The fish coming to the water’s edge, bold in its aggravation, making its sudden leap, causing Matthew to drop the rod and to slip on the slick shore mud, throwing him into the water, causing him to thrash about, trying to get his footing, the water pulling at him, the soft slush on the lake’s bottom grabbing him like quicksand. And then his body disappearing under the water.

All of it Noah could see in mind-pictures, and he could not push aside the thought that lodged in his chest: if he had caught the fish earlier, Matthew might still be alive.

He stood gazing at the place in the water where he had found Matthew’s body.

I will catch you, he said silently to the fish. I will catch you. “Peavo’s right,” Taylor said, standing close to Noah. “Not your fault. I guess the boy was always headed for something like this. It just happened, that’s all.” He put his hand on Noah’s shoulder. “Howard wants you to come up to his house,” he added. “Wants you to tell them about it.”

Noah nodded numbly.

“Has Milton come home yet?” someone asked.

“He’s on his way,” Whitlow said. Then: “He don’t know about this yet.”

“It’ll near kill him,” Moody mumbled. “Losing his wife like he did, and now his boy.”

For a moment, no one spoke, and then Whitlow whispered, “He’s with his mama now. That’s enough to know.”

It was a statement the men would carry with them from the lake to Howard Reynolds’s home, would pass it along to Howard and to the women who were there doing housework for Ada. They would say it again and again, and in each saying they would find some peace from the truth of it.

“He’s with his mama now.”

“He’s with his mama now.”

“He’s with his mama now.”

There was no wailing in Howard Reynolds’s home. Only near—silence. In the living room, sitting heavily in two chairs, Howard and Ada seemed barely aware of the coming and going of people—of the helping-out women and the helpless men. They sat as though they were alone in the room where they had always found some comfort, the room holding some telling of their lives together. Photographs of people smiling for the shutter stroke of the camera, forever leaving that particular moment of merriment to be looked at and wondered about. A side table to the side of the sofa. A coffee table in front of it. The chairs. A rolltop desk against one wall. On it, a radio. A heating stove with a short piece of stovepipe going into a covering over the fireplace. It was a room they had made for their own fit and purpose and only they belonged wholly to it.

Ada had a framed photograph of Matthew in her lap, letting her fingers rest on the glass that covered his face. Eleanor sat in a straight-back chair near her, holding a church fan that she used to fan the air across Ada’s face when the air seemed to fill up with heat. The church fan had a picture of Jesus knocking at a door that did not have a latch on it. Howard kept his hands resting on his legs, as though someone had posed them there and he was afraid to move them.