“What do you mean? What are you saying?”

“Well,” she said, and for a long time that was all. Then her voice started up again, resigned: “This is not to be repeated. Not to that woman or anyone else. Are we clear?”

I nodded and she looked out the window toward the street. I thought she would begin her story, whatever it was to be, but instead she nodded into the darkness and told me we would have to drive there.

Chapter 11

11

ON THE DRIVE TO AUBURN, MRS. WILSON TOLD ME WHAT SHE had, up to that point, kept in secret: that Ray had come to her home—“My home!” she exclaimed, baffled and outraged even years later—and that she had run him off the property. She had thought that would be the end of it, but of course he returned the next day. This time her husband was present. He and the boy—a man now, a soldier who had been under fire and had killed, done things that Homer Wilson had never done and never would—had words there on the porch. Homer tried at first to be reasonable, but Ray kept asking why why why no matter what her husband said to him until Homer lost his temper, a rare event, his fleshy freckled countenance reddening from the end of his nose to the tips of his outsized ears. “Get off my property or so help me God I’ll have you thrown in jail,” his voice raised in a howl, indignant, bereft of patience, and still harboring the secret knowledge that here stood the father of his own grandson. He was unable to look him directly in the face, a face which must have reminded him of his friend Tak and all that had been before and all that would never be again. He had never seen the baby, neither of the men had, and although Mrs. Wilson did not say it I could not help but wonder if there was a great swath of loss running through Homer Wilson on that porch, that it had come to this, that in another world he might have embraced this boy as a son to replace the one that was lost.