I thought about what Isaac knew. He knew how to budget, how to plan trips he wanted to take, how to purchase things he liked. He knew how to live by himself. He knew who he was in the great big world. And he knew about my mother. She had not evaporated into a shower of coins or coal ash. She was waiting for me, at the kitchen table, or sitting on the windowsill beside her solar doll, waving for me as long as the sun shone. I would try to ask for forgiveness as soon as I could find the words.

The roads tumbled by. The trees, the rising and dipping power lines. The flashing angles of a tobacco field, the quick alignments. The ticking power lines, the swarms of birds. I could see every claw and eye, every blade of grass, the fibers on the blades that sucked up the water, and the water itself, flowing smoothly toward the heavens. The sun kept climbing and climbing till the shadows were at their minimum. The earth reeled backward, the road flung up behind our tires like a strip of silk. The trees mumbled. The light buzzed like a hornet.

Who am I? I asked the landscape. Who am I? Who am I, alone now with all these memories? I still don’t know, which is as Dice intended. He didn’t believe in the “I,” anyway.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to my teachers at the Brooklyn College MFA program—Josh Henkin, Dinaw Mengestu, and Ben Lerner; and at Harvard—Amy Hempel and Bret Johnston for the life-altering gifts of their instruction and support.

Thanks to PJ Mark, for his guidance, knowledge, and generative conversation, and to Emily Graff, for her profoundly attentive edits and for immersing herself in the farm with me. I’m grateful also to Marya Spence and Ian Bonaparte at Janklow & Nesbit, and, at Simon & Schuster, Jessica Chin and Aja Pollock, for their exacting copyedit, Carly Loman and Kimberly Glyder for their beautiful designs, and Samantha O’Hara, Elizabeth Breeden, and Marysue Rucci. I’m also indebted to Shakespeare & Company in Paris, and Harvard’s Office for the Arts, for encouraging the book in its earliest stages.

Thank you to Eve Gleichman, the best person to call when you’re halfway through a scene and don’t know what’s happening in it. Thank you to the first reader of the first draft, Julian Gewirtz, to Anastasia Bessias for photos in Durham, and to Lucy O’Leary for introducing me to Sacred Harp and so much else. Thank you to Jay for thoughts on activism and utopia and to Michael Stynes for the mania.

Thanks to all shape note singers in New York and beyond, and to my family, Dan, Nancy, Katie, Trevor, and Charlie.

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© JULIAN GEWIRTZ