Once he’s done making a red, chewed-up clay of Beth’s breasts and face, he tries to dig up his mums. He pulls up plant after plant and finds only the twisted white claws of roots, dirt falling off them. The sixth plant is sickly, the leaves full of holes, ants crawling up and down the roots.

Jack touches his head, which feels queer, and leaves red fingerprints on his face. Whether he has marked himself with Beth’s blood or his own, he could not say. He wonders if this is what it feels like to be hungover. His arm is sore from sticking her so many times. Butchering a full-grown woman is tiring work.

What exactly was he thinking when he led her out here anyway? It’s already hard to recall. He can never truly remember his night terrors when they fade. They are like one of those flowers that only open by moonlight, and the night is well over, the sky is brightening, turning a shade of lemon.

Beth, with her slashed, savaged mouth yawning wide, gapes blindly at the coming dawn.

20.

Jack is a while in the barn. The forty-pound plastic sacks of ammonium nitrate are piled against one wall, the white cans of nitromethane lined up next to them. He works by the shaded steel lamp on the plywood table, crafting a simple explosive out of a couple inches of copper pipe, black gunpowder, cotton swabs, and some other bits and pieces. He caps either end of the pipe, feeds a fuse punched through a hole in one end. He works in a kind of half-awake trance, without second-guessing himself, without second thoughts. There is no going back now. There is only going forward.

After due consideration he nestles the nitro tanks here and there among the heavy-duty plastic sacks of fertilizer. He uses electrical tape to secure his homemade IED to one of the cans, directly beneath the valve—then rotates the tank so the gleaming copper pipe is out of sight, facing the wall.

By the time he leaves the barn, the sun is snagged in the branches of the big oak beyond the house and the entire tree is aglow like a burning skeletal hand of glory. The grass rustles in the breeze, a hundred thousand burning filaments of green light.

21.

“Dad,” Jack says. He pushes aside the shower curtain. “Dad! I did something bad, I did something really, really bad. I need help.”

His father stands, broad-shouldered and powerfully built, in the hot and foaming spray. His face looks curiously naked without his spectacles. He twists his head around and stares nearsightedly down at his son. Hank McCourt’s face is almost innocent in its shock.