After Owen had left it behind, his original village seemed an innocent, precious place, but it did not strike him as that while he lived there. It was the world, with a fathomless past and boundaries that were over the horizon. There were snakes in the grass and in piles of rocks warmed by the sun. Sex and religion had distinct, ancient odors; families perched like shaky nests on tangled twigs of previous history; and death could pounce in the middle of the night. In the period of young Danny Hoffman’s suicide, when Owen was still a child sleeping beneath a shelf holding two dozen Big Little Books, a one-eyed teddy bear called Bruno, and a rubber Mickey Mouse with a bare black chest and yellow shoes, a big horse-barn on the edge of Willow—the Blake farm, the property of absentee rich people from Delaware—burned down, and his father, who chased after disasters like a boy, reported how the horses, led to safety outside, in their terror bolted back inside, and how terrible the stench of their burning flesh and horsehair was. In the sky from Owen’s window that night, an orange glow silhouetted the roof and chimneys of the house next to the vacant lot, and the tallest spruces and hemlocks in people’s back yards beyond. The town fire sirens blasted again and again, enormous angry cries to which no answer came. As on the morning of the gunshot, Owen had rolled over and gone back to sleep, letting the world’s torrents of pain wash over him.

ii. Village Sex—I

Killing yourself was the ultimate sin, the Bible said, according to Owen’s Sunday-school teachers; especially strict on this and other scores was pale-faced, iron-haired Mr. Dickinson, who managed the bank. Killing yourself was worse than killing a man in self-defense, which was what the Yost boys were doing overseas. It was as if, on quiet Mifflin Avenue, where the milk wagons still made the early morning ring with the lazy sound of horseshoes on asphalt, a crater had opened up next to Owen’s bedroom, a crater of dreadful possibility, a denial of everything, of trees and birds and blue sky and the blessed rest of Nature. Buddy Rourke’s father had fallen into that crater, but he hadn’t intended to, or perhaps—it wasn’t clear, and Buddy didn’t want to talk about it—the father was still alive, but living somewhere else, with another family. He had, the word was, “strayed.”