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hitching now and then, over it all the enormous gas ruin of the sun among the smokestacks, the barrage balloons, power lines and chimneys brown as aging indoor wood, brown growing
    deeper, approaching black through an instant-perhaps the true turn of the sunset-that is wine to you, wine and comfort.
    The Moment was 6:43:16 British Double Summer Time: the sky, beaten like Death's drum, still humming, and Slothrop's cock-say what? yes lookit inside his GI undershorts here's a sneaky hardon stirring, ready to jump-well great God where'd that come from?
    There is in his history, and likely, God help him, in his dossier, a peculiar sensitivity to what is revealed in the sky. (But a hardon?)
    On the old schist of a tombstone in the Congregational churchyard back home in Mingeborough, Massachusetts, the hand of God emerges from a cloud, the edges of the figure here and there eroded by 200 years of seasons' fire and ice chisels at work, and the inscription reading:
    In Memory of Confiant Slothrop, who died March y 4th 1766, in y 29th year of his age.
    Death is a debt to nature due, Which I have paid, and fo muft you.
    Constant saw, and not only with his heart, that stone hand pointing out of the secular clouds, pointing directly at him, its edges traced in unbearable light, above the whispering of his river and slopes of his long blue Berkshires, as would his son Variable Slothrop, indeed all of the Slothrop blood one way or another, the nine or ten generations tumbling back, branching inward: every one, except for William the very first, lying under fallen leaves, mint and purple loosestrife, chilly elm and willow shadows over the swamp-edge graveyard in a long gradient of rot, leaching, assimilation with the earth, the stones showing round-faced angels with the long noses of dogs, toothy and deep-socketed death's heads, Masonic emblems, flowery urns, feathery willows upright and broken, exhausted hourglasses, sunfaces about to rise or set with eyes peeking Kilroy-style over their horizon, and memorial verse running from straight-on and foursquare, as for Constant Slothrop, through bouncy Star Spangled Banner meter for Mrs. Elizabeth, wife of Lt. Isaiah Slothrop (d. 1812):
    Adieu my dear friends, I have come to this grave Where Insatiate Death in his reaping hath brought me. Till Christ rise again all His children to save, I must lie, as His Word in the Scriptures hath taught me.
    Mark, Reader, my cry! Bend thy thoughts on the Sky, And in midst of prosperity, know thou may'st die. While the great Loom of God works in darkness above, And our trials here below are but threads of His Love.
    To the current Slothrop's grandfather Frederick (d. 1933), who in typical sarcasm and guile bagged his epitaph from Emily Dickinson, without a credit line:
    Because I could not stop for Death He kindly stopped for me
    Each one in turn paying his debt to nature due and leaving the excess to the next link in the name's chain. They began as fur traders, cord-wainers, salters and smokers of bacon, went on into glassmaking, became selectmen, builders of tanneries, quarriers of marble. Country for miles around gone to necropolis, gray with marble dust, dust that was the breaths, the ghosts, of all those fake-Athenian monuments going up elsewhere across the Republic. Always elsewhere. The money seeping its way out through stock portfolios more intricate than any genealogy: what stayed at home in Berkshire went into timberland whose diminishing green reaches were converted acres at a clip into paper-toilet paper, banknote stock, newsprint-a medium or ground for shit, money, and the Word. They were not aristocrats, no Slothrop ever made it into the Social Register or the Somerset Club-they carried on their enterprise in silence, assimilated in life to the dynamic that surrounded them thoroughly as in death they would be to churchyard earth. Shit, money, and the Word, the three American truths, powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped