So they were all different now, all changed. The plague bacillus had done its job. Death became for Hook what his family once had been, the very content of his life. It became his companion, a dour hired man forever at his side. He could not look at anyone without seeing it, like the skeleton under their flesh, the white bone naked to the truth of the cathode ray tube. He would look at Jenny and wonder how it would come to her finally. In childbirth? Some silly accident, a casual oversight by a hung-over intern? Aunt Marian he would see in a hospital bed, cadaverous and silent, with plastic tubes running into her nose and veins and her fine sharp eyes glazed with morphine as she drifted away. And Bobby. Always with Bobby it was an accident, a car chopping into a tree at night or their big new John Deere tipping on a hillside and rolling over on the boy or one of the bulls getting him against a building or fence post and crushing him so quickly Hook would barely have enough time to get there and gather him up, clutch the quicksilver of his life as long as he could.

And it was no different in town. There Hook had the feeling he was passing through some kind of modern open-air death row unknown as such to its inmates, with himself a stranger among them, some alien being privy to a secret that if known would have caused all of them to lay down their work and begin to fast and pray and weep and wait.

But they did not know. Only Hook knew. Only he had the dour companion.

He began again one night in late February, dressing silently and slipping out of the house and heading with the dogs down the drive through a cold clear moonless night to be with his other family, his family of the dead. As he walked, they kept pace beside him, Douglas and Parnelli and Liz, for she was dead now too, dead to him. And he wondered if they thought his tears were for them or simply because of the cold. Himself, he did not know.

He came to the end of the open ground and started down the hill through the trees toward the blacktop, which shone like a lane of lava in the starlight. In a few seconds he would reach it and follow it uphill to the cemetery, the altar of his cathedral, where he would be alone for a time with what was left of his son and wife, his Chris, his Kate. And he knew what he would feel there, a pain that would open him like a plow dropped in spring soil and he would want to offer his companion all he would ever possess just to see the two of them alive again for even a few seconds, to hold them and love them and lose for those moments the burden of his aloneness.