room and pretended to concentrate on adding rows to the sweater I was making.

How strange it was. In all the years that we lived less than a mile apart, this was the longest time I had ever spent with Claire. The first time I’d ever been that physically close to her. She always declined my invitations to come over for dinner, my offers to help, and she never returned my waves when I saw her in town. Even so, I knew we were alike in some ways. We were not the barrel-shaped, knee-slapping women sitting at Clemson’s Bar and Bowling Alley, having one too many beers and laughing in rough, smoky voices, waiting for their league’s turn to bowl. Nor were we women who participated in 4-H or the PTA. We didn’t wear our hair in towers of shellacked meringue that got washed and styled only once a week. Beehive hairdos that had gone out of style years ago except in Olina. Some of those women stretched their styling and washing to once every two weeks, and it would not have surprised me if bugs were hidden in the honeycombs of those columns. Claire used to have black hair like me. But it had turned completely white, and she wore it in a short pageboy that was becoming to her. My own hair was a mix of silver and black. I had always kept it long because Ernie liked it that way.

We had the same taste in books. I know because I saw her name on the library cards of the same books that I borrowed from the bookmobile.

There were differences between us, though. I had gone to nursing school, which was an education and a trade in those days. From what little I picked up from the boys when they were young, Claire had gone to a private liberal arts college in Milwaukee. She still went to church on Sundays. Ernie and I hadn’t stepped into a church in years. I had, all things considered, a wonderful husband. She had had the husband of a B-rated horror movie.

But Claire had children. I did not.

I watched her out of the corners of my eyes. Watched her sip her coffee.

I had wondered for years what her story was and why we never saw company at their place. Company, as in relatives. You would have thought that some of her family would have visited after Jimmy was declared MIA. Or at John’s death. The boys never mentioned grandparents or aunts and uncles. I didn’t ask them. They were children, and I didn’t want to make them feel uncomfortable.

I had sisters and made yearly trips to visit them in Oregon, or they came to visit us. I wrote to girlfriends from the service, and we often called one another at holidays. But then I thought about my parents. My mother. The brothers that I never saw.

My mother had lived just twenty miles away in Cedar Bend, and I visited her only when I absolutely had to. It was a relief when she died. Her cruelty was in her passive acceptance of wrongs committed against us and in her failure to love her three daughters as she did her sons. She didn’t think we were as worthy as our three brothers. Her expectations of us were to stay put, get married, work like beaten horses, have a houseful of kids, and take care of her and Dad in their old age. The farm was never to be ours.

My older sister, Betty, was the first to leave. A week after she graduated from high school in 1935, she got up early one morning and dressed and left a note on the kitchen table. Her note said she’d contact us once she got settled wherever it was she was going, and she signed it “Betty.” That note was a code to Jeannie and me. Like a honky-tonk song, Betty was really saying, “I’m looking for love and someone who’ll want me.” But she did love her sisters. When we woke up that day, we saw two chocolate bars propped up against the mirror on the dresser. We cried and then ran out to the hayloft to eat our precious chocolate. I learned then that sometimes leaving is sweet.

A few years later Jeannie and I did the same thing. Left early one morning and didn’t look back.

That’s why I understood Jimmy’s decision even though it gave me grief.

I was as hell-bent to get out of Cedar Bend as he was to get out of Olina. I worked my way through nursing school and then did the unexpected. I joined the Army in ’43. I wanted to travel, and it made me feel proud to serve my country. I was going to show my mother and father that I was smarter and braver than my spoiled-rotten brothers, all of whom found a way to dodge joining up. I was initially trained for nursing in North Africa. But in the eleventh hour they sent us to the South Pacific. I worked from Guam to the Admiralty Islands and then to Leyte, becoming part of the Fifty-eighth Evacuation Hospital.

I hadn’t planned on returning to northern Wisconsin. I came back to Milwaukee, where I had gone to school, to look for a civilian nursing job. I was no longer so proud or so brave. I felt sad and hollowed out. I thought I had fallen in love with a doctor. But after the war he returned to his wife. The wife I didn’t know about. He had given me a pair of silk stockings as a good-bye gift. In my grief, I blew some money on a wickedly beautiful dress and shoes to match in San Diego. When I arrived in Milwaukee, I heard there was a VFW dance for returning veterans. So I put on my dress and shoes and went to the dance to sap over my wounds and memories. I didn’t want to meet anyone. I just wanted to get drunk. In style.

After the doctor I did not believe in fairy-tale love. I thought love was something that had to get built up over time like a house that needed constant remodeling. Lust was different. It helped ease the loneliness at night just like a good bottle of wine. A temporary bandage on the brain and a lot of fun between the legs. But when I looked at Ernie and heard his voice, a lot of what I thought I knew about myself disappeared. I just knew I had met the man I would marry. If he hadn’t asked me, I would have asked him. In those days they called it fate. Now they call it chemistry or pheromones. We fizzed and popped at first, but we’ve never gone flat. Maybe underground but not flat.

Ernie insisted that we stop in Cedar Bend first and see my parents. I didn’t want to, but Ernie felt it was only right. I think he knew what would happen.

“How could you?” my mother growled when we were alone.

I had predicted that she would shit peanuts, but it wasn’t over the dress. I had married an Indian. Even worse, a local Indian. It was bad enough growing up feeling worthless as a girl, but facing that German prejudice and arrogance after all that I’d seen and been through was the last straw. Her words bounced off me because I didn’t care what she thought. But it would be over my dead body before I’d let her hurt Ernie.

“Too late now,” I smarted off, holding up my left hand. “I thought you might be happy for me.”

“You girls never did have the sense God gave you!”

I marched through the kitchen to the door. “Don’t worry,” I said sarcastically, slamming the screen door on the house I’d grown up in and hated, “we won’t visit and embarrass you. My last name is now Morriseau, not Niedemeyer.”

Ernie drove to Olina with one hand on the wheel and the other hand wiping the tears from my face. I was afraid to meet his parents after that. After all, racism goes both ways. I was afraid they would not think me good enough for their son. How wrong I was.

You would have thought I was the one who had brought their son home alive. His mother had a face as round as the moon and copper penny eyes. When she smiled, it radiated through the darkness I felt, and she laughed right away as though Ernie had brought them a huge surprise. I towered over her, but she reached up anyway and hugged me around my waist. His father was more reserved, but when his big hands wrapped around mine, it was with such strength that I didn’t think he’d let me go.

The sweetness of having such parents. His mother gave me a lifetime of maternal love in the five years that I knew her. Even while she was dying from congestive heart failure and I was caring for her, she would rub my hands from time to time.

“The babies will come,” she whispered. “Maybe a little late like Ernie, but don’t worry. They’ll come.”

I glanced at Claire. I thought about her own mother. Did she talk to her? Did she talk to her sons?

Jimmy had pestered me to tell him stories about the war. Tagged after me with the tenacity of a badger. So I told him the funny stories and not the bad ones, although I did tell him that I’d been sick for a good six weeks when we were on Leyte. I told him how we used our helmets to wash our underwear in, to carry water in, and how the nurses even used their helmets like shovels, digging small tunnels underneath the zigzags of low-grounded barbed wire. How we would wake up with snakes on the dirt floors next to our cots and how I had to kill the first snake with one of my boots so that the other nurses would feel brave enough to do it. How once we ran out of containers to carry our rations of rice and I took off my bra, put my shirt back on, and had them fill the cups of my bra so that I could carry my rice back to the hospital. Jimmy went into giggling fits on our kitchen floor when I told him that. He was fascinated by the fact that I had gone through basic training too and could shoot a carbine rifle. That I outranked Ernie, being a lieutenant while Ernie was a corporal.

And he asked me to tell him the story of how I met Ernie over and over again. He thought it was magic that Ernie and I grew up twenty-five miles from each other, were in the Philippines at the same time, and didn’t meet until that dance in Milwaukee. He wanted to know what we wore and what we talked about. I had kept that dress and opened the closet to show him. He called it my movie star dress. When Jimmy was still small, I sometimes caught him looking into our closet and holding the hem of that dress. I even had to tell him the songs we danced to, which of course wasn’t easy. I couldn’t remember, and I wasn’t about to tell him that I’d been really drunk. So I told him some of the songs that everybody danced to then: “Jivin’ the Vibes,” “This Love of Mine,” “Take the A Train,” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing.” I pulled out my albums and played them on the record player. Jimmy loved music.

I wondered why Jimmy craved our stories so much. Didn’t Claire tell him stories? Or was her life so painful that she could not repeat it or remember any of the good times? I knew there was a complexity to abusive marriages, that the women in them did not enjoy the suffering. Did not ask for it and often found themselves trapped before they knew it. But I often wondered: Did he ever push her too far? Far enough where Claire picked up a skillet or a hammer and tried to smash his skull in?

