They had seen and heard, but none of them—Moira the maid, Dailey the driver, Gideon the caretaker—had the temerity to ask Cyrus what had provoked him; and when the boys returned from the boatyard that evening, the help all knew what was expected of them. It would be best if you leave your father alone tonight. Lockwood was here earlier in the day, and they had a dispute. He’s quite upset.… What about?… He didn’t tell us, and we think it would be smart if you don’t ask him.

So Nathaniel, Eliot, and Sybil’s grandfather did not speak to their father that night, or see him. Like the help, they also knew what was expected of them, and in the morning said nothing to him until he addressed them. By that time, he gave all the appearances of having calmed down, but of course it wasn’t calm; it must have been, Sybil theorizes, a kind of numbness brought on by fury, grief, disbelief, and revulsion of such depth and intensity as to cancel each other out. The betrayal! The betrayal! From the wife to whom he had given so much, from the son he could have cast aside but did not, even at the sacrifice of all that should have been his. The shock was not emotional but metaphysical, such as might be felt by a devout priest who comes upon irrefutable proof that God does not exist. Cyrus was, in short, insane, but not in his mind—in his soul. That species of madness is the kind that commonly results in mass domestic slaughters, and as Sybil looks back far into the past, through the prism of fact and imagination, her wonder is that Cyrus did not take his L. C. Smith and shoot the sons who were not his and the son who was, and the treasonous wife, and then himself. Instead, he sat and brooded for days, and, the rational brain thinking within the deranged soul, he decided on what he had to do. Had to do, perhaps, to prevent himself from picking up the gun and cleansing his polluted house in the blood of the guilty and the innocent alike.

Sybil stops talking and looks up into the square of blemishless blue, from which the hawk has flown. Now there is only empty, annihilating sky.

“All right,” I say. “He had a plan, of sorts. A muddled plan, but a plan. The divorce was part of it, but he never went through with that. Right?”