Eli had a stronger sense of home. He was homing now like a carrier pigeon, unable to rest until he could sleep in his own bed. He knew he ought to stop for the night, but he was feeling the kind of exhaustion that masquerades as wakefulness. He reached for the figuring rope he always kept handy and began tying knots with one hand as he drove. It was an old habit—when he had a problem he couldn’t untangle, he would grab a worn-out strip of lariat and tie everything from a sheepshank to a hangman’s knot while he thought it through.

He had much to ponder on this midwinter evening. How a man grows old, the way time whispers along his spine. How a fellow can set out to carve his name on the world and find, when all is said and done, that the world has carved its name on him. He was sixty-two, a big man whose power had scarcely begun to diminish, but at times he felt like an old dray horse pulling a load of bricks. Decades had passed since he had buried his wife Livvy, a woman he had loved as a man loves breathing or sunrise. Ida Mae, his second wife and the mother of the last six of his thirteen children, was lost to him and to the world—a blank, staring form in the state hospital in Evanston, her mind beyond the reach of money or medicine. When he looked at her, he could not recall what she had been like before her mind went. There was nothing more he could do for her. In his nightmares, he saw their entire brood lined up in identical wheelchairs in front of the big windows on the main floor of the hospital, all with the same blank, unseeing gaze.

Of all the sorrows that troubled him, the one that weighed most heavily was the death of his daughter Velma. Death cast regret in stone. He didn’t need Emaline’s rebuke to remind him of all the ways in which he had failed poor Velma. He had always thought that one day he would be able to sit down and spend time with his banished daughter, get to know her again. A dozen times he had been on the verge of paying her a visit, but something always intervened. He could stand at her graveside until doomsday, but he couldn’t change a thing. She was gone and he could find no shred of forgiveness for himself.