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not sleeping in my bed anymore.” Simon managed a grin.
    “That’s right. It’s hard not having a mother. We’re all that boy has right now.”
    Turley, Young Fred’s father, was a sometimes logger and a steady drinker. No one was sure when his wife died, but sometime afterwards, Turley brought the two-and-a-half-year-old Fred for an extended stay without mention of when he’d be back. Fred was now almost four. Why did everyone have to be lost? Simon wondered. His father cinched up his duffel bag. Both of them stared down at it. “Dad?” Simon said without looking up. “What if Uncle Ebbin is dead? What if—”
    “No what-ifs . We’ll find out. Not knowing is worse than knowing, even if it’s the thing you fear most. And now,” his father pulled out his watch, “time’s running short. You’d better go get your grandfather. And, Simon? You mind what Ida says, your grandfather, too, when I’m gone. And your mother,” he added.
    Simon might have liked to mind his mother, but she hardly noticed if rules were broken. The rules weren’t hers anyway.

    H IS GRANDFATHER DID not come to say good-by at the train station in Chester. “Too hard on this old man. Too long a journey,” he said when Simon went up to fetch him—though the train station at Chester was only sixteen miles away. When Simon pleaded with him, his grandfather just stared out at the harbor. It was a beautiful morning, sharp and crisp and perfect. “I’ve said my good-by. You’d better get on. Go on, boy. Go to the station.”
    “Dad’s going to find Uncle Ebbin,” Simon said, arms crossed.
    His grandfather’s pitying look ushered Simon out the door.

    C AUGHT NOW IN the threads of dream and memory, Simon huddled deeper into the quilt and rested his head on his knees and thought about France and wondered how the constellations lined up over there.
    There was a globe worthy of a university library on a stand in his grandfather’s study. He and his grandfather used to navigate it together and, more often, the charts his grandfather would spread on the massive chart table. “Here,” his grandfather would say, his calloused hand over Simon’s, moving it along, “is the route Champlain took to the South Shore before it was called the South Shore and before it was Nova Scotia, before it was New Scotland. And here, settled on an island at the mouth of the St. Croix. A disaster. And here, John Cabot’s route a hundred years before. Lowered baskets like a pail down a well and scooped up cod without so much as a hook. Bottom feeders, mind—so plentiful they must have been stacked one on top of the other to find their way into buckets dropped from a deck.” The grand finale was always, “And here is Mahone Bay, most beautiful bay in the world, where God has granted us the privilege to live.”
    Now they shared something else—a passion for war reports. It was serious business. He and his grandfather devoured and analyzed every scrap of news from the Front, often at cross purposes, but always enjoying their time together. Simon relished being treated with respect—enough to ignore the occasional antiwar rant. And he secretly suspected that war news was his grandfather’s way of keeping up with his father.
    The previous afternoon, the paper brought news that the Canadians were massing forces in the Arras Sector at a ridge called Vimy, which no one had been able to wrest from the Germans. “The French failed to take that ridge twice in 1915 and racked up over a hundred fifty thousand casualties,” his grandfather said, lowering the paper. “My sources tell me the western slope of it is an unending graveyard. Now the French insist the Brits should try it. So the Brits have enlisted the help of our boys. Arras—that’s where your father is this very minute.” He’d rattled the paper into its folds and slapped it against the desk. “War to end all wars, eh? My God, the simple-minded lunacy of it.”
    “Maybe,” Simon said,