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and the damage done to it in the course of the old robust domestic life were all still there. And the old books. Their grandfather had sent a significant check to Edinburgh, asking a cousin to assemble the library needed for instruction in the true and un-corrupted faith. He had received in response a trunk full of large books, bound in black leather, in which they all assumed the true faith did abide. Sometimes they pondered the titles and wondered about them together. On Predestination, an Answer to an Anabaptist; On Affliction; The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women; Booke of the Universall Kirk of Scotland; De Vocatione, a Treatise of God’s Effectual Calling; The Hind Unloos’d; Christ Dying and Drawing Sinners to Himselfe. Or A Survey of our Saviour in his soule-suffering, his lovelynesse in his death, and the efficacie thereof. They were respectfully proud to have these books in the house, as if they had been given the Ark of the Covenant for safekeeping and knew better than to touch it, except, of course, for Jack, who took down a volume from time to time and read or seemed to read a page or two, perhaps only to worry his father, who was as respectful of the Edinburgh books as they all were, and as little inclined to open them, and who clearly dreaded the thought that they might be damaged. “Are you finding anything of interest there, Jack?” he would say, and Jack would answer, “No, sir, not yet,” and seem to read on, and then, after a few minutes, set the book on its shelf again. Whether he had found occasion to mar a page no one would know. There were tens of thousands of pages. And their father would not have wanted to know, since, even more than the other inexplicable and irremediable damage her brother left behind him, this might exasperate him beyond patience. Everything the rest of them treated with tacit reverence Jack found his way to. Poor old Ames. For many years he bore the brunt of it, uncomplainingly. Many things must have passed between him and the boy that Ames never spoke of, and this was a gentleness toward their father, a wordless, palpable, patient regret very much like their father’s own. Those became the good days in retrospect, the days of their father’s happiness.

IN THE AFTERNOON SHE WENT OUT TO WORK IN THE GARden. She had planted peas and pole beans and tomatoes and squash and spinach. Rabbits were a problem, and groundhogs. Still, the futility of it all was not yet absolute. She would have had to ask someone to put up some sort of fence, and that would involve talking to someone, which she preferred not to do.

And after a few minutes there was Jack, standing in the sunlight at the edge of the garden, smoking a cigarette. He said, “I thought maybe you could put me to work out here.”

“Sure. I mean, you can put yourself to work. There’s so much that needs to be done. Well, you can see that. Mama had iris beds right up the hill—”

“I know,” he said. “I used to live here.”

“I just meant that might be a place to start. They’re so overgrown. Of course you used to live here.”

“—Strange as it seems—” He said it as if he were completing her thought, or sharing it.

They heard voices from the street, and a look of alarm or irritation passed over his face. Then he saw that it was a young man and a child passing by, taking no notice of them.

She said, “That’s Donny McIntire’s son. And his grandson. You might remember him. He was Luke’s age.”

“And good old Reverend Ames has a boy of his own, I understand.”

“Yes, he does. And a wife. Marriage seems to agree with him.”

He said, “What did people think of all that?”

“I guess there was some talk. But who could begrudge him. Papa has felt a little neglected. He and Ames used to spend so much time together.”

Jack dropped the butt of his cigarette and stepped on it. “I’d better make myself useful,” he said, and went off to stand among the irises in his urban shoes and a fairly respectable white shirt with the creases of folding in it and light another cigarette. Their father came out to his chair on the porch, a project for him, a painful business. Now, with Jack there, he avoided help when he could, toiling dangerously up the stairs to shave himself with an unsteady hand. There was nothing to be done except to listen for the sounds of emergency and pray, and ignore the scruff of hair at the back of his head where his comb didn’t reach. From his chair in the porch he could look out on the garden.

Jack stooped to pull a clump of weeds and tossed it aside, and pulled another one and tossed it. Then he went to the shed behind the house to find a spade. When he came back, he said, “That DeSoto in the barn isn’t yours. It’s been there too long.”

“No, one of the boys left it for Papa. But he never really did start driving. I guess he had a license for a while. Years ago.”

“It looks like a decent car.”

“I tried to start it once.”

“You left the keys in the ignition.”

She nodded. “No safer place in the world for them.”

“Well,” he said, “a little gas in the tank might change that. A little water in the radiator. Some air in the tires. I wiped off