“I let her out of the pen, and she wouldn’t go back in,” he says in his choked voice. “I thought I could scare her.”

“Oh, Jack,” Beth says. “One of the pigs?”

“The sow,” he says, leading her out into the pearly, brassy light of dawn. He hurries her across the dewy grass, past the kitchen garden, through the open gate of the graveyard. “I’m so stupid. I think she’s going to die.”

He slows as they approach his mother’s headstone and the plants growing in a wild tumult before it. They’ve all cleverly sunk back into the ground, so nothing is visible except the disturbed earth and their tufted green branches. He lets go of Beth, and she takes another few steps forward, looking around, puzzled. When she frowns, Jack can see she has a small second chin, and it strikes him that someday she will be unpleasantly fat. Then he thinks, No, she will never be fat.

“Jack,” Beth says, and her voice has a note of caution in it. “I don’t see anything. What are you playing at?”

He reaches behind his back and grips the handle of the trowel, jammed down into the back of his jeans. He means to drive the point of the blade into her calf, but she turns at the last instant, and he sinks it, with a gritty crunch, into her thigh, above her left knee. She cries out and sits down among the mums with a thud. Beth draws a long, quivering breath and holds it, staring at the trowel buried in her leg. She rests her shoulders back against Bloom McCourt’s headstone.

“Get her,” Jack says to the mums. “Finish her off! She’s yours!”

The plants do not stir.

Beth lifts her chin and gazes at him with bewildered eyes, brimming with tears.

“Have you lost your mind?” she asks.

“Get her! Kill the sow!” he shouts at the mums, something almost like hysteria in his tone, but there is no response.

“Are you out of your goddamn mind?” Beth asks again.

Jack stares into her pale face, at her damp eyes and quivering, girlish chin.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Jack says. “I think I am.”

His hand finds the handle of the trowel. He yanks it out of her leg. Then he puts it back in, this time in her chest. She tries to scream, but the third blow sinks into her mouth, cutting it open wide. The fourth finds her throat.

For a long time after, there is only the sound of digging, although Jack never once sinks the trowel into soil.

19.