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to his childhood, but by spectres out of science fiction, where gigantic cinder moons fill half the turquoise sky. As David ran, a gray planet rolled inches behind his neck. If he looked back, he would be buried. And in the momentum of his terror, hideous possibilities—the dilation of the sun, the triumph of the insects, the crabs on the shore in
The Time Machine
—wheeled out of the vacuum of make-believe and added their weight to his impending oblivion.
    He wrenched the door open; the lamps within the house flared. The wicks burning here and there seemed to mirror one another. His mother was washing the dishes in a little pan of heated pump-water; Granmom hovered near her elbow. In the living room—the downstairs of the little square house was two long rooms—his father sat in front of the black fireplace restlessly folding and unfolding a newspaper as he sustained his half of the argument. “Nitrogen, phosphorus, potash: these are the three replaceable constituents of the soil. One crop of corn carries away hundreds of pounds of”—he dropped the paper into his lap and ticked them off on three fingers—“nitrogen, phosphorus, potash.”
    â€œBoyer didn’t grow corn.”
    â€œ
Any
crop, Elsie. The human animal—”
    â€œYou’re killing the
earth
worms, George!”
    â€œThe human animal, after thousands and
thou
sands of years, learned methods whereby the chemical balance of the soil may be maintained. Don’t carry me back to the Dark Ages.”
    â€œWhen we moved to Olinger the ground in the garden was like slate. Just one summer of my cousin’s chicken dung and the earthworms came back.”
    â€œI’m sure the Dark Ages were a fine place to the poor devils born in them, but I don’t want to go there. They give me the creeps.” Daddy stared into the cold pit of the fireplace and clung to the rolled newspaper in his lap as if it alone were keeping him from slipping backwards and down, down.
    Mother came into the doorway brandishing a fistful of wet forks. “Andthanks to your DDT there soon won’t be a bee left in the country. When I was a girl here you could eat a peach without washing it.”
    â€œIt’s primitive, Elsie. It’s Dark Age stuff.”
    â€œOh, what do
you
know about the Dark Ages?”
    â€œI know I don’t want to go back to them.”
    David took from the shelf, where he had placed it this afternoon, the great unabridged Webster’s Dictionary that his grandfather had owned. He turned the big thin pages, floppy as cloth, to the entry he wanted, and read
    soul  … 1. An entity conceived as the essence, substance, animating principle, or actuating cause of life, or of the individual life, esp. of life manifested in psychical activities; the vehicle of individual existence, separate in nature from the body and usually held to be separable in existence.
    The definition went on, into Greek and Egyptian conceptions, but David stopped short on the treacherous edge of antiquity. He needed to read no further. The careful overlapping words shingled a temporary shelter for him. “Usually held to be separable in existence”—what could be fairer, more judicious, surer?
    His father was saying, “The modern farmer can’t go around sweeping up after his cows. The poor devil has thousands and
thou
sands of acres on his hands. Your modern farmer uses a scientifically arrived-at mixture, like five-ten-five, or six-twelve-six, or
three
-twelve-six, and spreads it on with this wonderful modern machinery which of course we can’t afford. Your modern farmer can’t
afford
medieval methods.”
    Mother was quiet in the kitchen; her silence radiated waves of anger.
    â€œNo, now, Elsie: don’t play the femme with me. Let’s discuss this calmly like two rational twentieth-century people. Your organic-farming nuts aren’t attacking five-ten-five; they’re