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protuberant.
    Three classmates stand out in my memory from those days: Lester, a tall farmer’s son who wore the same faded overalls every day—I realized this when I noticed the same stains in the same places—and who had grayish skin and a wedge-shaped head he held stiffly as he slouched and shambled around the classroom; Lucy, who became a friend; and Freddie Harrison, in whose presence I often lost my breath and was unable to speak. How did Uncle Elwood know about the joyful consternation I felt in those moments when Freddie and I passed by each other in the classroom or stood silently together in the school playground?
    One warm afternoon, Lucy came to visit me. We drew what we conjectured to be male genitals on the blank backs of paper dolls, our heated faces close together as we crouched under a yellow-leafed maple tree near the stone wall. I don’t know what we were hiding from unless it was our own prescience of sexual love. In any event, we weren’t far off the mark.
    I had a curious view of the world and its inhabitants. I imagined people were lodged inside the earth like fruit pits, and I was perplexed by the visible sky. Miss Hamilton substituted an even stranger view, that we all lived upon the earth’s surface. How was it we didn’t fall and tumble forever through space?
    I walked home with the other children on the dirt road. It curved steeply at its beginning, and on the rise we passed a fieldstone house in a huddled mass of trees that hid it from sunlight. It looked emptier of life than the little graveyard behind it, where two or three tombstones had fallen over onto the ground. It all had a brooding character that stirred and frightened me. Its lightless windows looked like the eyes of a blind dog.
    Gradually the other children glided away, down paths or rutted roadways, their faces assuming a certain blankness of expression they would wear indoors for the first minutes after they reached home, as my face did, until there was only one left, Gordon, a tall boy with a cap of black curls, who lived a half mile beyond my driveway and with whom I walked in an easy silence.
    *   *   *
    Car headlights shone on ranks of stunted pine trees and clumps of small weathered gray houses, silent, silvered for an instant as we drove past them. Who was driving, Uncle Elwood or my father, I can’t recall. We were on our way to Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod, where my parents were living in a house on Commercial Street. Soon after my stay of a few days, when they were away, it burned to the ground—the fourth fire started by the retarded son of a Portuguese fisherman.
    The house, a saltbox, was set back from the street a few hundred feet on the hummocky undernourished ground characteristic of land near salt water. I have a snapshot of myself standing in front of a straggly rosebush growing on a rickety trellis in the yard, its stems like insect feelers. There is another photograph of Uncle Elwood and me by the bay. He kneels to hold me around the waist, although there is no surf; the water is as flat as an ironing board. I suppose my father took the picture with the minister’s camera.
    A German shepherd my parents owned attacked a cat that was drifting along the narrow cracked sidewalk in front of the house. My heart thudded; my vision narrowed to the two animals, one helpless, the other made monstrous with rage. I grabbed the cat. In its terror, it scratched my hand.
    There was no one in the house that day to whom I could report the scratch. I washed my hand at the kitchen sink, standing on a chair to turn on the faucet. The wound bled intermittently for a while. When my parents returned from wherever they had been, I didn’t bring it to their attention.
    I discovered a steamer trunk in a little room next to the kitchen. It was on end and partly open, like a giant book waiting to be read. Deep drawers lined one side. Suits and dresses hung in the other. They looked as though they’d been pitched across