Shortly after his release from Chicago General, he began weekly attendance of the Second Church of God (or was it the Third?), where he met his first wife, Agnes, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Lucy (same peaches-and-cream complexion). When it came to his past and his history with lightning, scars aside, he had the reticence of a Cold War spy: the book was closed on cloud-to-ground, on hexes, on lightning rod drummers, and the mystical crowd. (He had been offered gigs selling Pro-teck-o-Charge Safe-T rods. LIGHTNING IS THE NO. 1 CAUSE OF BARN FIRES!!!! and from 1–800-Know Your Future.) The book was closed on media interviews, on direct one-on-one confrontations with big bolts. (He in no way worried about smaller variants of lightning, those stray electrical fields that haunt most houses, those freak power surges that melt phone lines and blow phones blank, or those bolts of energy that float bemused into farmhouse windows.) Later he’d come to think that he had been willfully ignoring these forms and thereby picked a fight with them. Once, a film crew from France tracked him down to dredge up the past, but for the most part he urged himself into a normal life and felt bereft of charge, working at the PR firm, representing some commodities brokers, so that when the next strike came it was out of the blue—the blue yonder, a rogue bit of static charge, summer heat lightning. This time he and Agnes were safely ensconced in their summer rental in upstate Michigan watching the Cubs on television. Agnes lay prone on the divan wearing only panties and a bra, exposing her long legs and her schoolgirl belly and the dimpled muscles of thigh. The cobwebby bolt radiated in a blue antimacassar across the window screen, collected itself, swept through the window, and seemed to congeal around her so that in that brief moment before she was killed, before the power failure plunged the room into black, he was granted a photo negative of her glorious form.

To get away from Chicago, he bought the old family farm, rebuilt the big barn, installing along its roof line six rods with fat blue bulbs attached to thick braided aluminum wires dangling from the barn’s sides. The horizon in those parts let the sky win. Even the corn seemed to be hunching low in anticipation of the next strike. In the evenings he read Kant and began dating a woman named Stacy, a large-boned farm widow who dabbled in poetry and quoted from T. S. Eliot, the whole first section of “Ash Wednesday,” for example, and entire scenes from The Cocktail Party. Nick was fifty now, lean from the fieldwork, with chronic back pain from driving the combine. But he loved the work. He loved the long stretches of being alone in the cab, listening to Mozart sonatas while the corn marched forward into the arch lights, eager to be engulfed by the mawing machine. Behind the cab—in the starlit darkness—emerged the bald swath of landscape.