I took a sip from my own cup of coffee. We probably would have heard about it if she had. A man of his size would have killed her for making such an attempt. But on the off chance that she had succeeded, Ernie and I would have defended her all the way to the stake if it had come to that. Any belief I had in redemption was killed in the Philippines along with all the men whose heads I cradled as they died and the pain I saw in the people who lived there. All the Filipinos and the Chamorros, caught between two forces they wanted no part of, who came to us looking for food. They were often shot, and their women raped. Occasionally a Filipino or Chamorro woman, made a refugee because her village had been bombed, gave birth in the hospital. The baby was passed from nurse to nurse. We could not believe the smallness of its hands or the kernels of its toes. The beauty of its crying. The wounded men who were conscious called out to see the baby as well. The men stared at the baby’s face in disbelief. Birth was not in our line of work, so when it happened, it carried more than a sense of the miraculous. It was an act of opposition to what was going on around us. I’d watch the mother nurse, and it broke me to see that small face blissfully pressed into her breast.

Justice during war takes on a concrete meaning. There are no courts to make fair and judicial decisions, to prosecute the obviously guilty or safeguard the innocent. It is one thing to shoot and kill or be killed in combat. It is entirely something else if you kill and cripple innocent people caught in between. If you torture them, rape them, and keep them prisoner. If you kill children and their mothers. You do that during a time of war, and justice can be immediate. A bullet to the brain is in store for you.

I could never help thinking whenever I was called out with the ambulance during hunting season that it was a pity that John Lucas hadn’t been dispatched while hunting. It was too hard to sort out those deaths. They were almost always ruled accidents. I know almost for certain that if Jimmy had come home from Vietnam, that might well have happened.

I put my cup back on the bedside stand. “He’s going to have delirium tremors soon, and he may even have seizures,” I said. “I think he may need to be in the detox center in Cedar Bend. Do you want us to take him there in the morning?”

She put her own cup next to the heater. “I don’t think,” she said, caressing his face again, “that Bill has insurance any longer. I think he may have lost his job at the Standard station.”

She looked down at her hands, picked at the cuticles of her nails as though she had lost her job and were ashamed.

“The county would pay then,” I said.

“I’m not sure that would be good for Bill. For other people to know.”

I watched her turn slightly in her chair and stare out the bedroom window at the falling snow. The room was so quiet except for Ernie’s occasional snore and a moan from Bill. For other people to know. Always that fear of other people’s knowing her business that had prevented her from asking for help. I suffer from the sin of pride too, but I’d have taken John Lucas down with me in a fight if I’d had to and not given a crap what the community thought.

I could tell by the way she stared out the window, the way her lips pursed together, that she was working up something to say. Then she said it, and it struck me as if she had reached across the bed and slapped me.

“You always had what I wanted. A wonderful husband. A good life.”

She turned and gazed at Ernie, who was not looking his best at that moment. A bit of drool dribbled onto his shirt. I was used to other women eyeing my husband and in fleeting moments falling in love with him. Ernie was the kind of man you fell in love with within seconds. After all, I fell in love with him in the course of one night. And what a night that had been. He had been gorgeous and even now was still handsome. But more important, he was a good man. He is a good man. Someone who thinks deeply about his actions. At times too deeply. There is no pretense or hostility in his manners. But in being the closest one to him and his wife, I have been hurt by Ernie. Husbands and wives hurt each other in ways that others don’t see.

I was sure that Ernie saw as little of Claire as I had. It never occurred to me that Claire would desire my husband. Of course. Why wouldn’t she?

I put my hand on my chest and swallowed.

“Claire. You had children. We couldn’t have children. Our life has not been golden. I love Ernie,” I said, nodding toward my sleeping husband, “but he’s not perfect either.”

Claire bit down on her lower lip, and I knew that it was a reflex to keep her lip from trembling. “You did have children,” she said. “You had my children. My boys loved you.”

She was right. But to hear it said stopped me in my tracks. I had never meant to hurt her. I had thought I was helping her, that the boys wandered over to our place because their mother was too busy or too much in pain. But truthfully, I did love her children. More than that, I coveted them.

“And I loved them,” I said, finding my voice. “But I was not their mother. Are you saying that I took your children away from you?”

Claire looked at me straight on then. For a few seconds the two of us just stared across the bed at each other. Despite years of abuse, she still appeared delicate and birdlike. With the contrast of her snowy hair, her brown eyes appeared darker than ever. If her hair had been a smoky gray instead of white, she would have resembled a junco.

“I would have said that years ago,” she said, trying to stay composed, “but it isn’t the truth. You didn’t even have to try. My boys wanted to come to you. I can’t blame them. I suppose,” she added, clasping her hands in her lap, “that you and Ernie think I’ve been a bad mother all these years. Even now.” She tilted her head toward Bill.

I stood up and put my knitting on the chair.

“We have never thought that. Never. In pain, yes. But bad, no,” I answered adamantly. I placed one hand on Bill’s forehead, to feel if it was hot. “Bill is going through a troubled time,” I said. “But not because of you.”

I reached across the bed. “Give me your cup. I’ll get us some more coffee.”

Claire spoke just as I was taking the cup from her. “I was relieved when he died. I haven’t missed him at all. I didn’t miss him when he was alive. I often thought ... but I had children,” she said defiantly as though daring me to ask what I had wondered earlier. “I’m sorry about a lot of things, but I’m not sorry about his death.”

I had always known it. But it strangely lifted my spirits to hear her say it, to know that there was some part of Claire that her husband could not beat down.

“Nor should you be,” I said.

As I walked down the stairs to get more coffee, it occurred to me that we had the easy part. We had the treasured role of an aunt and uncle or grandparents. We did not suffer the boys’ tantrums or fights, they did not mouth off to us, we were not responsible for making them do their homework, nor did we have to worry over bad report cards. We did not have the daily discipline of raising a child. We had the gift of their love and their good times. Claire had their love too, but she also had the work and the pain.

Did anyone, I thought as I poured coffee into our cups, love Claire without asking something from her?

ERNIE WOULD REMEMBER THE DAYS and nights spent sitting by Bill’s bed. The muscle spasms that rippled down Bill’s belly and legs. The intermittent gagging and crying from withdrawal although it was not nearly as bad as they had anticipated. Ernie’s hands shook as he tried to weave a plastic straw through Bill’s chapped lips and past his teeth to wet his dry mouth with a little water. When that didn’t work because Bill’s jaws were so locked together, Ernie used a mouth sponge. He parted Bill’s lips with two fingers and pressed the sponge against the clenched teeth so that some of the water trickled into the well of Bill’s gums.

Rosemary had inserted an IV line into a vein on Bill’s right arm that first night. But Bill ripped it out of his arm repeatedly during his hallucinated thrashings. They finally tied his arms to the bed, and Rosemary reinserted the line, taping it down in several places on his arm.

Ernie had to wait until the next day after the snowstorm passed to go back to the ridge and search for the guns. He had worn snow-shoes to give him better traction on the deep snow, but upon reaching the base of the ridge, he realized with horror that he had left a loaded rifle behind, and it was now buried under snow. He found the old Remington still propped against the tree, appearing as though it were a snow-covered stick. The ridge was not only snow-covered but had a glaze of ice covering it. He did not want to step on a loaded rifle. He squinted against the sun, trying to determine just where he might have put the rifle down. Then he noticed a three-foot-wide ribbon of impacted snow and about halfway down a patch that appeared to be thrashed. He walked up the ridge on the right side of the packed snow until he reached the mangled snow. He ran his hands gingerly over the spot, pressing down just enough to feel for steel. He found the butt end of the rifle first and dug around the entire rifle before lifting it up. The safety was frozen into place, and he warmed it with his bare hands until the ice melted. Then he moved the bolt back and unloaded the rifle.

He walked back down the slope with a gun in each hand, but when he reached the bottom, he turned to look back up. There wasn’t an animal that made such a distinctive mark, and he had found no footprints. It was exactly how it appeared to be. As though a child had taken out one of those newfangled sleds that looked like a large metal tray but were called saucers and enjoyed a fast and snowy ride down the slope in the night.

Claire saw him standing in the window. Shook her head. She did not want him to come down.

He would never forget the British officer. Red-haired and blue-eyed. Freckles the color of iron-stained soil on his face. The remainder of his body was little more than a head and torso, but he was not dead yet, and he was not unconscious.

“Look at me,” he commanded. Ernie told his buddy carrying the other end of the litter to stop. He balanced one pole on his knee and lifted back the flap on the canvas.

“Shoot me,” the officer said with such calmness. Then he added as though his mother had nudged him, “Please.”

Ernie would remember the weeks after Bill was up and moving around and eating solid food. His clothes did not fit him, and not even his jutting hipbones could hold up his jeans. Claire’s voice rose above Rosemary’s offer to buy him new clothes. It would be a waste, she said, because he would gain the weight back. And where would they find a belt but in a boy’s size, and what would they do with such a small belt afterward? So his jeans were held up with a piece of twine woven through the belt loops. Bill helped with small chores on the farm. In the afternoons they drove over to the Lucas place, to work on the chores needed to keep the place up there.

“I think you have a new name,” Rosemary said after they’d gotten Bill home and put him to bed. They sat under the yellow light at the kitchen table, too exhausted to even drink their coffee. Ernie tented his hands over his forehead. He was more tired than he ever thought was possible, and his arms ached from wrestling Bill into the truck.

