It occurred to him that Magnus had been watching this for years, and he stopped to face this pathetic man. “You’ve got to destroy that thing under there. If I come here any time after today and find it, I’m going to beat you till you cry piss and shit tears, you got me?”

Flinching, as if Frank were about to hit him, Magnus nodded. Frank wished he had the strength to hit him, but it was all he could do to keep walking. He didn’t feel human but like something forged in what he had seen, those images, which were senseless and made all the sense in the world. It was as if he had dreamed them a thousand times before. Now they had broken surface, a wreckage in his head. And the worst thing was that he hadn’t known—had managed to forget somehow until now—how deeply he loved his mother.

Annie stood at the edge of the field watching Lew trying to uproot a stump. The old Deere’s engine kept cutting out. How similar he was, in some ways, to his father; solitude finished in his long body.

At last he jumped down from the tractor and came to her out of this defeat, his walk like no walk, but as if he imitated walking in order to move. A feminine face, its beauty both assertive and blank, with that smooth forehead, those otherworldly eyes, the placid mound of his pink soft mouth. And yet his muscular legs and torso, his vein-vined arms, broad shoulders, and powerful neck, gave the impression that masculinity had infected him from the ground up. Soon it would take his face too, and the lovely girl beneath would be consumed entirely.

“Can you fix it?” she said.

“That old rust bucket ain’t never going to shift those stumps. And the ground couldn’t be any wetter.” Leaning back against the fence in front of her, he sighed.

She put her hand on his damp neck. “I’m on my way to Ruth’s. I’m interviewing her for the school paper. Thought I’d come by.”

Smiling, he removed her hand and kissed it.

“Things don’t seem to fit,” she said.

He frowned curiously.

Her heart was pounding. She didn’t know how to say it: that she wished they hadn’t become physical, hadn’t got older; that she knew her love, desire, and all these years between them weren’t enough. And at the same time he was hers. Twice now she had dreamed he was dead. Strange dreams, with Raj holding Roh’s hand, Lew lying on the forest floor. She knew that some part of her wanted him dead. She had come to watch him work because she wanted to make him a stranger, to unlearn him, as you unlearn a word by saying it over and over again.

“Why aren’t you going to school anymore?” she asked.