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have to fill in the blanks for her–the circumstances that created this fractured family of ours. But theyears passed and she has never asked. And I have managed to push aside any temporary feeling that the moment was right. Maybe the time has come to tell her the truths, the secrets, as I know them, or have imagined them. All of it. The forgivable and the unforgivable.

Chapter Seven
    T HE SHATTERING OF our family did not occur gradually. There was no drawn-out series of events that could be pointed to and blamed. No slow motion accident to be replayed and pondered over. It came suddenly. The irreversible tragedy of errors was accomplished in the course of a few long-ago summer days. It left everyone in our family with their own secret version of what happened. And the rest of their lives to come to terms with it. Whatever conclusion each of us came to, we kept it to ourselves.
    If I could go back and rearrange the past, if I could erase that July afternoon, would I? Would I change everything that happened afterward, have it so he never became part of our lives?
    I would. Of course I would. But the past cannot be altered; it can only be lived with. Or buried.
    On that July afternoon I watched Mom unlatch the gate. For a moment I wondered if she knew when she hired him, that the young man who stood on the other side of the fence was one of those ‘long-haired freaks’, as my father called them. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be around when Dad, and my brothers, came back with the next load of hay.
    Only a few days before, as Mom cleaned her freshly gathered eggs in the kitchen sink, she had mentioned that Dr Benjamin Spock was encouraging young Americans to resist the draft.
    My father sat at the table rolling cigarettes. He looked up and raised one eyebrow. ‘I wonder what he thinks would have happened if the fathers and grandfathers of those boys had thought that way?’ he said to Mom’s back.
    Mom placed the last egg in the carton, turned and smiled at Dad. ‘He just wants to see the babies he helped raise have a chance to grow up.’
    My father snorted. ‘Those babies have grown up to be a bunch of spoiled, greasy-haired hooligans, who stand under a peace banner because they don’t have the guts to fight for their country,’ he said. He ran his tongue along the paper of a freshly rolled cigarette.
    Boyer, who was twenty-three at the time, sat at the opposite end of the table. He looked at my father over the rim of his coffee cup. In that quiet voice of his he said, ‘It’s about choices. The very existence of the draft takes away their democratic right to choose. It looks to me like those who are saying no are taking a stand for democracy.’ He added, ‘At least they have the chance to take a stand on something; to be involved in something larger than themselves.’
    And now here was someone walking into our lives who looked as if he had done just that.
    He was dressed like no one I knew. Instead of the denim or plaid snap-button shirts my father and brothers wore, a beige Indian cotton tunic hung loose over dark bell-bottom pants. Instead of cowboy boots, he wore leather moccasins. A carved wood emblem–a peace sign, I would learn later–dangled from a leather cord around his neck. His hair, the sun-streaked yellow of a hayfield drying in the sun, hung loose around his shoulders.
    But it was his eyes that held me. His eyes were the colour of a blue-green ocean, an ocean I had seen only in my imagination. When he blinked, they closed and opened slowly, almost as if thethick, surprisingly dark, eyelashes were too heavy for his lids. I later heard Mom describe those eyes, saying he had lashes that ‘most women would kill for.’
    â€˜Bedroom eyes,’ our neighbour, old Ma Cooper, would snort after she met him.
    The stranger smiled as Mom opened the gate, a smile that crinkled into premature crow’s feet around those aquamarine eyes. He