“I won’t be talked to like that,” Bob Campo said from behind him. “Not from a . . .” He seemed to look to the uniform then, as if in consideration of what it might mean. Then he finished what he had started: “Not from a goddamned Jap.”

What happened next was talked about for the rest of that evening and on into the following week and we all knew, each of us in our own way, that with each telling and retelling we were making things worse, that we were, each time, pressing him farther down the path that he only seemed to have chosen but which we had chosen for him: that Ray Takahashi did not even pause in his step but turned as if he had been given a marching command, about face, and drove his fist into Bob Campo’s jaw.

The foreman fell without a word. When Ray spoke again, it was to call down the rows to the boy, Bish Kenner. When there was no answer he said, just loud enough to be heard, “You’ll want to get this man some water.”

Now came the reply, a quiet voice from somewhere amidst the trees: “All right, Ray. I will.”

Then he turned to the ground again where Bob Campo writhed in the dirt, clutching his stomach and breathing sharply against the dust. “It’s Sergeant Takahashi,” he said. Or maybe he said nothing. After all, this story was told to us by the teens on their ladders and would they not want a kind of closing statement? If we needed any proof of what he had done overseas it was there upon his uniform, the story somehow held in the shape of those three chevrons stacked one upon the other and pointing upwards on each sleeve. Sergeant Takahashi was home.

WHEN HE REACHED THE WILSONS’ at last it was, like everything, just as his memory had preserved it and so he peopled it with the Wilsons of his memory, expecting them to appear, to greet him, smiling on his return from the war, Mr. and Mrs. Wilson and Jimmy and Helen. But when he approached that Victorian upon its hill—white and clean and glowing amidst the green blades of the orchard trees—it was quiet and still. The curtains were open but the direction of the sun had rendered them opaque, so that when he stepped onto the porch the windows were but incandent plates of blinding light.

He might have circled to the side yard to peer up at Helen’s window or, on the opposite side, to Jimmy’s, but instead he went to the front door and knocked. Then waited. Then he knocked again.