More out of habit than any compulsive fastidiousness, they put on boots before going outside, and it was a good thing they did, for the dung-rich soil of the farmyard had none of the frozen crust of the cemetery. Going past the barn, Hook saw that Coley Jonas, a neighbor’s son he hired to help out occasionally, was already back for afternoon chores, in body anyway if not in spirit, for the youth was lying back on some sacks of protein supplement stacked near the feed mill, and he was smoking. Any other day and Hook would either have given him a roasting or fired him on the spot, since the hairline profit margin in cattle-raising did not allow such luxuries as insuring one’s buildings at their replacement value. But this afternoon Hook simply walked on past the open door. The cattle in the feedlot, yearlings mostly, and accustomed to men on foot, barely bothered to glance up as Hook and Bobby moved through them and out the gate into the main pasture, a rolling dun carpet of brome and lespedeza and clover stretching out ahead of them all the way to a fence row of elm shade trees over a half-mile distant, and barren now, but still a favored haunt of the cattle, which Hook could see lying in clusters along the row, like scattered raisins.

Though Hook was taller than his son, and longer-legged, he had to step quickly to keep up with him. Where Chris had been built along his father’s lines, slim and bony, Bobby had the good fortune to favor his mother, and the same subtle force that had kept her body firm of breast and belly and buttock till her death at thirty-eight was evident in the boy, in the solid wedge of his torso and in his athlete’s rump and sturdy legs. A trackman like Chris, he had been the faster of the two, beating his older brother regularly in their wind sprints up and down the farm drive each morning before chores and breakfast. Yet Hook knew that the boy had counted these victories as less important than the fact that as the distance lengthened, as it stretched out to a mile and beyond, Chris had left him far behind, just as he had everyone else on the school track team and in fact almost every miler in the conference.

“I don’t understand death,” the boy said now. “I can’t figure it.”

“I know, son. Neither can I.”

“One moment you’re alive. And the next you’re dead. It doesn’t make any sense. Why live in the first place?”

Hook wished he had something to give the boy, but there was nothing. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t say I know.”

“If we believed—I mean, you know, if we were like the others around here, and I believed he was in heaven and that we’d all be together again someday—that I could see him again—him and Mom—” He was strangling on the words. “It would be easier.”