As he had done evenings in New Hampshire in the time between burying his father and his leaving, sitting on the boulderback by the river suspended in the mesh of grief. Foster was no fool; he’d understood Patrick Jackson’s message. Now he could see that when he’d found the letters from Abigail he’d glimpsed not only a place to study his situation from the safety of some distance but also the hope of some clarity, some wisdom greater than his own. Some method perhaps to decode more perfectly the message Jackson gave him. Instead he’d learned there was no method. And understood that a portion of what Jackson had offered was a threat, from the same forces that had swallowed his father as completely as the earth covered his body. He knew he would not be returning to New Hampshire, not in any time he could name. He would keep the house. Let it rot and fall down if it came to that. But, keeping it was holding a presence, a small cry against the dark. Even if no one noticed or heard.

So he would sit in the starlit September burnt-back grass of the small family cemetery that was partly where he came from and drink small swallows of the whiskey and consider the breathless beauty of the earth and the perfect precision of its ways, where he saw no action as random or uncounted, and try to understand this weighed against the workings of men, a world that had been moving silently to bring him to this time, to this place and moment in his life. It was a world that seemed to hold no place for him. It was a world he was not even sure he wanted part of, and yet a part of it belonged to him by the simple fact of his existence. And knew he must take up that part for himself.

He grew sentimental with the whiskey, profoundly sad and hushed before the terrible beauty of it all. His dogs slept beside him, shivering with the early fall.

He went to see Connie Clifford. He dug his best shirt and his black trousers and coat from the valise and amused Pru and satisfied Abby when he heated the flatirons and pressed his own clothes. It was only what he’d always done, his father too. Perhaps his mother had once done this work for his father but it was a time he knew nothing of. Bathed and shaved and with his boots brushed clean and buffed with an old rag, he shut his dogs in the barn and then used the same rag to wipe down the Chrysler, clearing a week’s worth of yard dust from it.

Abigail said, “You took no such pains before driving in here and presenting yourself.”

He looked at her. Her face was pleasant. He said, “I didn’t know much, did I?”