“Let me guess,” he said, rubbing his hands down his face and looking at Rosemary. “Fuckin’ bastard.”

His wife smirked.

“I’ll have to set him straight the next time,” Ernie wisecracked. “It’s fuckin’ half-breed. Not fuckin’ bastard. My folks were married.”

They laughed then until their lungs burned, until they coughed from lack of air.

Early in May Bill tipped again. He told them he was going for a walk after dinner. When ten o’clock rolled around, Ernie walked outside and contemplated how far Bill might have gotten on foot and if he had walked the six miles into town.

Tough love, they preached at the weekly meetings. Tough love.

Jesus Christ! he fumed. Tough on who?

He decided to heed the advice. Let Bill fall down wherever he was. But of course Ernie could not sleep. He paced his kitchen floor until he went outside and walked up and down his driveway.

He remembered on his second time down the driveway. Claire had warned him. The Lucas farm was a veritable liquor store, all of it buried underground. He didn’t have to imagine John Lucas doing it. Ernie could see the tall and slope-shouldered man rooting around in the dark when he could not or did not want to go into town. Combing the ground and then digging with the obsessiveness of a red squirrel looking for a lost stockpile of pinecones. Claire had estimated that the entire field behind their barn held bottles beneath its surface. She had gone through their barn with a hay rake. She found and drained twenty bottles of Ever Ready, buried and insulated by old hay and hay bales. At least the barn was clean. But a whole field? How was he going to find all that booze? He looked down at the dog patrolling beside him. He wondered if he could teach Angel to scent alcohol like the pigs they used in Europe to sniff out truffles.

He sat down on the porch steps with the dog. He had a hunch and was proved right when he heard Bill before he saw him, coming from the direction of the Lucas farm. Claire was right. High-proof alcohol, it seemed, could be preserved for eternity in a gopher hole, despite the frost line.

When Bill saw Ernie, he ran into the small patch of cedar swamp just north of the house. Ernie chased and tackled him, and they fell down in the mud, the dog barking wildly from the edge of the barnyard. In an attempt to pin Bill’s arms behind his back, Ernie missed one of Bill’s flailing fists. It careened off his cheekbone, just missing his left eye. He dragged a howling Bill out of the swamp and into the barnyard, where he could see him under the light. Bill twisted out of Ernie’s grasp, and the two men circled each other underneath the yard light.

The dog would not stop barking. Ernie was afraid that Rosemary would wake up, if she hadn’t done so already. So he stood still, and finally so did Bill. They eyed each other from ten feet away. Bill was tanked, but he did not wobble or weave. His feet remained solidly planted to the ground. He was shivering, though, his arms wrapped around his chest. Mud was caked over one side of his face, gumming the eyelashes on his left eye together so that he had to squint.

Bill glanced at the dog. The dog’s barking had diminished to a whining growl, but he remained agitated, walking between the two men.

“For as drunk as you are, you run pretty fast.”

Ernie bent over and rested his hands on his thighs, but he kept his head up and his sight pinned on Bill. The twenty-four-year-old certainly looked better than he had six months ago. Although he remained slender, it was not the skeletal look of a crow-picked deer carcass. Food had put enough flesh on his frame so that Bill carried himself with the languidness of a long-limbed cowboy.

Ernie wiped his brow. He could hear the wind of his own breathing as it struggled to regain its normal rhythm through the pipes of his lungs. He could not figure Bill out. During the day he was deceptively quiet but easygoing and helpful. Occasionally he betrayed that calm by nervously pulling on his thumbs. But if he got a hold of some hard liquor like the bottle of Wild Turkey Ernie had found, he was just that. Wild.

Jesus! He got worked up.

Ernie remembered seeing Jimmy drunk a couple of times, but it was nothing like this. Bill seethed and foamed with the rage of a rodeo bull. Bill was looking at him now with an expression that could not be mistaken. Hate.

Ernie took a deep breath, lifted his head just like the dog when he wanted to sniff the air. If he got any closer to Bill, he’d get loopy just on the exhaust coming out of the kid’s mouth.

Tomorrow he’d have to do something about that field, about the supply resting in its soil. It was evident that John Lucas had taken great care never to run out of what made him tick. He had apparently buried his treasures down far enough so that the freeze of winter would not shatter all of the bottles. Ernie wondered how long Bill had combed through the grass to find a mound. How long did it take him to dig up even one bottle? Then he briefly pondered if hard liquor aged with the changing seasons. Could the whiskey in the bottles have evaporated enough so that instead of being a hundred proof, they were two hundred proof? Alcohol distilled so much that it could kill its consumer. Or anybody close to that consumer.

He straightened up slowly. He was too old at fifty-nine to be physically fighting.

“Hell, Bill, what is it this time?”

Bill’s face crumpled. A thin stream of saliva ran out of the corner of his mud-crusted mouth and rolled down his chin.

“You!” he screamed. “You were always there for James. You went hunting with him! You never took me! I was alone over there!” He stopped and roughly wiped the mud away from his lips with one hand. “You think it was a picnic living with the old man? At least James had you! I didn’t have anybody!”

Ernie groaned inwardly. He hadn’t thought and shouldn’t have spoken as he had. He didn’t mean to sound uncaring or fed up, but he was tired. Still, he should have been more careful.

The dog paced between the two men. Ernie opened his mouth to apologize, to try to explain those lost fifteen years, but Bill beat him to it.

“You wanna know what happened after James left?”

Bill walked until he stood directly underneath the yard light. Then he undid his belt, pulled the zipper down on his jeans, and shoved both his underwear and his jeans down to his knees. He pulled off his T-shirt. Tilted back his shaking head and bit down on one corner of his dirt-smeared mouth. The cracking in his voice.

“Take a good look.”

Ernie stumbled forward and held out his hands as if to shield his face. It couldn’t be what he thought it was. He could feel the pulsing underneath his left eye, the throb of what he knew would be a shiner in the morning. He lowered his hands and stared at Bill’s nakedness. He thought Rosemary had been strangely possessive, insisting on being the only one to help Bill with his bedpan and then, when he could stand and walk, being the only one to escort him to the bathroom. She had been the only one who gave him his baths while he remained bedridden.

It couldn’t be what he thought it was, and he had to fight to keep breathing while his eyes took in what was shown to him.

Rather than the normal-size testicles of a grown man, Bill had lumps the size of small walnuts. Across those lumps were brownish red circles like full moons. Bill had the same lunar scars on his upper thighs and in the creases where his thighs met his groin. On the head of his penis.

Ernie blew air out of his mouth and gulped it back in against the sudden rage that sucker-punched him. Although he did not utter it, a scream ripped through the creases of his brain and bottled up near his ears. The pressure in his ears. He thought he was going to blow up.

He had been so preoccupied with Jimmy, with the possibility of his appearance again, with his own guilt and paralyzed grief for fifteen years that he had done to Bill what it appeared everyone else had done to Bill. They did not question his silence but relinquished the quiet boy to a dark corner, and because he did not speak out, they thought he was all right and forgot about him.

Ernie had trouble focusing on Bill, but he limped toward the young man anyway until he stood in front of him. Still breathing hard against the pain in his chest, Ernie bent and gently pulled up first Bill’s underwear and then his jeans. Zipped up his fly and buckled his belt. He wrapped his arms around Bill’s waist and rested one cheek against Bill’s bare chest. And sobbed.

Neither one of them could recall how they got inside the house and made it up the stairs. Ernie only vaguely remembered taking Bill’s boots off before tucking him into bed. Bill cried and would not let go of him, would not let Ernie leave the room. So Ernie wedged himself next to Bill on the twin bed and held him until they both fell asleep.

They did not hear the muffled dragging going up the staircase. Or realize that they had left the bedroom door ajar. The arthritic old dog took one step at a time, hauling his stiff and painfully knotted hind legs up behind him.

Rosemary found them all the next morning. Ernie and Bill asleep on the bed. Angel asleep in the corner behind the door.

ON THE FIRST DAY HE awoke with complete clarity, Bill became aware that he was not in his own bedroom but in a bedroom faintly familiar to him. He tried to raise one hand and discovered that both his arms had been tied to the bed. He turned his head and saw the IV stand and the saline bag hanging from a hook with its tube trailing to his right arm. He tried jerking his arms free, but it was no use. He did not have the muscle strength to try more than twice. Then he saw Angel.

The dog was lying in the corner by the door. Bill dimly recalled a night in which he’d seen the dog in the field, but he could not be sure that it had been just a dream. The dog coughed and yawned. His breathing was a wheeze and a rattle, as though the air passing to and from his body had to pass nearly insurmountable obstacles. He could not believe the dog was still alive. If I’m twenty-four, Bill thought, then Angel must be at least sixteen years old.

He watched as the dog got up stiffly and stretched. Noticed that his muzzle and the hair around his eyes were ivory. The dog recovered from his stretch, yawned again, and sat. He stared back at Bill.

