He had tossed himself a setup question, a softball. A ranter himself, he knew why. Costumed in righteous outrage, a rant expressed pain and fear, isolation with these feelings, cries for help. When a man ranted, he asked you to rant with him. When a man ranted, he showed you a wound. He wanted the salve of sympathy, the first aid of agreement.

These were decent turns of phrase, Fanta thought. A man who sent a ranting letter to the editor was looking for a hug. He craved the embrace of, That is so true. Every week, the newspaper came out, the whole community widened its arms to listen, and the man felt better. Nothing changed, of course. But he could keep ranting, writing, sending, imagining, and feeling better—until the newspaper disappeared.

So that explained the rage and blame well enough. But Fanta had a strong hunch that FROM HELL HOLLOW would be a more complex sort of cat. The letter he had selected for special focus—crimped half-open atop the file folder on the Tercel’s passenger seat—could have been dictated by John Milton to his obedient daughter, the great blind poet raving and hacking through thickets of metaphor to find his visionary Paradise Lost. Some men groomed their madness, Fanta decided. Definitely not Darvin Montag or Kent Sutherland. But some men built an altar to their big idea and sacrificed themselves.

He aimed a squinting glance at FROM HELL HOLLOW’s letter, its penmanship so large and childishly precise that he could review bits of the screed as he steered his wonky old Tercel. The letter had been sent four months ago, just after Babette Rickreiner had bought the Broadcaster and banned opinions. Hence Fanta had just opened it today. In his poetic style, FROM HELL HOLLOW voiced remarkable claims.

I am afflicted with the plagues of our Mother. In putrefaction’s fever I see the path and the purpose of my full decay. My flaming out will light the world. Allegory? Watch me.

These were not the words of some unread, light beer–swilling soybean farmer. He should discount Wally Rumpf right now, Fanta advised himself while turning onto Rumpf Hollow Road. But his journalist’s habit was to work the process. Experience had taught him that he never knew until he knew.

He spied Wally Rumpf. Way out across his field the man balanced eight feet off the ground atop the back wheel of his spray tractor, taking a piss into pesticide-saturated soybeans. Drifting over the field with the sour scent of dimethoate, lethal to bees, came country music, our great collective head-in-the-sand. So now Fanta knew: FROM HELL HOLLOW was not Wally Rumpf. He turned his key and headed back for the high ground of the highway.

He had progressed this far when the Farmstead Volunteer Fire Department’s Pumper #2 screamed past the other way. Helpless before his instincts, the old newspaperman turned around and chased the fire truck.