Midafternoon, and the boys are back again. Asia gasps when she sees them from the window, limping their way up the lawn to the porch. She calls for Mother and Rosalie, her voice so shrill, it brings them at once and Ann Hall, too. John is leading Joe by the arm. The boys’ faces are mottled, misshapen, black with bruising. Joe’s eyes are swollen into slits.

“There was a nest of hornets,” John says. He’s breathing hard, bent over, hands on his knees. “Like a plague in the Bible. They came right for our eyes.”

“Hornets,” Joe repeats with difficulty. His face is still swelling.

Ann Hall mixes dirt with water from the pump to make a poultice. She puts this on John’s face, Rosalie daubs it on Joe’s. Mother forces castor oil into both boys and sends them to bed. “Hornets,” she says to Rosalie, and Asia can tell that information has passed between them but she herself doesn’t know what was said. This happens often.

Around this same time, Joe is afflicted with the first visitation of what will become a recurring malady. For six days, he’s sunk into a misery so deep, he’s unable to eat or to speak. The diagnosis is melancholic insanity. Then the fit passes, leaving Asia unsure how much of it was merely performance.

The shelter is never finished. Soon after, despite the expense, Joe is sent off to a boarding school in Elkton, where he’ll be enrolled for the next four years.

Months will pass before John confesses that, unable to agree as to the orientation of the door, he and his brother had argued furiously and then fallen on each other with their fists. When they’d finally exhausted themselves and calmed enough to see the damage, they knew they’d be in trouble. The hornets were a story they’d concocted together.

John’s forthright if tardy confession is disarming. Asia writes to Edwin: “Those wicked boys! Of course, Mother knew. Knew from the moment she saw them. I’m just glad they didn’t escape completely. I’m just glad about the castor oil.”

John was quite impressed with Joe and says so repeatedly. Despite the difference in size, despite John’s years of Bully Boy brawls, his little brother fought him to a draw.

“Nobody won in the end,” John says, but it’s hard to see it that way. After all, Joe was the one Mother sent away. This is a thing worth remembering when, years later, Joe disappears into the ether without a word to anyone, causing his mother no end of worry and heartache.

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