He had mentioned to Chet that Jimmy Wilson was dead and Chet told him that it had been in the newspaper and his mother had kept the notice; he would show it to Ray if Ray wanted to see it, although apart from stating that Jimmy had been killed in the Pacific, Chet said that there was nothing in the newsprint that Ray did not already know. The whole world had gone mad for a few years and the boys of that county had thrown themselves into the meat grinder without a thought. Even Ray, for he really had believed that there might be some dispensation for his mother and father and sisters in the camps, that the government might look to his service as a way to release them back to their lives. Nothing he had wanted had come to fruition in the end, the whole of the tree blistering into curl.

BY THE TIME THEY CAME he had decided to leave Newcastle entirely, to travel back west toward the Pacific and to find his family in Oakland. Had he left a day earlier, an hour earlier, he might yet have made it, might yet be alive, and then all that could have been might have been, for all of them: his parents, Mrs. Wilson, even Helen. And Franklin, of course; him most of all. Perhaps Ray would have found the boy, would have loved him from afar, watching his son’s innocent play from across some Seattle street on a day when the sun shone bright and clear through the clouds. Perhaps the boy would never have known him—for he would have had his own parents, the Yamadas, and assumedly they would have loved him fiercely, having plucked him from that orphanage—but even if they never met, even if Ray never made himself plain and clear to the boy, would not his love have been a kind of shield to him?