Hook remembered one of the last late-night conversations he had had with Chris on the porch. It was a summer Saturday night and the boy had driven in slightly before midnight, probably from a date with the Baptist grocer’s daughter. The herd was in the main pasture and for some reason had settled in for the night just beyond the drive fence, and the sounds of their snorting and breathing, their quarreling and moving about, combined with the usual insectival racket, had made the night seem almost African, aswarm with life. Chris parked the car in the driveway loop and came up the six stairs in two long strides, all legs still, but easy and graceful, surprised for a moment at finding his father up so late, but then smiling his quick, slightly crooked smile. Even then he had begun to wear his dark blond hair down over his ears and Hook had suffered the length in silence, remembering the futile fuss his own father had made over his mid-forties’ crewcut, calling him Himmler and Bristles. They talked for a few minutes about the cattle being up so close to the house and about the condition of the corn on the Strickler hundred, which Chris had stopped to check on his way to Banner Hill, and about their neighbor Joe Silas miring two tractors one after the other trying to pull his three-gang disk out of a slough, and finally having to hire a contractor with a bulldozer to pull all three pieces out, an ignominy Silas probably would never live down. Then they got around to the subject: college and the draft. Chris had already been accepted for admission to the University of Illinois and could have gotten in at least a semester of study before his nineteenth birthday in February, when he would have been eligible for the draft. But his number was a low one; there was no question that he would be called up. So Hook was not surprised at the decision the boy announced that night.

“I’ve definitely decided, Dad. I don’t want to go. Not for just one semester. I’d rather start after I get out of service.”

Hook was not against the decision. “Okay. I’ll call them Monday. What do you want to do this fall, then? Just work?”

Chris grinned. “Not exactly.”

“What then? Lie around and eat Auntsy’s coffee cake?”

“That’d be all right.”

Hook studied his look, his smile, in the darkness. The boy had something on his mind. “But not that either, huh?”

Chris shook his head. “No. I’ve been thinking I might take a trip. Go down South and out West. See some of the country.”

Hook considered it. One of his worries was that as a widower he had been overprotective of the boys, had inhibited the growth of their self-reliance. “Not a bad idea,” he said. “You’re a little young, though.”

“Nineteen?”

“Eighteen.”

“I pass for twenty-one.”

“So I’ve gathered.”

Chris grinned guiltily.

“How would you go? In the Jeep?”