Despite having a self-inflicted headache that would drop a moose, Bill did all the chores that day in Ernie’s absence and was grateful when it was time to go to bed. He was so tired. Just as he was pulling off his boots, he heard a whine and a scratch at the door. He let the dog in, and Angel limped to his usual corner behind the door. Bill stripped down to his briefs and climbed into bed but did not go to sleep right away. He listened to the labored breathing of the dog and shifted to lie on his side, to quietly observe the sleeping animal. But Angel was not asleep. His large dark eyes caught and reflected the moonlight coming in through the window.

Bill couldn’t remember, but he lied because he didn’t want Rosemary to think he’d forgotten.

“Yeah. He’s an old dog.”

She leaned down from her chair and scratched the dog under his chin. “Angel knows me better than anyone,” she said. Thoughtfully pausing, she added, “Even better than Ernie sometimes. I can’t bear the thought of losing him, but he can’t live forever. And the aspirin I give him for his arthritis can only do so much.”

With the dog’s crusty eyes watching him, Bill suddenly did remember the nearly half-dead six-month-old puppy that Angel had been and his tenacious will to survive. They’d found him in a ditch.

Bill could not look at the dog any longer and turned his face into his pillow. Bill had done the same thing a year and a half ago, taking the corner too fast and spinning the car into a full circle before it slid, back end first, into the ditch. Then he passed out. Wally Wykowski had found him after having driven out to the farm, wondering why his mechanic hadn’t shown up for work.

A couple of weeks ago his ability to dream suddenly returned, and he did not have good dreams but nightmares. Images so vivid they spiked right through him and caused him to wake up yelling. One night he woke up covered in a sweat that chilled him and that pierced his senses. What he saw and felt was neither a dream nor a nightmare. It had been real once.

“There is only one man in this house.

“Only one man.

“Only one man.

“Only one man. ”

Then Bill could remember nothing but waking up. His bed was often wet, but sometimes he made it to the toilet on time, and that was even worse. His groin cramped, and he pissed fire, the stream of urine coming out of his body in pumped jerks.

It did not occur to him that he could tell anyone because he did not know if it was real. It had a nightmarish quality, something that couldn’t be explained in the daytime. Yet when he looked down at himself, it was shamefully visible on him.

“Angel had been gone all night, the night before. He showed up just before Ernie brought you home,” she went on. “His right side was covered with birdshot. Somebody had shot him. We still don’t know who or why. Thank God it was birdshot,” she added, looking down at the dog lying near their feet, “and not a deer slug.”

He had told Ernie that he couldn’t remember much from that night, and it was the truth at the time. That night came to him in bits and pieces, out of the blue and mostly while he was working during the day. But it came to him now in one big chunk. He remembered raising the gun and being angry at the dog. How the dog had stood up and become a man. Then fire and burning.

He crawled back into bed and pulled his knees up to his chest. Tomorrow he would have to tell Rosemary. He had shot the dog.

He wished his mouth were not so dry. He wished Ernie were home.

The dog took a deep breath, exhaled noisily, and rested his head on his front feet.

Bill wondered why the dog didn’t hate him or give any outward sign of it. The dog had to have known it was him, smelled him, and of course, he sat in the field and watched him. Wouldn’t Bill have hated someone who had shot him?

He thought about Angel lying in that ditch fifteen years ago. He had been put there to die by someone else until Ernie and Rosemary had pulled him out.

“It wasn’t easy getting him out of that ditch.” Rosemary laughed. “He growled and tried to lunge at Ernie. We hypnotized him with a flashlight. But he was so weak too. Ernie was the brave one who tied the twine around his muzzle. It took him a long time,” she said, “to get used to Ernie.”

“He likes him now.”

“Oh, sure. But it took awhile. He still likes women better. And children who don’t tease him. You just prefer us gals, don’t you?” she crooned to the dog, rubbing the top of his head. “He never forgets anything,” she added.

He sat up and, leaning forward, looked out the window.

Bill was staying in what used to be Ernie’s boyhood bedroom. He could see the barn and the field behind it from the window. He briefly tried to imagine Ernie as a little boy and what Ernie saw out of that window fifty years ago.

Then he thought of his father. It was going to be hard to stay sober. What else would help him against the memory of that remorseless, cold-eyed man or the chanting Bill still heard in his sleep? What would brace him against the hatred of the man and the marks he left as though he had branded his son with an identity he could never erase? His father had been one mean fucker, and stories about him still hovered in the community. Hovered over Bill.

Bill looked at the dog again. Angel had never lost his hatred of most men. His reaction to their presence was still so strong that their first priority was to get to the dog first when someone drove onto the Morriseau place, just in case Angel bit someone. What the dog had been through was visible on him. The lumps on his head. The one ear tattered as though it had been put through a paper shredder. How it waved in the wind like a shot-up flag.

Bill wiped his eyes again.

Some dogs wounded as badly as Angel had been either became so savage they had to be put down or they cowered and shied away from people, crying even if they were touched lightly. Angel had done neither. He had never walked as though he were wounded. He had acquired a ruff around his neck with age and a slow stroll that made his big shoulders ripple with authority. That announced his territory and his determination to protect those within it. Had Angel been a wolf or coyote, his scars and his age would have identified him. To have survived those injuries and have reached that age in the roughness of the natural world would have elevated him. Made him larger than life and a legend.

He would be the talk of the woods and a presence that would cause fear in most hunters.

ERNIE WAS GONE MOST OF that day and into the night. Not because he couldn’t face Bill but because his rage was so severe he could not risk its unwarranted explosion on those he loved.

He killed time before nightfall by driving up to Lake Superior. He had taken one of his rifles with him, but after reaching the hardware store in Washburn, he realized that using bullets would be dangerous. He was about to the leave the store when he caught sight of a shelf full of baseball bats. He bought six of the cheaper wooden ones but reconsidered and went back into the store to purchase two of the more expensive heavy alloy bats. Then he drove on to Bay-field, where he bought a whitefish sandwich and thick-cut potato fries from a lakefront restaurant. Sitting on one of the docks, he ate his food and watched the ferry cross back and forth from the main-land to Madeline Island.

It was midnight when he reached Olina again and parked by the cemetery on the edge of town, shaded by very old and lofty elms. He gathered the bats under one arm and, using a tiny flashlight from the truck’s glove compartment, walked through the newer section of the cemetery.

The headstone was as clean and polished as the day it had been set into the ground. An expensive gray granite. He had to give Claire credit, though. The only words chiseled on it were the name. No date of birth or date of death. No terms of endearment. Still, it galled him. The money spent for a meaningless piece of stone. Money that Bill and Claire needed. And the harshest joke of all, John Lucas was buried in an area of ground known as the Sacred Heart Cemetery.

He picked up one of the wooden bats and raised it above his head. He listened for a moment, to make sure that he was alone. Then he brought the bat down and struck the headstone. It splintered after the third strike, and he tossed the handle aside. He picked up another bat, and then another, beating the headstone until they broke.

It was the metal alloy bats that did the most damage, and he regretted not purchasing more of them. He stepped sideways and thought of what he’d seen the night before. The maimed genitals. The humiliation and agony on Bill’s face. He swung so that the tip of the bat smashed into the chiseled name. He shut his eyes against the chips and wedges of granite that flew with each strike. When the first alloy bat was so severely dented that it was useless, he picked up the second alloy and last bat. Exhaustion stopped him before he had destroyed the last bat. His shirt was soaked with sweat, and he felt something heavier trickle down his chin. He had bitten his lip.

He stood for a while until his breathing was steadier. Squatting down, he gathered up as much of the splintered wood as he could and the two alloy bats, and headed back to the truck. He took the long way home and stopped to dump the remains of the wooden bats into the Chippewa, where they would secretly float away.

He hid the alloy bats in the far corner of the hayloft in his barn before going into the house and taking a shower. Then he crawled into bed next to Rosemary and fell asleep.

“WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME?”

We were in bed talking in the dark. It was two nights after Ernie found out. I had rubbed ointment into the bloody split on his lip.

“Because,” I answered, feeling fragile myself and near tears, “I was afraid of what it would do to you.”

I wasn’t happy either. I resented being the one who knew, who had to tell. It reminded me of writing letters for dying soldiers. Putting their last words to their families on paper in my penmanship. I was sick of being the body through which bad news had to pass. It wasn’t entirely true, though. Ernie had been the one who had had to tell Claire about Jimmy and then about John.

But there was another reason I hadn’t told Ernie. A very good one. Bill did not tell me or give me permission. I stumbled on it while he was unconscious. I had no right to speak of it until Bill did. That’s what Ernie had to know.

“Bill had to tell you,” I whispered into his neck. “Not me.”

But I did tell Claire. Or rather I showed her. That fourth day while Bill was still drifting in and out of consciousness. We were sitting across from each other, in our same chairs, listening to Bill’s breathing. I stopped knitting.

“Claire,” I said, standing up, “I have to show you something.”

I slowly rolled the blankets down. Unsnapped the top of Bill’s pajama bottoms and tugged them down his legs. She stared at his bared hips.

“What is that?” She reached forward and touched one of the red marks with a fingertip.

