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some strands of it had riffled in an imperceptible draft. That infant being lifted now would never forget his glimpse of this parade. History’s grind was beginning in his poor soft brain.
    The parade rounded a corner where a Buddha of a man sat surrounded by devotees. An aluminum chair was folded into his fat like spit into chewing gum. It was Lefty Reisenbach, the only major leaguer Hayesville has ever produced. I had seen him play shortstop for the playground team, slim as a knife, and as flashing. Then, on rudimentary Fifties television, as a blur of gray sparks, cocking his bat, squinting toward third base for the sign. Now he was back home and bloated on fifteen years’ worth of local beer. Old ballplayers are like ruined temples: their giftshave blown through them and left not a trace, just a hollow inscrutable pomp.
    The secretary of my high-school class broke from the crowd and ran along beside us. She had been lithe and wasp-waisted, a cheerleader and a wing on our undefeated girls’ hockey team. Her weight had doubled since then, but she still moved athletically, matching the limousine’s pace with easy strides. Her chest, her bouffant hairdo, the upper parts of her arms all bounced. “Bobby!” she called. “Are you married?”
    The sirens, and a marching band from the coal regions hitting hard on “The Marine Hymn,” made it difficult to hear. “We’re divorced!” I shouted.
    “I
know
that,” she called impatiently, beginning to be winded. “It was in
People
! Have you married
again
?”
    “No,” I called back, as the limousine jerkily accelerated. “I’m living with a woman! Everybody’s doing it!”
    “Not around here … they’re not,” she responded faintly, curling up and falling away like an autumnal leaf. There was something amiss, some secret, as always in Hayesville, I was not privy to. The day, which had mustered itself under one of those white hazed skies that represent sunshine in these humid parts, was clouding; large ragged scraps of cloud, with plum-colored centers, had gathered above the dark green crowns of the Norway maples that line the borough’s straight streets. The horse-chestnut trees—the guardians of my childhood with their candles of bloom, splayed fingerlike leaves, and glossy, inedible, collectible nuts—had been mostly cut down.
    The parade ended way over on Buttonwood Avenue, where the sycamores form an allée and the trolley tracks used to head out of town. The parade did not disperse but had become a vast collapsed mob. Jostling tubas and glockenspiels uttered random notes and leggy twirlers in their white boots and braid-encrusted jackets giggled in anticipation of what came next. What did come next? The four aldermen had gathered, making a single black sloping mass, Gus Horst foremost and leaning dolefully forward. Behind them rose a temporary structure of raw new pine—a platform for speeches, I guessed at a glance. With a shudder of its gummy carburetor, our limousine at last stopped. When I opened the door and tried to step from it into freedom, Scabs’s steel-hard, bullying hands seized my arms. Several of Hayesville’s sleepy-eyed young policemen moved in to back him up.
    A certain reverential hush overtook the crowd as it parted for us. Drawing nearer, near enough to smell the resinous fresh lumber, I saw the structure to be a gallows. Of course. It was for me. It was what I deserved. Terror thickened in my throat and then vanished. By ever leaving Hayesville, I had as good as died anyway.
    1976

FIRST WIVES AND TROLLEY CARS
    W ILLIAM F ARNHAM , though as tough and flip as most denizens of this eighty-two-percent-depleted century, was sentimental about first wives and trolley cars. A trolley line had been threaded down the center of the main street of Wenrich’s Corner, his home town, leading one way to the minor-league metropolis of Alton and in the other direction to a town so small and rural that its mere name, Smokeville, was enough to