“I can feel it,” he told his father. “The instant I pull the trigger I know I got it.”

“Maybe we’ll have partridge for supper one night then. Once they’re empty, these cans don’t make much of a meal.”

“What it is, is just looking at the can. Nothing else.”

“Is that what it is?”

“It’s my brain stopping, is what it is.”

Jamie ran his hand quickly over the boy’s head. Said nothing. The short autumn afternoon gone to evening. Twilight. The leaves of the trees along the meadow edge a soft glow in the half-light, the maples like coals in a fireplace.

Early October, the middle of the night, rain like warfare, the telephone went off like the end of the world. Jamie in the hall in the dark, one hand holding up the mouthpiece stand, the other pressing the earpiece against his ear, listening. Even with the line static and the storm he heard the shrill rise in Carrick’s voice. And so responded with a deep calm, his voice easy, saying, Yuht, and Sure, sure. This calm against the screaming little-rat-bomb going off inside his own head. Finally said, “Sit tight. Don’t call another soul. I’ll be there half an hour. How’s the old woman?” Listened. Then said, “Of course she is. Listen: make her some tea, put some liquor in it. No, fuck that. Just give her a little glass of liquor. Not much, just some. You understand?” And did not wait to hear what Carrick replied but had already hung up, was going back up the hall, pulling off his pajama bottoms. Heard the rustle of noise at the top of the stairs. Boy or dog. Likely both. Snapped up the hall switch for light.

Two reasons for gratitude: Binter died if not in his sleep at least in bed, sitting up with a racking motion, waking his wife, both hands first gripped tight to his chest as his voice rattled broken out of him, then his hands reached out, groping, before him. And so there was no culpability upon Carrick. None to be laid at least. And this: the surprise that the Binter woman, that angry figure hovering for the past near-dozen years whose job it seemed was to glower at Jamie, this woman of garbled gibberish actually spoke American at least as well as her husband had.

When he came into the farmhouse that night out of the rain with his boy and the dog shut out in the car the woman had come to him and held his elbows with her hands and studied his face and then she crinkled; her face folded into itself and she moved in and laid her face against his chest and held him and wept. As if he were her son. And he stood there holding her, patting her back, ignoring the eyes of Carrick, seated at the kitchen table with the open bottle of whiskey before him, the pair of glasses. The woman shuddering against him. He looked down at the top of her head. Her hair loose for the night, down over the shoulders of her nightgown. And he stopped patting her back and slid both hands around her back and pulled her close to him and she tightened against him and they stood there, holding each other. His chin in the furrow of her hair. Her chin a small sharp jab into his breastbone.