“Some of them looked like they wondered,” he got out finally. “Like they believed maybe he really did kill himself.”

“We know better,” Hook said.

“Why’d they have to lie out there? Why’d they—” But the boy could not go on. He began to pound his fist against his knee, slowly, but with brutal force.

Hook seized his wrist. “I don’t know why. But we’ll find out, son. We’ll change it.” The words felt good to him, good on his lips, like the cubed bread of a childhood communion, like the recitation that accompanied the bread’s ingestion, a statement of faith and fact, solid, unarguable.

In the front, Rohmer started the car and they began to move down the narrow road toward the creek bridge and just beyond it the entrance to his farm. Along the creek bottomland stretching to their right about fifty head of Hook’s Black Angus herd were placidly moving among the brokendown corn stalks, scavenging for any grain the picker might have missed six weeks before. It was a hobby for them, not a necessity; they got all the hay and silage they needed.

“I want to go with you,” Bobby said.

Hook did not answer him. He would go alone, of course. The boy knew that. It was not a matter for discussion.

Except for the stretch of cleared ground along the creek, the rest of his land bordering the road was rough and wooded, virgin white oak and hickory with a sprinkling of maple and ash, and for Hook it was never anything but beautiful, the muted grays and blues of winter now, the black electricity of its barren limbs, just as important to him as the bright glory of its springtimes and autumns. And as always, he found it strange that such beauty was held against him, was somehow part of his neighbors’ brief against him, along with his college degree and his unbelief and just his character in general, his cold unblinking inability to be or even pretend to be “just plain folks.” That he, a farmer, a businessman the same as they, would leave this land along the road in a wild state instead of clearing it off and seeding it, making it work and produce—this, Hook knew, was one further heresy as far as they were concerned, further proof that he was not one of them. But as the Cadillac swung into his gravel drive now, leading the cortege over the cattle gate and up the long hill through the woods, Hook did not doubt the rightness of his decision. This strip of woodland was the stone wall of his castle. It was the moat between his world and that other, larger one outside, the one that had just cost him the life of his son.