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skill—or Dale Hawthorne would think, for the hundredth time, about suicide, hunting in mixed fear and anger for some reason not to miss the next turn, fly off to the right of the next iron bridge onto the moonlit gray rocks and black water below—discovering, invariably, no reason but the damage his suicide would do to his wife and the children remaining.
    Sometimes he would forget for a while by abandoning reason and responsibility for love affairs. Jack’s father was at this time still young, still handsome, well-known for the poetry he recited at local churches or for English classes or meetings of the Grange—recited, to loud applause (he had poems of all kinds, both serious and comic), for thrashing crews, old men at the V.A. Hospital, even the tough, flint-eyed orphans at the Children’s Home. He was a celebrity, in fact, as much Romantic poet-hero as his time and western New York State could afford—and beyond all that, he was now so full of pain and unassuageable guilt that women’s hearts flew to him unbidden. He became, with all his soul and without cynical intent—though fleeing all law, or what he’d once thought law—a hunter of women, trading off his sorrow for the sorrows of wearied, unfulfilled country wives. At times he would be gone from the farm for days, abandoning the work to Jack and whoever was available to help—some neighbor or older cousin or one of Jack’s uncles. No one complained, at least not openly. A stranger might have condemned him, but no one in the family did, certainly not Jack, not even Jack’s mother, though her sorrow was increased. Dale Hawthorne had always been, before the accident, a faithful man, one of the most fair-minded, genial farmers in the country. No one asked that, changed as he was, he do more, for the moment, than survive.
    As for Jack’s mother, though she’d been, before the accident, a cheerful woman—one who laughed often and loved telling stories, sometimes sang anthems in bandanna and blackface before her husband recited poems—she cried now, nights, and did only as much as she had strength to do—so sapped by grief that she could barely move her arms. She comforted Jack and his sister, Phoebe—herself as well—by embracing them vehemently whenever new waves of guilt swept in, by constant reassurance and extravagant praise, frequent mention of how proud some relative would be—once, for instance, over a drawing of his sister’s, “Oh, Phoebe, if only your great-aunt Lucy could see this!” Great-aunt Lucy had been famous, among the family and friends, for her paintings of families of lions. And Jack’s mother forced on his sister and himself comforts more permanent: piano and, for Jack, French-horn lessons, school and church activities, above all an endless, exhausting ritual of chores. Because she had, at thirty-four, considerable strength of character—except that, these days, she was always eating—and because, also, she was a woman of strong religious faith, a woman who, in her years of church work and teaching at the high school, had made scores of close, for the most part equally religious, friends, with whom she regularly corresponded, her letters, then theirs, half filling the mailbox at the foot of the hill and cluttering every table, desk, and niche in the large old house—friends who now frequently visited or phoned—she was able to move step by step past disaster and in the end keep her family from wreck. She said very little to her children about her troubles. In fact, except for the crying behind her closed door, she kept her feelings strictly secret.
    But for all his mother and her friends could do for him—for all his father’s older brothers could do, or, when he was there, his father himself—the damage to young Jack Hawthorne took a long while healing. Working the farm, ploughing, cultipacking, disking, dragging, he had