“Those are burn scars. I think, from a cigarette.”

She cupped his penis in her hand for a moment.

“I didn’t ... I didn’t ... know,” she said in a small voice. “Bill would never let me see him naked. I don’t remember when he got funny that way about it. He would never wear shorts,” she continued in a daze, “even on the hottest days.”

I heard Ernie rustling around in the kitchen downstairs. I pulled Bill’s pajama bottoms back up and covered him once again with the blankets.

“C’mon,” I said, “let’s go for a walk. We need some fresh air.”

Claire stumbled going down the stairs, and I caught her by the arm. I had to put her coat and boots on. Her mittens. Then I dragged her outside with me. When we waded through the snow to the garden, she fell against me, and I caught her again. Her lips opened, and her teeth bit down into the fabric of my coat. I felt the sound in my shoulder before I heard it. That intense wail of a mother in pain. She began to slip from my arms, and I didn’t have the strength to hold her up. So we went down on our knees.

I went through the motions of the day Ernie smashed John’s headstone, smiling like an idiot as though nothing were happening and making lunch and dinner. Talking to Bill, who was severely hung over. Bill asked me where Ernie had gone, and I lied, saying he had gone to look at a used tractor for sale near Rice Lake. I had no idea what Ernie was up to that day or where he was, but I knew what had happened the night before. The dog’s barking woke me up. I watched from our bedroom window and bit my knuckles, wondering if Bill and Ernie would fight some more and whether I should go down there to break it up. I couldn’t have predicted what happened next. But it made sense. How do you explain something like that? Bill could not say what was done to him. He had to show Ernie.

I was grateful that John Lucas was already dead. I know Ernie would have killed him. I don’t know how—hanging him from a rope, beating him, and then maybe shooting him—but he would have killed him. And I would have lost Ernie for doing what was only right, what was just. Still, killing John Lucas wouldn’t have relieved Ernie or erased the physical remnants of what had been done to the most consecrated part of a little boy.

Claire said nothing to us about the wrecked headstone. But she told the priest that she would not pay for another one.

Ernie had trouble getting out of bed again, and he had that dead fish look about him for a while. But he did get up. He had to. Bill was with us, and that was a blessing. Sometimes you can do the impossible for another person when you cannot do it for yourself.

While Ernie spent time with Bill, I spent time with Claire. We walked our field and her field countless times, wading through snow and then through the mud of spring. I had lived in this area all my life and on the Morriseau farm for nearly forty years. But I never took the time just to amble through it. I let Claire lead us on the walk, and it was always the same. She could name all the birds, knew what plants grew on the edge of the fields and why some of the cedars grew in their twisted way. Claire wordlessly showed me how walking the same route over and over again had a meditative effect. How she had survived those years of loneliness and pain by putting her feet on the ground and moving forward. It hit me that walking in a circle means you never come to a dead end. You just keep walking the circle over and over until whatever it was or is that bothered you slows down or becomes unwound. And then, maybe, drifts away.

I finally understood why she had stayed after her husband’s death and had not returned to her hometown of Milwaukee. It was never his home. It was hers.

THEIR HOUSEHOLD THAT WINTER, SPRING, and summer of 1983 became one in which three people resided at the Morriseau place with a fourth, Claire, drifting between the two farmhouses, staying some nights with Rosemary, Ernie, and Bill. Rosemary had a short bout with her own polluted memories. They drifted up through her sleep and caused her to kick the covers off the bed. One night, before he realized what was happening, she had pushed Ernie off the bed with such force that he hit his head on the bedside table before landing on the floor. Then there was Bill’s constant flood of nightmares. One of them, both of them, and sometimes all three of them found themselves running into Bill’s bedroom when they heard him crying loudly in his sleep.

A week after he smashed the headstone, Ernie borrowed a six-bladed plow meant for cutting deep furrows and began the hard work of unearthing what amounted to liquid grenades left by John Lucas in the field. He wired a wooden box behind the seat of the tractor. Whenever he unearthed a bottle or the blades sliced into and smashed a bottle, Ernie stopped the tractor and let it idle while he picked up the bottle or the pieces of glass and put them into the wooden box. If there were any contents in a bottle, he used a glass cutter to slice off the rusted top and drained it into the soil. Only half of the field was pockmarked with booze, and for that he was grateful. Most of the bottles containing less than 80-proof alcohol had shattered. But that half was so loaded with buried forts of shattered bottles and then some bottles that were miraculously intact that Ernie filled six empty oil drums with bottles and glass.

“You won’t be able to walk barefoot in that field for a few years,” he warned Bill and Claire, knowing that he had left numerous shards of glass.

While he monotonously worked the field over, he tried to grasp a way to begin again with Bill. He envisioned what his own father would do. Watching the blades cut and fold the top layer of dirt, snarled with brome and timothy weed roots, he realized that his boyhood had been happy and peaceful because Claude Morriseau did not dwell on the actions of others, particularly if they meant him harm. His father was not without compassion. But rather than let hatred eat him, Claude Morriseau stepped away from people who could not be helped, distancing harm so that it petered out on its own volition or turned back and bit its owner.

In those days and especially among his father’s people on the Heron Reservation, such an act toward a child was dealt with in a manner consistent with the horror of the act itself. The reservation was a sovereign nation and had its own court system. Even then the perpetrator was often not brought forward. They made sure, of course, that the guilty was indeed guilty. And then they made sure that he disappeared.

HOW COULD I LOOK MY SON in the face, knowing it was I, his mother, who should have protected him? I never thought I would face pain as terrible as that day when I was notified that Jimmy was missing in action. Of not knowing what had gone through his mind before he died. Or how long he had suffered.

This was worse in some ways. I threw up for days afterward and could not eat. I tried to remember if there were any clues that I hadn’t picked up on. What hadn’t I seen?

What possesses a man to torture an area of the body meant for pleasure and for giving life? A sacred area. How could he do it to a little boy? His own son?

It would shock people to hear me say it, but my dead son has benefits that my living son does not have. It would have been kinder to have just killed Bill rather than calculate and deliver this secret torture night after night. To leave him with visible scars and a humiliation and pain that would deny him the right to seek love. There were clues, though. I have scars too. They call it rape, but back then I thought of it as survival. To squeeze my eyes shut and let him do what he wanted. It never occurred to me that he would do the same to Bill.

I could not bear to think of Bill’s nights. I did the only thing I could think to do, as a bulwark against such knowledge. I walked at night, around and around our field and then sometimes the Morriseau field. I walked down the driveway and once that spring all the way to the river. I contemplated my life that night, leaning over the bridge. Hearing the dark water below and wondering if my body would float unimpeded all the way to Eau Claire or get snagged on a submerged log just a mile or so down the river.

I was walking back from the river in the dark when I heard footsteps on the gravel walking toward me. Then I saw the light from one of our kerosene lamps.

“Mom. What are you doing out here?”

“I needed to go for a walk.”

“In the dark, Mom?”

I said nothing. He lifted the lamp higher to look at me.

“Are you mad at me?”

Was I mad at him? That was too much. I cried so suddenly and so hard that I could not stand up. Everything that tormented me ran to the front of my brain and pounded until my forehead, my cheeks, and my eyes bulged with pain. I went down like a tripped kid onto my hands and knees. I didn’t have to look to know that my palms and knees were scraped and bleeding and that I had pebbles jammed into my skin. I was grateful that the gravel hurt so much. It was not enough suffering. I deserved to feel pain for what I did not do, and I wanted Bill to be angry with me.

“It is,” I choked out, blindly reaching forward to grab one of his ankles, “the other way around. You should be mad at me.”

“Those Lucases,” people would say if word got out that we were seen sitting and crying on the side of the gravel road near our farm in the middle of the night. “They have always been crazy.”

“The worst,” he whispered to me, “is that I can’t figure out how he got into my bedroom. I locked the door every night and put a chair in front of it.”

I wondered too. I remembered John as being gone most days and evenings. Did he come back at night when we were asleep? Or maybe he never went to work but hid underneath Bill’s bed?

When I asked him how long he thought it went on for, Bill said, “I don’t remember. It stopped, I think, when I was being carried somewhere. And then someone laughed.”

My son released me with those words. Such a gift. That he could remember that night and that laughter. I had at least, unknowingly, ended his torture. I almost told him about the voice in the field, the voice that told me to laugh. But Bill had enough to struggle with, and I did not want to burden him with the additional thought that his mother was really crazy.

It was such a humble question. As if bringing him home from a near death of hypothermia in the woods were not enough. Ernie was in such deep misery that it announced itself in his body. He walked as though physically gnarled and twisted from torture. I did not have to be told who had smashed John’s headstone.

I didn’t want him to have a headstone in the first place. We could hardly afford it. Nor did he deserve to be buried in consecrated ground. That was when what little Catholicism I had left in me reared up like a spurred horse.

“Your husband was baptized a Catholic.” Shocked at my vague suggestion that John not be buried in the Sacred Heart Cemetery, Father Wallace admonished me. Of course Father Wallace was thinking of himself. His puffy face with its explosion of broken red and purple capillaries was a strong sign of his own excess. If he could deny it in himself, then he could certainly bless a fellow drunk with the same blindness.

