“He’s having a spell—crazy,” Ed said. “Can’t you see? He can’t even hear what you’re saying.”

He turned back then to the grader, as if he found some comfort in the inhuman beast that he could control, and climbed into the seat. From there he talked to Chuck in a whisper, told him to go down the road a piece and come back and do the job after they had got Nick away.

Joel meanwhile had put an arm around Nick and was just standing there.

“I can’t … stop … them,” Nick said. “It’s all being taken away.”

“No, you can’t alone,” Joel said gently. “But it was a good try.”

He felt sick to his stomach. Everything was in a whirl in and around him. Even the pond, as he looked at it, seemed like a hallucination, so peaceful, still, not a ripple to break the mirror of the surface where the birches were reflected, as white, as innocent of man and man’s furies and miseries as ever.

They walked home to Willard along the hardtopped road in silence. The day had begun as a holiday, a last day of freedom for Joel, and because he would soon be gone, it had all had a particular brilliance. He didn’t suppose he would ever forget the look of the lake and the delicacy of the birches reflected in it, the wakeful stillness of everything, as if they were present at a silent explosion of life at its purest and best. And now the whole mood had changed. The sun might as well have gone behind a cloud, there was so much darkness in him and in the thin, stooped man walking beside him like a sleepwalker, head down. Joel had seen his friend turn into a brutal animal, out to kill if he could. It had been so sudden—so unexpected—and so terrible, really—different from the scuffles he had witnessed at school. For Nick, he knew, it was pretty nearly a matter of life and death; for him the destruction of the wild flowers was as much murder as if they were people. Was this wrong? Who could blame a man for being that sensitive to the world around him?

Yet, it had been ugly. The ugliness of it hurt Joel. Anything that makes a man behave like an animal hurts. And it was pretty clear to him now that a man who might be unable to control such fury was not safe to have around.

“He’s never been right in the head since the war,” he remembered a man saying at the store. So … what now? And how would Ellen handle this?

When they were about a quarter of a mile from the village, standing on a hill where they could see the church spire below, Joel spoke for the first time.