About this time I began to get a glimmer of something. Just as the revelation of the identity of the new Incarnation of Good came only at the very end, and by surprise, so did the revelation of the good that was associated with this novel come to me. The final impetus was not for me, but for my daughter. Perhaps I should have seen it coming, as it seems obvious in retrospect, but I was somehow blind to it beforehand. Parents typically seek to vindicate themselves through their children. I wasn't even in the top half of my graduating high school class, 36

years ago; I was a complete nonentity. My wife did better, but married me instead of completing college. We had five babies, the first three of which died at birth, and the fourth was learning-disabled. Cheryl was the last. So the scholastic proof of our family lay in her success—and what a success it turned out to be! Often when I attend public functions, I am the center of attention; this time I was glad to be known as Cheryl's father.

When we moved to the forest in 1977, not only did we try to preserve the trees there, we planted five hundred more. These were red cedars, which we bought from the state forestry department as seedlings and planted around our border. About three quarters of them died in the first year, but we still have a generous hundred surviving, some of them now fifteen feet tall, some still under a foot tall. I discovered one that was growing well, but it was being crowded out by a laurel oak sapling that intercepted most of its light. Now the laurel oak is a nice tree, and we like it, but this one was in the wrong place. If I left it, my cedar would in due course die. So I got my axe and chopped down the laurel oak.

I felt horribly guilty doing that. Here was a nice tree, minding its own business, cut down in the prime of its youth. I had taken a life, for a reason that neither that tree nor the one I had saved would understand. I had played God, deciding which one was to be saved and which one was to perish. It was true that there were thousands of laurel oaks and only a few cedars. Still, was it right for me to condemn to death one in favor of the other?