“It’s what has to be done,” Ronny said, and waded deeper into the pool, raising the dynamite in his left hand as the water rose to his chest.

Reverend Tilson raised his hand as though to make a pronouncement as Luke crashed through the last thicket of mountain laurel and onto the rocks at the pool’s edge. Like the rest of us he could only watch as Ronny heaved the dynamite into the right side of the falls.

Ronny turned and started wading out as Sheriff Cantrell and Walter Phillips backed away from the pool. Allen tried to pull me toward the woods, but I refused to move.

“Turn your head,” Allen shouted at me, but my eyes were on Luke. He’d dived into the pool and was swimming underwater toward the falls. He was going after the dynamite. Maybe to snuff the fuse. Maybe to use his body to shield the river.

Everything was quiet, so quiet I thought I could hear the fuse sizzling under the water.

Then the ground beneath my feet shook and the pool heaved upward like a geyser.

Reverend Tilson stood in the shallows, his white shirt drenched. One of the women in his congregation screamed. The back of Ronny’s neck was bleeding. Sheriff Cantrell and Walter Phillips took him by the arms and set him down on a sandbar.

Walter Phillips knelt beside Sheriff Cantrell, blocking my view.

“How bad is it?” he asked.

“I think he’s okay,” Sheriff Cantrell said.

Luke was staggering back to the opposite shore, his face bloody.

Reverend Tilson was still in the shallows, his hand still upraised. He stared at something in the pool.

“Oh, God,” Herb Kowalsky said.

Then I saw what they saw, Randy’s and Ruth’s bodies rising from the pool’s depths into the light.

CHAPTER 10

After death, everything in a house appears slightly transformed—the color of a vase, the length of a bed, the weight of a glass lifted from a cupboard. No matter how many blinds are raised and lamps turned on, light is dimmer. Shadows that cobweb corners spread and thicken. Clocks tick a little louder, the silence between seconds longer. The house itself feels off-plumb, as though its foundation had been calibrated to the weight and movement of the deceased.

So it seems to me on this October afternoon as I box up my father’s clothes. Everything and everyone else has been dealt with: the horse and the cow given to Joel; the truck donated to Luke’s Forest Watch Project; paperwork done at the courthouse, pictures and a few other heirlooms I’m taking with me packed in the Toyota’s trunk; Tony Bryan, who wrongly assumed that Ben and I planned to sell.

After two months I am returning to Columbia.

“Don’t worry about your job,” Lee had assured me in August. “It’ll be here. You take care of your father.”