It was on the tip of my bitter tongue. “Throw him,” I very nearly said, “into potter’s field.”

I had to think of the outcome, though. Social norms in Olina dictated that I should bury my husband in the proper way. Father Wallace would take up a collection for the headstone if I didn’t come up with the money. That would cause gossip, and I had to think of Bill. I did not want people to poke my son with painful questions.

I envied Ernie. I understood why he had done it. I only wish I had thought to do it as well.

When John was alive, I visualized murdering him every day. How to do it and not get caught. It was only right. We deserved to live our lives with the release and pleasure his death would bring. There was no court of law that could know how we lived or what he did to us. They could not exact justice on him in the way I could, or Bill could, or Jimmy could, if he had come home. Or even Rosemary and Ernie.

I could have helped Bill much sooner. Those years I kept him to myself. Those years when I did not allow him to wander over to the Morriseau place. As if to punish me for my selfishness and my fear, fate allowed Ernie to find him when I could not. I did not tell Ernie and Rosemary what I did before I walked through the fields to their house. I did not tell them that I trudged through the swamp and woods. It was beginning to freeze, and I had to grab the lower branches on some of the trees, if there were any, to walk up one side of that ice-covered ridge. Most of the time I had to crawl, and when I reached the top, he was not there. I walked sideways going down the other side, but I fell anyway and slid straight down. I was desperately trying to grab at anything to stop my descent when I hit something hard midway down and felt it through the rear of my pants. I could barely see it, but after I wiped the snow off it and read its shape with my leather mittens, I knew it was a gun.

You can imagine what went through my head. I tried calling for Bill. I became frantic and screamed his name. It is useless to do so in a northern snowstorm. Snow muffles sound and buries it like it does everything else.

“Help me, help me,” I kept saying, but all that ever answered me was the wind. There is that moment that has happened to me many times in my despair and that always feels new with each crisis. I sit there feeling small and unable to think. Feeling stupid and ashamed. Crying because I don’t know what to do. Then something takes over in my body. Instinct, I think. I just got up and started moving as fast as I could. I fell again and slid the rest of the way down that slope. I stood up and hiked through the freezing swamp bedding. It was cold, and the snow was coming down in blankets. It is a miracle that I didn’t get lost and die out there.

I reached the Morriseau porch feeling much like Zhivago when he finally makes his way, frozen and exhausted, back to Lara in that little village in the Urals. I pounded on their door. Rosemary opened it, and that butter yellow light that seems to inhabit country kitchens filled my face. I was speechless with gratitude and nearly out of my mind with terror.

We ate dessert, and then Bill and Rosemary went outside to weed the garden.

I caught Ernie by the arm before he went outside to join them. “You want to know how to help Bill,” I said. “He has never been a child. What would you do to make a little boy happy? To help him?”

AFTER A LONG HOT DAY of putting new siding on the Lucas farmhouse, Bill took Ernie up to his bedroom and showed him the bed Jimmy had slept in and his own bed. He took out his shoebox of mementos, and they sat together on the bed and looked wordlessly at the Polaroid of Bill’s brother. At the leather pouch containing the fringe from the bedspread. A mud turtle’s shell. The worn leather collar from a dog Bill and Jimmy once had. The thick packet of letters sent from Vietnam.

“He never told me until the night before he left that he was leaving.”

“That’s the same night we found out,” Ernie said. “Remember you ate at our house and your dad came to pick you up?”

Bill flipped the picture over and stared at the writing on the back. “He told me that he had signed up that winter and that he never thought the day would come when he’d have to leave. That never made any sense to me. How could you sign up and not know you were going to leave?”

“I don’t know, Bill,” Ernie answered. “Your mom says she didn’t know until that night as well. I can’t figure that one out. It didn’t seem like something your brother would do. I don’t mean enlisting. I mean, not telling anyone.”

“I thought he 1-1-left,” Bill stammered, his voice cracking, “because he didn’t 1-1-like us anymore. Because we w-w-weren’t ever happy.”

Ernie pulled Bill’s head to his shoulder. “Nah, Bill. That wasn’t it.”

“Hey! That’s a good question. I was wonderin’ the same thing,” a brawny woman about Ernie’s age chimed in.

“Well,” one of the senior members said, not comfortably, “think of it as a higher power then.”

Bill decided to focus on “One day at a time.” Ernie thought that was a better idea too. After all, that was the unofficial creed of life in northern Wisconsin, where jobs were seasonal at best and the tourist trade fluctuated with people’s desires and pocketbooks. It could be said of farming as well with a slight modification: “One rock at a time.”

“That’s where,” Bill said, pointing to the small cemetery they always drove by on the outskirts of Cedar Bend on their way home, “the ‘Let go and let God’ people are.”

“Lucky bastards,” Ernie cracked, thinking of the dismal price of beef and whether or not he’d have enough hay for the coming winter.

“Hey,” he said nodding to the bookshelf, “where’s Huckleberry Finn? And there’s another book that’s missing. Oh, I know. The Man Who Killed the Deer.”

“I don’t know. Those books didn’t come back with his other stuff.”

Bill got up and put the shoebox back into his dresser drawer. He sat down next to Ernie on the bed.

“I gave him those books. Have you ever read them?”

“No. James was more of a reader than I am.”

Bill was telling a white lie. Ernie remembered seeing him read books and carry books. Remembered how he had snuggled next to Rosemary as she read books aloud to him.

“That’s not true. I used to see you reading all the time.” He nudged Bill good-naturedly.

“I guess.”

“You guess? I know. You should start again. It would take your mind off things.”

Then Bill got up again and opened the closet. He took out the Marlin .30-30 rifle and handed it to Ernie.

“It used to be James’s. I don’t hunt. I think the rifle probably needs cleaning.”

HE HAD LIED TO ERNIE. Of course he used to read books. His mother had always read books and continued to read books. His brother had read voraciously. And Bill used to lose himself in books as well. He just stopped reading his senior year of high school. If Ernie had pressed him, he would have shaped and stretched the lie and told Ernie that he didn’t know why he stopped. But he did.

He couldn’t hold a book with shaking hands. He didn’t want to read when he felt numb and weightless. A book would have crashed through all that. He did try. The beer bobbing in his veins caused a throbbing in his eyes. The words appeared to skip across the page and not make any sense.

He thanked her at breakfast and was startled when she beamed. It wasn’t until a week later, when a thunderstorm kept them all inside, that he picked up the book.

“One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary Bishop from America were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine Hills, overlooking Rome....”

He read through the night.

Bill could feel the dust of the Acoma mesa. He wanted to crack piñon nuts between his teeth and stand on top of the mesa, all ten acres of it, and look at all that blue sky and the distance. The seemingly unending distance.

Huddled in his bed, Bill was only vaguely aware of the rain that slapped the window glass. The thrashing of the pine boughs in the wind. He was in Acoma. He could feel the night coming on there after a hot day and the slow gathering of the Acoma people. Their singing and chanting. How they gathered as a large family and approached the abusive priest reading his breviary. How they bound his hands and feet. He tried to imagine those small people carrying that obese man and throwing him off a cliff.

He reread that book several times. Then he moved on to the books on his brother’s shelf. Ernie gave him new copies of Huckleberry Finn and The Man Who Killed the Deer.

He had forgotten the interior pleasure of sitting quietly and absorbing a story that lifted him effortlessly away from his own life and at the same time strangely affirmed that his own life was real to him. People shared his own feelings long ago. Books held those people whose lives were not so far from his own. Books said that life mattered in its beauty and its ugliness. His life.

“I want you,” his mother said one evening, “to go to college. I wanted Jimmy to go to college. He was smart, and so are you. College,” his mother said with a dreamy look, “is not at all like high school. It is like having the world brought to you, and you can study anything you like.”

She got up and opened one of the kitchen cupboards. Placed a jarful of money on the table. “I found this when I was cleaning out the barn. You can use this to buy your first semester of textbooks.”

He stared at the jar. So many nights when he was short of cash for beer or cheap whiskey, it never once tickled his memory. That money hidden in the corner of the barn.

“I think your dad probably hid this and forgot all about it. Funny, isn’t it?” His mother giggled. He looked up at her. She had a satisfied “I-got-him” look on her face. He had a flash of that look from long ago. Things will get better.

Her giggle snagged him. It was a joke. A joke on him. And so funny.

“Not Dad,” he gasped, slapping the tabletop. “James. I got that money from James. I forgot all about it.”

“He sent you money?” His mother was stunned.

“Yeah. All of that,” he said, wiping his face on his shirtsleeve.

“When you were eight and nine?”

“Yeah.”

“And you kept it?”

“Yeah.”

“Good Lord!” His mother covered her mouth. She tried to hold it back with her hand, but her giggling bubbled through the crevices between her fingers.

Bill howled. “James told me not to let Dad use it on a beer dream!”

That did it. His mother dropped her hand from her mouth and let loose with raucous laughter. Bill slapped the table again and joined her.

