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gripping him. At the curve by the sandstone cliff the sound altered, and then it died away altogether.
    Why should your old sins be permanently pinned to your jacket? For all to read aloud? It was stupidly unfair. I would do my shopping in Arden, despite the inconvenience of making a ten-mile drive whenever I wanted anything. The making of this decision helped to dispel my temper and after a minute or two of further brooding I began to feel as though I might be producing an at least feeble tranquility.
    —
    Where, you might ask, was the clown, the reluctant wag I have proclaimed myself to be? My own abrasiveness surprised me. A woman like Andy’s wife would think the word “bitch” scandalous applied to any sphere but the canine. It was an emotional morning. My former thefts! Yet I supposed that it was too much to expect anyone to have forgotten them.
    —
    A hundred yards past the deserted school was the church: Gethsemane Lutheran church is a redbrick building with quite a sturdy, pompous, peaceful air to it, probably conferred by the Palladian columns at the top of the stairs. For the sake of my grandmother, who was already very weak, Joan and I had been married in this church. (My mother’s idea.)
    After the church the land seems to open up, and the corn takes over. I passed the Sunderson farmhouse—two pickup trucks parked on the high sloping lawn, a rooster strutting in the red dust of the driveway—and saw a burly man in overalls and a cap just coming out of the house. He stared at me and then decided to wave, but I had not generated sufficient alpha waves to return his greeting.
    Half a mile past the Sunderson farm I could see my grandmother’s old house and the Updahl land. The row of walnut trees at the edge of the lawn had put on weight, and now they looked like a row of heavy old farmers standing in the sun. I drove by the front of the property and swung into the driveway, passing the trees and feeling the car jounce on the ruts. I expected to feel some strong upwelling of feeling, looking at the long white house again, but my emotions seemed flat and dull. It was just a two-story house with a screen porch, an ordinary farmhouse. Yet when I got out of the car I smelled all the old odors of the farm, a rich compound of cows and horses and fertilizer and milk and sunshine. This pervades everything: when people from the farm had visited my family in Fort Lauderdale, it hung on their clothes and hands and shoes. Smelling all this again made me momentarily feel thirteen years old, and I lifted my head, straightening out the kinks in my neck and back, and saw a heavy form moving down the screen porch. By his shovelhanded, lumbering walk I knew it was Duane, who had been sitting invisible in the corner of the porch just as he had been on that terrible night twenty years before. When Duane came out of the porch into the sun I tried to smile at him. What the first sight of my cousin had brought back to me was how much hostility there had always been between us, how little we had liked one another. It would be different now, I hoped.

TWO
    “H ave a case of beer, Duane,” I said, mistakenly trying for a bluff friendliness.
    He appeared to be confused—really, confusion was stamped all over his big plain face—but his mechanism was set for holding out his hand and saying hello, and that was what he did. His hand was huge, a true farmer’s hand, and so rough it felt made of a substance less vulnerable than skin. Duane was a short barrel-like man, but his extremities might have come from someone a foot taller. As we clasped hands and he blinked at me, half smiling, trying to figure out what I meant about the beer, I noticed that he had obviously come in from a morning’s work: he wore heavy stained denim coveralls and workboots crusted with mud and excrement. He radiated all of the usual farm odors, compounded with sweat and underlain by his true odor, his inner smell, which is of gunpowder.
    Finally he released