“Dad, don’t.”

Skeeter begins. “Let’s forget the slavery, Chuck. It was forever ago, everybody used to do it, it was a country kind of thing, right? Though I must say, the more it began to smell like shit, the more you crackers rolled around in it, right?”

“We had more country.”

“Easy, sit back. No arguments, right? You had cotton come along, right? Anybody but black folks die working those cotton swamps, right? Anyhoo, you had this war. You had these crazies up North like Garrison and Brown agitating and down South a bunch of supercrackers like Yancy and Rhett who thought they could fatten their own pie by splitting, funny thing is”—he chuckles, wheezes, Rabbit pictures him with a shaved head and sees Farnsworth—“they didn’t, the Confederacy sent ’em away on a ship and elected all play-it-safes to office! Same up North with cats like Sumner. Come to the vote, people scared of the man with the idea, right? Do you know, suppose you don’t, dude called Ruffin, bright as could be, invented modern agriculture or next thing to it, hated the Yankees so much he pulled the string on the first cannon at Sumter and shot himself in the head when the South lost? Wild men. Beautiful, right? So anyhoo, Lincoln got this war, right, and fought it for a bunch of wrong reasons—what’s so sacred about a Union, just a power trust, right?—and for another wrong reason freed the slaves, and it was done. God bless America, right? So here I begin to get mad.”

“Get mad, Skeeter,” Rabbit says. “Who wants a beer?”

“Me, Dad.”

“Half a one.”

Jill says, “I’ll split it with him.”

Skeeter says, “That stuff rots the soul. Mind if I burn some good Red?”

“It’s not legal.”

“Right. But everybody does it. All those swish cats over in Penn Park, you think they have a Martini when they come home at night? That’s yesterday. They blow grass. Sincerely, it is more in than chewing gum. Over in Nam, it was the fighting boy’s candy.”

“O.K. Light up. I guess we’ve gone this far.”

“There is far to go,” Skeeter says, rolling his joint, from a rubber pouch he produces from within the sofa, where he sleeps, and thin yellow paper, licking it rapidly with that fat pale tongue, and twisting the ends. When he lights it, the twisted end flames. He sucks in hungrily, holds it in as if about to dive very deep, and then releases the sweet used smoke with a belch. He offers the wet end to Rabbit. “Try?”

Rabbit shakes his head, watching Nelson. The kid’s eyes are bird-bright, watching Skeeter. Maybe Janice is right, he’s letting the kid see too much. Still, he didn’t do the leaving. And life is life, God invented it, not him. But he looks at Nelson fearful that his presence in the room will be construed as a blessing. He says to Skeeter, “Get on with your song. Lincoln won the war for the wrong reasons.”