A somber mood settled over them when they both were too tired to laugh anymore.

“I want you to understand something,” his mother said. It was her choice of words that once again conveyed her intent. It made him sit up and listen.

“Small towns are often like chicken coops. They don’t like or accept difference or change. If one hen is molting or is hurt and the rest of them aren’t, they will peck at that bird until she is bloody. I’ve seen hens that were molting,” his mother said, “get pecked to death.”

She ran her hands down the sides of the large jar. Rubbed it up and down as though it were a genie’s bottle.

“In a small town,” she said, “talk is like that. It can kill you if you let it. Sometimes you need to leave and finish your changing somewhere else before you can come back. Then they have nothing to say about it because they don’t know where you’ve been. That frightens them. Then they shut up.”

She pushed the jar into the center of the table and then leaned toward Bill. “Will you at least try a year of college? I think you’ll be surprised.”

He glanced at the jar of money.

“I’ll try.”

BILL WAS NOT A HUNTER like his brother. But he loved the river. Loved water.

They sat one morning, their legs dangling off the old logging bridge above the Chippewa, and ate fried egg sandwiches that they had made before leaving the house.

“We used to come down here. Except Terry was with us most of the time.” Bill peered down at the water. “We never did go fishing. James said he’d teach me to fly-fish, but he never did.”

Then he lifted his head and smiled at Ernie. “James always said you were the best.”

“Best gone to rotten. I haven’t fished in a long time. But I’ll teach you how to fly-fish. Do you still want to learn?”

The silver from his new braces glinted in the sun. Ernie smiled. It was an incongruity to see teeth braces on a grown man. Bill filled out his frame of six feet, five inches and towered over Ernie far more than Jimmy had.

As Ernie sat in the waiting room, he thought about Bill’s life and where it would go. Bill had perhaps chosen the more difficult path in life. Ernie knew Bill could have escaped this grief, left home like his brother, left it all behind. Ernie thought of how he viewed his own classmates who had stayed in Olina and never gone anywhere: provincial, cowardly, redneck, and small. To go away and then come back was something different. A person gained perspective that way. But Ernie had to think twice about his notion when it came to Bill. To stay in one place required discipline in many ways more rigorous than holding yourself together when surrounded by a new land and new people. It might be harder just to stay and live with the foundation your family might have laid for you, rotten or not.

The doctor came out of the examining room and gestured to Ernie to come into his office.

“His genitals function normally in that he can pass urine and get an erection. But,” the doctor said, shaking his head, “I doubt he will ever be able to have children. Testicles damaged like that can barely produce any sperm. I can run more tests, but I can tell you just by looking at him that they would be a waste.”

“What about surgery?” Ernie asked

“To open the ducts from the testicles?”

Ernie nodded.

“There’s not even a fifty-fifty chance. And why put him through that?”

There were several times that late summer and early fall when Ernie happened to glance at Bill, especially when they fished the Chippewa, and saw Bill reel in his line and pause. Watched him stare and focus on something down the river. Ernie quietly inched his way through the brush in the hope of glimpsing whatever it was that Bill seemed mesmerized by. Once Ernie thought he heard whistling. He looked up from the fly he was tying on his line to locate it. He felt a cold mist settle on his face and thought it was river spray. But when he wiped his face with a handkerchief and then looked down, he saw that he was standing in shallows that threw no water, no mist.

When they weren’t fishing, they hiked the ridge. Stood on its pinnacle and looked down at the lake on its north side. It happened more than once, his nostrils picking up the sharpness of it. Finally he asked Bill, “Do you smell smoke?”

“Sometimes.”

Bill looked at the lake and chewed his lower lip.

“Huh,” Ernie grunted, thinking it was the new guy who bought the neighboring farm just beyond the lake. Ernie thought he was burning leaves or wood, except that the smoke had a sulfuric edge to it.

HE HAD ONCE INHABITED his mother.

Bill thought about this as he watched her eat. They were having supper alone as they had in the old days. Mesmerized by the motion of her hand, by the clink of the fork as the tines hit the plate when she pierced a piece of broiled chicken, he stopped eating. He watched as her arm brought the food up to her mouth. It was one of those things he could not remember. His mother eating. It slowly dawned on him that he had no memory of it because he had not seen her eating food. She always sat and watched him as he ate his meals. When did she eat? he wondered. She must have eaten something or else she would have starved and would not be sitting with him at the table now. He gazed at her face. She was thin in those days. As a child he had often thought she was hollow. In those days she appeared to be sustained only by coffee and by the invisible reserves in her own body, her flesh eating upon itself.

He had once gnawed on her as well. Wasn’t it true that babies were parasites on their mothers? He had lived in her once. Small as a pea, he had floated in her habitat. She had been his soil, sky, water, and air. Now through testing and ultrasound, women could know the sex of the babies they carried. But did his mother have a sense back then that she was a woman walking with a baby boy inside her? That twice in her life, for nine months, she was both male and female?

He watched her sip from her glass of water. Their silence was pleasant and comfortable. It had almost always been just the two of them. He could dimly remember James at the dinner table, his joking or sometimes his quiet anger. But mostly it was just the two of them.

Now there was talk in town about him.

Wally Wykowski took him back. Working at the Standard station did not make him feel proud or accomplished as it had when he was seventeen. It was boring and simultaneously irritating, even hurtful at times. Local people he’d been familiar with all his life kept their distance, and he could hear their whispers. Saw their elbow nudges. They didn’t have to say it to him directly. It was apparent when they visibly chewed him over and then dismissed him. Like father, like son.

“Ignore ’em,” Ernie told him. “And they wonder why they don’t make ends meet. Should flap their tongues less and work their hands more.”

So Bill tried. He considered them as he did his father. Bothersome elements like tornado warnings or heavy winds. But he had never belonged to his father and was persistently perplexed that people connected them just because of his drinking.

“Whose little boy are you?” He remembered being teased by Mrs. Schaefer, who owned the hardware store with her husband, Sheldon. Bill was still quite young, just barely out of his white toddler walking shoes. It was during a rare moment when both his parents were present. He took his thumb out of his mouth and silently pointed at his mother.

Bill had always thought of himself as the son of Claire Lucas. As though his father had had nothing to do with his creation. He was her son. She was his mother. She was the country in which he had grown up and still lived in. It may have been a country full of rocks, seas whose tidal waves threatened to drown him, periodic droughts, and seasons that shifted from hot to cold and sometimes warm. But simultaneously it was a country full of wonder and promise and mystery. Always a place that never let him forget that he was native to it and wanted him despite the upheaval.

It was to his mother he went after that night in September.

The new elementary school teacher in town had brought her Volvo in for a prewinter tuneup. Then she came back for some windshield wiper fluid, and after that, a pack of cigarettes. She finally asked him out, and he shocked the rest of the men in the station by casually saying yes. She was of average height with shoulder-length blond hair and bluebird-blue eyes. They went out for a couple of weeks, and he thought they had fun together. That she liked him. It was long enough for him to feel somewhat safe with her. To let down his guard.

“The front,” she whispered, and lightly bit his ear.

The breasts that filled his hands. She unzipped his pants and pushed them down to his knees. He pulled her to him so that they were lengthwise on the couch. He became so lost in the dreaminess and intense sensation of arousal that he didn’t feel her slide his underwear down. Then she moved down his chest and bent over his pelvis to take his penis into her mouth. He momentarily came out of the haze of his arousal and began to sit up, but it was too late.

She froze and stared at his genitals. “What is that?”

He saw the distaste, even the horror on her face. He panicked and squeezed his eyes shut.

“Is that a rash? Oh, God. Do you have herpes?” she fired away. “And why are your balls so small? You weren’t going to tell me, were you?” she shrieked.

He pushed her away and yanked up his underwear and then his pants. He reeled and crashed against walls on his way through the dimly lit rooms of her rented house, feeling as big and as ugly as Frankenstein. He nearly fell out her front door and stumbled down the broken cement steps before running for his car.

“Bill,” she said faintly, “what happened?”

He dropped the six-pack on the floor. Heard the thud as it hit the wood, and he knew that he had dented and scratched the floorboards.

“Here,” he heard his mother say and felt her pull on one of his hands. “Sit down.”

He sat down and looked at her hand, a pearly shell inside his large paw. She was so small beside him. A little bird. A very tired little bird.

“What happened? Are you all right?”

He saw the years ahead through the inebriated wash of his brain. It was now 1983. He’d live at home with his mother and work at the Standard station. He’d avoid people in town. He’d never, ever date again. He could never forget that look of horror and disgust.

“Nobody,” he sputtered, “will ever want me.”

He leaned over, buried his head in his mother’s lap, and let his sorrow drain into her thighs.

But if she did talk, he was not aware of it, and nobody said anything at the station. He avoided her completely although she did not do the same for him.

“Don’t cry over that one,” Wally remarked one day after she left. She had brought her car in for an oil change, and Wally had another mechanic do it. Bill retreated to the picnic table behind the station and sipped a Coke. He waited until he was absolutely sure she was gone.

