On the way, friends kept stopping them, not so much to talk as to touch them with their hands, pat them, give them their twisted smiles of sympathy, which were genuine, Hook knew, for it was Chris in the coffin and not himself. Mrs. Corman, a neighbor and high-school English teacher as Hook himself once had been, tried to speak but had to give it up. He would have taken her hand and tried to comfort her but Jenny was still holding onto him, pressing her face against his shoulder. Even old Emil Strickler, whose last hundred acres Hook had bought at a fair price, and earned the man’s undying resentment in the bargain—even Emil came up and put his hand on Hook’s arm, squeezed him.

Others walked along with them. A weeping George Anderson cursed out loud. “It don’t make no goddamn sense, Dave! Why him, huh? Why him? Why not us? Why not me?” Two winters before, when George had broken his ankle hopping down from a tractor, Hook and Chris had seen to it that the man’s thirty-cow dairy herd went on producing through all the months of his mending.

They came to the cars and got in, Hook and his children into the rear of the first car, his aunt and uncle into the second. And it seemed ridiculous to Hook. They could have walked. A quarter-mile down the road, down the hill, was the gate to his farm; another quarter-mile back was his house. Yet he knew that they had to drive, that they had no choice, just as they had no choice but to suffer the presence of most of the mourners at his house for the next few hours, and for that matter just as he had had to suffer the absurdity of the whole ceremony, the rite of Christian burial. They lived here. They would go on living here. A man had to bend now and then. For himself, Hook would have preferred just the five of them, his family, bringing Chris’s body here and lowering it into the ground next to his mother’s with no more ceremony than the silence of their grief. And with this thought, as the mortician Rohmer discreetly closed the door of his prized Cadillac behind him, Hook felt the thing coming at him anew, and all out of control now. It was like being in a skiff on a fogged sea and out of nowhere there was suddenly this great dark shape slipping silently toward him through the mist, a ship’s prow, a shape of death, of loss. And then abruptly it was gone, was past him, moving just as silently on. Someday it would not miss him, he knew. But now was not the time for it, not the time for grief. Now was the time for control.

Hook looked at Jennifer sitting between him and Bobby. Meeting his eyes, she put her hands to her face and Hook looked away from her, only to see his son whipping his head furiously back and forth. The boy’s mouth was open; he was trying to speak.