On the turning gravel road Ray would have appeared to be, at least at a distance, just another soldier trudging home, first down to the irrigation canal and then west to cut into the edge of the rising ridgeline, oaks casting their shadows eastward across the tops of the yellow grasses, the occasional truck passing along the dirt, some slowing to look him over, this olive-clad soldier with his duffel. Perhaps one stopped to offer him a ride simply because he was a soldier and the soldiers were coming home, but he would not have taken such a ride, would have nodded politely and demurred, would have told them that he wanted to feel the road under his feet, to test the quality of the air, to feel that he was no longer in some dream or fantasy but had once more returned to the land of his birth. How many times had he walked along the dirt road up the side of the ridge, and how many times had he come down that same road with Jimmy and sometimes with Helen too, in Mr. Wilson’s borrowed Ford, all the way down the hill to the confluence of the river, feeling in all those years that he was not different at all, that they were simply young people living their lives? But of course it was exactly this that had been proven a lie. First there had been Tule Lake and then, after he had enlisted, Mississippi for training and then Anzio and the grim terror of the war. He had volunteered as a measure against everything that had come upon his father and his mother and his two sisters, as if in choosing he could somehow wash away every choice he had been unable to make. Maybe the gravel road up the ridge should have been filled with mines and machine gun nests. If it had been, it would not have been any more surprising than its current state and condition of being exactly identical to his memory.