“We’re going south, Tess,” he’d said one Sunday morning after three hours of drinking that black coffee and reading four newspapers, Frederic Engels and Karl Marx. “That’s where the fruit is ripe, that’s where we’re needed.”

Allie was reading a novel on the couch with her hair tied back, eating an apple. She sat up. “Oh yes, Daddio, and we’ll live in a mansion like Gone with the Wind.”

Chick laughed, then gently corrected her with bourgeois this and proletariat that, and their talking kept Tess from having to speak. When he did bring it up with her that night, she smiled and said, “Fine, Chick,” and after that he simply referred to the fall and the move south as something thoroughly discussed, decided upon, mutually agreed to, and believed in.

But there had been no reason for Theresa to bring it up because she was not going and neither were her children and she didn’t want to fight about it because she wanted Chick to go and she should have known what was coming when, last spring, her overly sincere and passionate husband discovered Marx’s line, “The point is not to understand the world, but to change it,” when Chick began living his days like those born-again people for whom ambiguity is a dirty word for they have found the parted seas of the black and white, all the answers are at hand, and you doubters best beware: to straddle the fence is to hesitate, and to hesitate at the calling hour is to side with the enemy—and make no mistake, the enemy will be vanquished. You will all be vanquished.

The sun glinted off a small plane far above the Berkshires. Tess tossed the last of her coffee, and remembered the stillness she had felt yesterday when she imagined her husband lying electrocuted on the ground. There was a quietness to it, a calm that seemed needed, one she knew for an instant she could slip into easily, if she were alone, if there weren’t her children’s grief to contend with, but mainly if there weren’t Allie’s, that bright darling girl who loves her crazy father so much.

12

Tom Burrell shook his head and drank coffee from one of Beatrice’s cardboard cups. “His cheekbone’s broken too, not just his nose.”

“His cheekbone.” Leo spit out a chunk of ice from his Coke. They were sitting inside the walled skeleton of the second floor. The sun was already clearing the roof of the barn and Leo knew when it got over the driveway and the road it would be lunchtime. The field grass down the hill was thick and green and a slight breeze blew it in uneven waves. “Did you mean what you said yesterday about quitting?”

“With God as my witness.”

“What will you do?”

Tom looked off in the direction of the road a moment. “My brother-in-law runs a crew in Chicopee. I don’t care for him much—he drinks like a catfish—but I’m going to have to make an exception right now.”