She bit off a thread, and Nick, as silent as a wild animal, slipped out to the garden to smoke a cigarette and calm down. He had seen his mother shaken by rage often these past years. There was too much she could do nothing about that tore her apart—little things sometimes, like the way Mrs. Croswell down the road let her dogs rove the village, but more often—and this was what upset Nick—a kind of rage against the world. Seemed as though as she got older she couldn’t make her peace. She never lashed out at him, but what upset him was that he sensed she felt like an animal caught in a trap.

Nick drew in on his cigarette and watched the smoke spiral up in the windless air. Two robins were strutting and bobbing up and down in the vegetable patch. Far off, a crow cawed. The big maple towered up like a fountain of light, so gold against the blue, and no leaf fallen yet. It made you stop and think it a wonderful thing to be alive in such a world. Mother should get out more, he was thinking. She gets all locked up inside. And he bent down and tore up the shriveled plants of squash—hard frost had wilted them two nights before. Seemed like she had almost stopped enjoying anything, though she had come back from that walk with Christina kind of lit up inside, the way she used to look. It was strange that all those worst years when his dad had used to go and sit in the barn and weep with the despair of giving up the cows, and get drunk—all those years when his mother, so frail, had kept her head up (those blazing eyes!)—then she had been hard pressed, but she seemed like a flame.

I should help her somehow, Nick thought as he threw an armful of squash stalks on the pile back of the barn. But what he had to bear in himself was seeing and not being able to do. It was as if at the moment of taking hold, of action in any real sense, he was overcome by fatigue, by lethargy, and felt he had to lie down somewhere and sleep. That is the way it had been with Nick since he came back from the hospital after the war, a machine that had lost some vital part. No, he didn’t want to think about it. And Nick lay down under the apple tree and looked up through the branches at the sky. He saw a robin’s nest he hadn’t known was there, and soon he was lost in a long, wordless daydream.