Owen and Julia, as it happened, befriended mostly older people when they moved to Haskells Crossing. Couples their own age, discovering that this polite middle-aged couple did not drink or know any local gossip, tended not to have them back after the first invitation to cocktails. The elderly, though, having arrived by way of illness or AA at their own renunciations, found the new “young” couple fresh and mannerly, and had them to seasonal parties where Owen and Julia were, save for grandchildren underfoot, the youngest guests present. In the cheerful crowd of these elders, jubilantly full of obsolescent lore, the great harvester was already active. Funerals became a familiar occasion—the Episcopal rite, stretched to accommodate informal, sometimes irreverent and hilarious, reminiscences by old friends and aging offspring. There would be a service leaflet, with anodyne verses on the back and in the middle the hymn numbers and prayers and on the front a fascinating photograph of the deceased in the fullness of life, at the tiller of his boat in Maine, or posed by a laden rose trellis, laughing in a sunshine whose neutrinos have reached the star Vega by now, or holding the bridle of a horse, itself deceased, displaying a wild eye and flaring brute nostril. Owen was fascinated by what constituted, for the rich, their happiest, summary moments. Country pleasures: millions of dollars organized into a quest for purity, for aboriginal innocence. Rarely was an indoor photo chosen, or one snapped in the course of a workday or a ceremony, a fortieth anniversary or a sumptuous retirement party. If the image was taken from the smooth-skinned youth of the recently dead, it was almost always in a sporting pose—in whites beside a tennis net, or holding a silver trophy with a smile no less bright. The afterlife, the implication was, would be a country club. After the service, the widow or widower or oldest child still in this locality would host a party, at the spacious former home or at the yacht club or the country club, where remembrance of the departed yielded to forgetful gaiety and bitter complaint of how the land-owning, tax-paying residents of Haskells Crossing were disadvantaged in their struggles with those corrupt, or just careless, and in any case petty politicians ensconced in the power chambers of Cabot City. The party, if this was a private home, would have in its view a sparkling slice of the sea, that omnivorous imperturbable image of the eternity that awaits each celebrant, each survivor.