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Bagger fucking?” This was his favourite, white with a single dot on the left ear. His speech was erratic. Sometimes he stuttered.
    “See,” Lewis said. “Your words become his words. Care is required.”
    “You murderer,” Everett said.
    “Bang, bang,” Fish said. “Murder.” And he began to whimper. “Bagger,” he said. “Bagger.”
    Lizzy watched a large truck approach. It passed in a swoop. Her father’s neck was brown from the sun. He needed a haircut. Her mother had long hair that covered parts of her thin shoulders. She was looking out the window and then she turned to Lewis and Lizzy saw the hollow of her left cheek and the sharpness of her collarbone and the darkness of her eyes. She didn’t speak.
    And in the tomb of the car, floating above the sobbing of Fish and then William, their father’s voice rose, calling out that everything in its time had to die and what would they rather have: three kittens starving and mistreated, or the certainty that Shadrach, Meshach, and Bagger were in a better place. He said that there was a time to be born, a time to die, a time todance, and a time to mourn. He said, “I have maintained that which is under my control.” He said this as if it were something that he had just thought of, with a certain mellifluent surprise, as if to say, listen to these words I have found.
    And into that claim, into the buoyancy of his timbred voice, soft and silky, there fell a silence, the stillness of the children, who seemed to hold their breath, as if the words themselves would become proof of a bigger place that only their father could provide. Words and words and words. He must know. But Lizzy knew that he might not know. In fact, she knew it with utter certainty. But she didn’t confess her knowledge, because that would make Fish cry. And Everett was silent now, a wall falling down and separating him from the world. Lizzy, in the sticky morning heat, beneath the drone of her father’s voice, took Everett’s hand, held it, and he let her.

T he Retreat was located several miles outside the town of Kenora, on two acres of wooded land. Up the highway and then a left turn and down a winding gravel road, past a collection of houses, and on further towards a small lake and then left again down a narrow road that was really two tracks of mud and a strip of grass and, finally, out of the bush and into a clearing. The main cabin was an old house that had been gutted and opened out with pine beams. This was the dining area and it was also the meeting place and it was called the Hall. Across from the Hall, at the opposite side of the clearing, stood seven cabins in various stages of disrepair, cabins that housed the occupants.
    There were sixteen people living there: three families and several younger men and women who found, in the Doctor’s vision, their own parallel dreams. The Doctor’s goal for the Retreat was both spiritual and practical. A chiropractor by training, he had lived all his life in Duluth, Minnesota, married there, and come to Canada when his wife left him and after the divorce eventually came through. He settled in Thunder Bay where he opened a small chiropractic office and fell in love with his receptionist, Margaret. She became pregnant, they married, and during their first spring together he bought theland for The Retreat. In the following years, each April, they travelled around, giving talks in small school gymnasiums and recreation halls, encouraging people to visit The Retreat, with the notion that a refuge from the hurly-burly of the world for several months of every year would augment peace; not world peace but individual reckoning. If the Doctor wanted this place to be considered a spiritual oasis, it was also sometimes referred to as an artists’ colony, though there was very little art happening, except perhaps at the hands of Emma Poole, who was playing with watercolours. Harris, her husband, had money in his pockets that had been made in an earlier