The house was rank with absence. He sat in the pale filtered starlit yard and smoked and drank a small glass of whiskey. Then went through the dark house to the bedroom and lighted a lamp. The closet doors stood open as she had left them. He stood before them and gathered together an armful of her hanging dresses and thrust his face into them. Laundry soap. The closet smell of mouse scat, pale ancient cedar, a floral thread that might have been from her or might have been only the clothing itself. He blew out the lamp and undressed in the dark and got into the bed. The sheets musty, smelling old.

He woke during the night or half woke in another state altogether. He rolled off the bed onto his knees and crabbed across the floor and found her torn-off clothes from that last afternoon and he took them up wadded against him and lowered himself onto the mattress and humped against the balled clothing and then rolled over onto his back and with his left hand held the mess of clothes against his face, pressed to his nose and mouth as if he meant suffocation and with his other hand masturbated with a furious tight clench. Then slept again.

His first three years of school he frequently arrived home bruised, bleeding from his lips or nose, his eyes swollen. His knuckles broken and raw. It came in spates, days in a row or weekly and then weeks with nothing at all and then it would begin again. He would not speak of it, would stand silent, helpless tears on his face as one or both sisters ministered him. It was Abigail took the buggy to visit the teacher at Riford School but came back with nothing, her face a sneer of undirected anger. Nothing happened on school grounds. The Clifford boy cousins denied all knowledge, their eyes running over Jamie as if memorizing him. Aunt Connie squatted and took him by the elbows and naming them one by one asked if her boys tormented him and he denied it. After this Prudence laid claim to the job of driving him to school and picking him up afternoons but he would slip out of the house while she was in the barn harnessing a horse and go fast across the meadow into the woods and down to where he could come out and cross the road to the school. Afternoons if she was sitting waiting for him he’d bolt past the back of the gig and leap the ditch on the far side of the road and be off into the alders and popples in the springy damp ground there. And yet there in the woods they found him also and once found he would not run but turned to face them, one or five, and stand shaking before their taunt—of himself, of his father, of his dead mother, of his sisters: of them all. Not as simple as his skin or that of his mother or how she died but all of it mixed together in the animal cruelty of boys, the real with the imagined or conjured, the words’ meanings not even understood by them or him but the cut and thrust of them clear enough, the indecent giddy pleasure of making pain. Until he would charge them, silent, clench-fisted. The boys: not just his cousins Clifford but the Polk brothers, Jimmy Potwin, Dennis Dowd, Bill Bartlett, Duffy Smith, the Morgan brothers. Sometimes others. He would always fight them. He knew if he quit they would also and knowing this made him all the more ferocious, wild and ineffectual as they bloodied him and he would not quit. His father knew this, both these things, and he would sit nights wreathed in pipe smoke explaining aloud what the boy already knew. His father gentle, puzzled, remote and tender, his wearied recognition not aid but a balm as if together the two of them understood the pointlessness of the anger of the two women—that it was not the blood or fists or even the words but some other thing altogether that could not be stopped, checked or changed.