The original willow tree still lived, coddled like an old dignitary with injections of pesticide and fertilizer thrust into its roots by making holes with a crowbar; it survived from the time when there had been a paper mill with a water wheel, and a pond stocked with trout, and a dirt racetrack, with harness races, before a grid of streets was laid out on the level low land north of the Pike. Owen’s house—not his house, really, and not even his parents’; it belonged to his mother’s parents, Isaac and Anna Rausch—was one of the older and bigger along Mifflin Avenue, bought by his grandfather when he felt rich from growing leaf tobacco in the First World War. He sold his farm and moved ten miles to this newly fashionable borough of Willow. Then, with the Depression, his savings melted away and his daughter and her husband and child moved in. One couple had a house, the other had some earning ability. Owen’s father was an accountant for one of the knitting mills in Alton. Owen’s auburn-haired, then-slender mother sold draperies in an Alton department store until her little boy pricked her conscience by running after her down Mifflin Avenue, sobbing, as she was on her way to catch the trolley car; she quit the job to spend more time with him. His father, Floyd Mackenzie, came from Maryland. Owen had been named after a sickly grandfather who had died before he was born, but who, by the family’s legendary accounts, had had a twinkle, a sprightliness and inventiveness of mind, they thought of as Scots. He owned a hardware store in Mt. Airy, this original Owen, and in his spare time had invented things, improvements on the implements he sold—a weed-extractor a person could operate without bending over, a hedge-trimmer geared to make the crank turn much easier—but no company had ever taken up their manufacture and made him rich. He died bankrupt and tubercular. Yet a glimmer of his hopes of outwitting the hard world descended to his grandson. The Mackenzies were not rich but were clever, canny. Owen’s father told him, “You take after my old man. You have his intellectual curiosity. He liked to sit and figure out how things worked. Me, I never wondered about anything except where my next dollar was coming from.” Daddy said this somewhat mournfully, as if the Mackenzie heritage was a mixed blessing—a hopeful imagination mixed with a certain frailty of constitution and essential ignorance of the way the world worked as it ground away day by day and picked your pockets.