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taught the children, sporadically, “poetry” and “elocution,” usually on dark rainy afternoons when his own rambles into the woods were impractical. But Vernon spoke with an ecstatic certainty that disturbed his nephew. I say to you—all things are gods— all things are God. The living God is not distinct, my dear confused boy, from His creation.
     
    THE CREEK WAS dangerous on higher ground, and the lake was rough even on fairly mild days, stirred by underground currents; but Mink Pond was safe. It was safe, it was hidden, it was his pond. The other boys had no interest in it. (There were no fish in Mink Pond, only minnows, and not even very many frogs.) Raphael’s brothers and cousins and their friends rowed out onto the lake, or rode on horseback down to the Nautauga, where they could fish for pike and largemouth bass and black bullheads and catfish and perch and satinfin shiners and carp. Why the hell would anyone want to hang around that little pond, they asked Raphael. It isn’t anything more than a drinking hole.
    Mink Pond. Raphael’s pond. Where he could hide away for hours, and no one would disturb him. Grandfather Noel spoke of the pond but he clearly didn’t know what he was talking about, his memory must have been confused, because the area beyond the pear orchard was just a marshy soggy meadow where red-winged blackbirds and grouse nested; there was no pond there at all.
    Why does Grandfather keep talking about the pond with the snapping turtles, Raphael asked his father. There aren’t any snapping turtles. There isn’t any pond where he says.
    Your grandfather might be getting things mixed up, Ewan said curtly. He had very little time for the children, even for his favorite, Yolande; he was always hurrying out to check on the tenant farmers, or track down an ailing cow, or drive to Nautauga Falls to meet with someone at the bank. His face was often brick-red with anger he couldn’t speak of because it might mean another quarrel with his younger brother Gideon, and all the children were wise enough to shrink aside when he passed, and never to draw his attention to them at meals. He said to Raphael, sternly: Show respect for your grandfather. Don’t you ever let me hear you mocking your grandfather.
    But I wasn’t mocking anyone, Raphael protested.
    Mink Pond. Where the very air was gentle with listening. Should he whisper aloud it heard him, it did not question or challenge his words, it was his secret, his alone. He sometimes crouched for hours in the waist-high rushes, watching dragonflies and fisher spiders and whirligig beetles, which were tireless. That they existed struck him from time to time as extraordinarily amazing. And that he existed in the same world as they . . . His mind drifted free of shore. It skittered across the surface of the water with the insects, or sank slowly to the bottom of the pond, darkening as it sank; but he felt no apprehension with the approach of this darkness, which was so different from the darkness of his room in the manor with its high ceiling and drafty windows and odor of dust and anger. Is there anything in the world you love more than that pond of yours, Raphael’s mother Lily asked him, stooping to kiss his warm forehead, not guessing the truth that lay hidden in her words: just as the leopard frogs lay hidden in the grasses at the very edge of the pond, and leapt noisily into the water when he approached.
     
    YET IT HAPPENED, one cold October afternoon within a week of Mahalaleel’s arrival at the manor, that Raphael nearly drowned in his pond.
    Nearly was drowned, that is. For he was set upon, as he lay dreaming on his raft, by a boy named Johnny Doan whom he hardly knew.
    The Doan boy was fifteen years old, from a family of eight children who lived on a five-acre farm several miles south of the main Bellefleur property, on the outskirts of the little village of Bellefleur (which was hardly more than a railroad depot and a few stores, since the