“Word has it that she has screwed any and everybody available, and I guess she’s now spending her nights driving to Cedar Bend. I think”—Wally chuckled, chewing on a peppermint-flavored toothpick—“she got Ray too. He’s been pretty ornery lately.”

Bill said nothing.

“Funny,” Wally went on, “she looks sweet, and you’d think she’d have more sense, teaching little kids and all. But I guess she’s a real bitch. Uses ’em and tosses ’em. She’s only here for the fall and she’s plowin’ these fields before she moves on.” Wally slapped Bill on the shoulder. “She wasn’t good enough for you, kid.”

He frightened his mother whenever he left the house and walked through the field, into the swamp and toward the ridge. He could sense her watching him from her bedroom window. He did not want to hurt her, but he could not help it. There were days and evenings he had to go back. He could not say exactly why, but he was instinctively driven there.

He knew what it was now. He thought that being on the ridge would help him regain what he saw and felt when he was younger, before he began drinking at the age of thirteen. He watched as a breeze rippled the surface of the lake. The lake reflected the color of the sky. A gunmetal gray.

A huge glacier, his mother had told him when he was five, created the lake. A glacier, she said, was a large bed of moving ice, like a giant mattress that could crawl. She said the glacier had many hands underneath it, some of them huge. Think, she said, of all the legs on a centipede. Only the glacier, she said, had hands. On every palm side of the hands were crusted boulders and sharp rocks. As the ice moved across their part of the world millions of years ago, the hands scooped and scoured out small holes and sometimes larger holes, which then filled with water. Lakes. Glacial moraine lakes. He had always imagined the hands as looking like the oven mitt that his mother used when she cleaned out the oven. One side was covered with a layer of steel wool. She had also told him that the ground underneath his feet was alive, and he remembered believing it because he felt it then.

He stretched out and stared up at the fading afternoon light filtering through the trees. He was conscious of his back as it made contact with the ground. His mother said the ground had a heartbeat, and if he was quiet enough, he would feel it and hear it.

“Do you know what makes dirt?”

He shook his head. His mother was funny. He knew the formal word for it. Eccentric. While other Olina mothers talked about cooking, their hair and makeup, Tupperware parties, Mary Kay parties, or who was doing what in the community, his mother in her bare feet was talking to him about dirt on a cold November morning. He did notice that those shopping trips with Rosemary were paying off. His mother had nicer clothes, and she clearly felt better. Although her hair was white and her face carved with old worries and fears, she was still pretty in an oddly delicate way.

“It’s when geology and biology get mixed together. Organisms and rocks. Or an easier way to think about it is rocks and bodies. Isn’t that fascinating?”

He smiled. Her bliss was contagious.

“Yeah, Mom. It is.”

On the field behind the barn lay a hard crust of snow that glittered under a full moon. Bill could hear several short, high-pitched barks coming from the field, and James had lifted him onto his shoulders so that Bill could see better. At first he saw nothing. Then James pointed and said, “See ’em? See ’em dancing over there?”

Sure enough, a vixen and dog fox were chasing each other on top of the hard crust, running in playful circles and lifting themselves up on two hind legs as though to dance with each other. As the two boys watched, the vixen abruptly stopped running and crouched low as the dog fox maneuvered his body behind hers, roughly nipping the back of her neck. He then mounted the vixen, thrusting hard, and remained locked into his mate for what seemed like hours instead of minutes to Bill.

He tugged at his brother’s hood. “What’s wrong? Why are they fighting?”

“They aren’t fighting. It’s their mating time. You know. To make little foxes.”

Confused and uneasy, Bill watched as the dog fox suddenly released himself from the vixen and then nipped the back of her neck again.

“I heard them barking. That’s how I knew,” James whispered to Bill, letting him slide off his shoulders.

Bill lingered for a moment by the fence post. It was a magical night with the wind blowing through the shelterbelt of pines so that it sounded like a flute and the moon shining down on the fox pair as though to illuminate their performance.

“You’re gonna freeze out here,” his brother said, returning to hoist his brother up on his shoulders again.

Bill relaxed into the rhythm of his brother’s gait and watched the sky as his brother slowly worked his legs through the deep snow. Sister Agnes had told him that God lived in the sky with the Virgin Mary and their son, Jesus. Sister Agnes had told him that the Virgin was kind and gentle and loved little children. James told him that it was all a pile of crap, the stuff they tried to make you believe in Catholic school, but Bill did think the statue of the Virgin Mary in church was beautiful. Looking up, Bill had taken off his mitten and waved, just in case she was watching him.

He flopped back down and rolled over on his side and stared at the lake again.

She unbuttoned the top pocket of her field jacket and pulled something out.

“I’ve had these for a few years now. But I kept them because I didn’t think you were ready.”

She pressed them into one of his hands. He felt metal and a chain. He opened his hand and stared at them.

“A veteran who had gone back to help search for POWs in 1978 saw this around the neck of a little mountain boy. Very near what used to be the Khe Sanh Combat Base, where Jimmy was. Actually it was the Navy chaplain who came to the house that day with Ernie to tell us about Jimmy”

Bill fingered his brother’s dog tags, their edges thick as though they had been partially melted and the metal chain they were connected to.

His mother leaned against the side of the truck. “Do you understand what this means?”

He knew why she picked this moment. She thought it would stop his forays back into the woods and to the ridge.

“I know James is dead.” He sighed. “Can I have these?”

His mother nodded and reached into her pocket again. “And these.”

She gave him the medals. A Purple Heart. The Bronze Star.

“They don’t mean much. But at least Jimmy earned them.”

She paused.

“Your father’s stories were never true. He never fought in WW Two.”

“I figured.”

Bill put the dog tags and the medals in his own coat pocket. He reached through the window and pulled out two cans of pop from the cab of the truck and gave her one. They drank in silence and listened to the river. Bill watched the last of the yellow birch leaves fall and drift onto the surface of the rapidly moving water.

He wondered what his brother would have been like if he had lived. Would he have come home like so many other Vietnam vets? Visibly and invisibly wounded? In a few months, during the grip of late January, it would be the anniversary of his brother’s death.

“How did you know,” he asked, startling his mother, “that James was dead?”

She poured the rest of her soda onto the ground and gave the empty can to him.

“Missing in action is an ambiguous phrase.”

She crossed her arms and looked back at the river.

“Think of what action means when you are fighting a war. It means that bombs and guns are going off. It means that something has happened to that person that is unmentionable and not visible. There is action, and in the middle of it, they cannot be seen or found. That’s the way I’ve always thought of it.”

“Isn’t it possible,” Bill cautiously ventured, “that he was taken prisoner?”

“No.” She shook her head. “I knew this about your brother,” she said. “He would never have let himself be taken as a prisoner. He knew what could happen to a prisoner of war. The torture. He could never have tolerated that. Never did.”

Bill drained the rest of his can with one swallow and threw both cans into the box of the truck. He glanced at her and wondered if she felt his brother in the way that he did. But he couldn’t ask.

She set her face in such a way as to end the conversation. He knew that look well. She was not going to talk anymore. He used to think she did it on purpose just to yank his strings. But lately it came to him that she was of a generation and culture that didn’t talk much and that his mother was an aberration, talking more than her parents ever did. She could only give away so much information at one time. It exhausted her, riding against that ingrained stoicism, and she needed to break and rest before she could say more.

IN THE MIDDLE OF NOVEMBER of ’83 the dog became more incapacitated, limping outside only when the need to urinate or defecate became intolerable. He barely made it beyond the porch steps. The piles of excrement from his aging dog’s body left a scent so overpowering that even after they were shoveled away, Ernie had to spread lime repeatedly over the spots. One night a week before Thanksgiving, Angel settled on his blanket and would not get up, nor would he eat or drink. Although Rosemary had always been the most attached to the dog, it was Bill who seemed to take Angel’s impending death the hardest. Bill had moved back home at the end of summer, but he spent the last five nights of Angel’s life in a sleeping bag on the Morriseaus’ kitchen floor. Angel died early in the morning three days before Thanksgiving.

Ernie sat helplessly in the kitchen and watched as his wife and Bill knelt over the stiffening dog, their bodies wrenched with grief. He had always considered it a miracle that the dog lived in the first place. He did not ask Rosemary how much she paid or what strings she pulled to get the dog’s body cremated so that they could have his ashes for Thanksgiving morning.

They had invited Claire and Bill to their house for the holiday. Ernie helped Claire in the kitchen while Rosemary and Bill bundled up. Ernie waved them off from the porch, but he watched them for a while as they somberly crossed the field and entered the swamp. Bill carried the canister with the dog’s ashes in his arms, and Ernie was pretty sure he knew where they were going.

A couple of hours later Claire and Ernie were setting the table when they heard loud singing and bursts of laughter approaching the house.

Ernie looked out the window and saw Rosemary and Bill striding arm in arm. The song was familiar. His wife’s head was nearly tucked under Bill’s armpit. Ernie glanced at Claire, who stood next to him.

“Orbison. ‘In Dreams,’ ” she said.

“I haven’t heard that song in years.”

Claire smiled and shook her head. “Jimmy’s records. Bill must have found them.”