By this time we’d tried screaming at the animal. The little girl and the mother. And sometimes Katie. And sometimes Miriam. Clapping our hands, chasing it. With clumsy vehemence Mom had run at the panicked animal with a rake, bringing the rake down, hard. Grunting, as the rake leapt from her hands even as the groundhog escaped, easily.

Running fatly, but fast. Disappearing into a burrow at the edge of the property.

Jerr had this great plan, he’d heard from somewhere: drown the garden predator in its burrow. Sure he’d rather shoot the motherfucker to smithereens with a shotgun but he didn’t have a shotgun, not even a rifle, though Daddy had a rifle somewhere in the house unloaded and off-limits for his kids. Instead Jerr hooked up the longest lawn hose to a spigot at the back of the house, dragged the nuzzle to the burrow (which the little girl had pointed out to him), and turned on the water full blast as Mom watched from a little distance.

As uneasily we watched. Katie and me. We did not want to see the animal drowned but we wanted Mommy not to cry and to be happy.

At the mouth of the burrow Jerr squatted, peering into it as water rushed in. He wore a grimy baseball cap, reversed on his head. He wore a soiled black T-shirt, shorts. He was no more than thirteen or fourteen but already he resembled our father. In the boy’s sharp-boned face the hard, brutal male beauty of the father. Indifference, obliviousness to the pain of others.

Water continued to gush from the hose and into the burrow, noisily. Either the water would drown the groundhog or “flush” it out so that Jerr could kill it by hitting it with a shovel—that was the plan. But after some suspenseful minutes water began to spill out of the top of the burrow, like vomit. No groundhog.

Oh damn. God damn. It’s in there—I saw it . . .

Mom dissolved in tears. Indignant, defeated.

But one more time, another morning Jerr tried again with the hose, burrow, gushing water. And again no groundhog.

(NEITHER HER BROTHER OR HER MOTHER KNEW: LITTLE VIOLET had—daringly—led Jerr to the wrong burrow.

Several burrows in the backyard which were easy to confuse. Jerr never knew the difference between them and neither, it seemed, did Mom.)

HOW’D MY BROTHER DIE? A PRISON GUARD SHOT HIM.

It was claimed that inmates at Marcy had “rioted” and tried to take guards captive. But they were outmanned. Gunned down.

Thirty at the time. Well—almost thirty-one.

Strange to think he’d got that old—he’d been just a kid when I last saw him.

What was he in for?—manslaughter.