Yet he knew how close to the cliff edge Lew was standing, how precariously his friend remained in the world, unable even to get traction on the words he was trying to say, his eyes full of pitying love but also of parting, their gaze recessive, releasing. About the danger of lunging, there had been an elision in his mind, a panicked short-circuiting. While it was true he had intended to save his friend, it was equally, maybe more, true to say he had wanted it all to be over. Beneath the story of love and safety of which he had convinced himself—perhaps beneath all such stories—was another. Could he deny that into the void of that loss entered everything: a blue immaculate sky; a broad brown river carved, through countless lifetimes, between striated bluffs; wind-filled trees flinging themselves away, losing nothing. The other story. He had died with Lew, his blood rushing forward over the bluff with his friend. His dearest friend, the first to throw a slack arm around his shoulders, unaware of the breathless joy this had caused in a dark-skinned little boy from England. He had died there on the bluff with Lew; had not died, which was, when he thought about it, miraculous. His life fell out of his arms. In the next instant those arms held his life: Annie.

When the dream of falling wakes him, he sits up in bed to let the pounding swell of his heart subside, listens to the distant surf, and watches the shadows of the eucalyptus leaves rise and swirl against the wall, separate and indivisible, like starlings above the fields.

As vividly as the sun upon the ocean, that glittering path to the edge of the world, Raj can again see Lew’s naked body when they found it lying in a vast floe of driftwood gathered at a bend in the river. He looked as if he were sleeping, newborn, slick, and exhausted, at the heart of that dead place. What had happened on a bluff over the Missouri that day seemed to Raj the source of his life, more real than he, as if that pale naked body amid the driftwood were dreaming him, dreaming all the people of Pisgah, dreaming this world.

He and Annie had thought so long about names for Baby, thought even for a while that they might call him Lewis. In the end, though, like so many immigrants from another world, they decided to give him a name that set him as free as any child can be from the past. Clayborne, Old English, meaning a dweller in a place with clay soil by a brook. More important, it meant nothing to them. There for this boy to fill. They should have known he would have no choice but to fill it with a manifestation of their silence—about his father, about the past.