The night smelled like a rotten log, the kind that mushed under his foot on their evening walks together. Asher had taught his son the names of trees and how to identify them. The feel of the bark, the shapes of the leaves. The hickory trees were scaly-barked, the tulip poplars possessed greenish-yellow flowers in the early summer. Sometimes Asher would stop and put his hand out to rest against Justin’s upper chest. “Hush, listen,” Asher would say dramatically, trying to drill into Justin’s head the importance of this world up on the ridge. Then he’d tell Justin that birdie birdie birdie call was a redbird’s. “Remember that song, now,” he’d say, and the little boy would eat it all up, big-eyed and openhearted. Those days wouldn’t last forever. He thought of the way Justin carefully tucked feathers or bits of quartz or buckeyes into his nature collection when they found them and then hid them in his Prince Albert cigar box when they returned home.

Asher hollered his name, over and over.

He couldn’t see much except the black silhouettes of the trees closest to him. Once Asher had found Justin and Roscoe in a grassy bald back in the woods, asleep. Roscoe’s head rested on Justin’s arm like a pillow, his wet black nose touching Justin’s neck.

Asher had come to the boundary fence and he was sure Justin wouldn’t have gone past that, so he took off at a jog until he had come back out into the starlit yard behind their house.

He looked under the porch, in the toolshed (where he grabbed a great hank of thick rope, just in case, wrapping it around his torso from shoulder to hip), even in the doghouse. He cupped his hands and hollered his son’s name but his voice was lost on the wall of noise. He ran back into the house and told Lydia and Zelda to come help him look.

“Vanished?” Lydia said.

He had seen the lightning earlier and knew that it was most likely raining again to the east. More water back there could drive this flood up in seconds. Or Justin could just stumble into the water trying to save Roscoe. He was out there and they had to find him immediately. “We’ve got to look.”

All three of them roamed the yard, calling Justin’s name. Lydia prayed aloud that he would be found. Asher felt sick to his stomach; they had lost him. He was gone. Just like Roscoe.

“I’m going down to the river,” Asher called.