For three weeks Stacy sat beside his hospital bed and accompanied his anguish by singing odes and folk songs and small ditties she’d picked up as a kid in Alabama, in addition to going through the complete collected poems of Eliot. She had a pure hard voice that seemed carved out of the American soil. In the bandage casing, amid the welts of itching and the drips of sweat running down his legs—all unreachable locations—he had acute visions of combat in Korea, the U.S. First Cavalry Division taking the full brunt of a barrage of Katyusha rockets—until bolt no. 8 (as he envisioned it) intervened, with its thick girth, the revoltingly huge embrace of the horizon as it came eagerly down. It was the big one, the finalization of several conjoining forks into one, unimaginable fury.

After Stacy took off on him, he put the farm up for sale and moved six miles to the north. He would live a bachelor life in a small Illinois town. A siege mentality had set in. He would hunker down, avoid fate by immersing himself in the lackluster flow of the landscape, in the view from his room over the Ellison Feed & Seed store, a vista so boring it made you want to spit (and he did). Boarding in the rooms around him were exiled farm boys who sniffed glue from brown bags, listened to music, and whiled away days writing on the walls with Magic Markers. There was nobody as deviant and lost as an ex-farm boy, he would come to learn. They were depressed from knowing that the whole concept of the farm—the agrarian mythos of land-human love, not to mention the toil and tribulation of their own kin, who had suffered dust bowls, drought, and seed molds—had been reduced to a historical joke. Industrial farms ruled. Left perplexed in their skin, they listened to hip-hop, attempted more urbane poses (many had missing limbs), smoked crack and jimsonweed, stalked the night half naked in their overalls, carved tattoos into their own arms. Nick felt akin to them. In their own way, they’d been struck by lightning, too.