Of course it was all still beautiful compared to anyplace else, or so he consoled himself for the area’s inability to cooperate with his dream. Diana loved it without reserve, but then nostalgia was an emotion foreign to her. As an amateur botanist, birdwatcher, butterfly catcher, she knew a great deal more about the natural world than Warlock, who was given always to the large view, and tended to walk around the woods suffused in a trance, remembering where or when he had walked or fished or hunted before. On a mostly subconscious level he was vitally concerned with the world conforming to his idea of it. Once he had decided on something so tentative and idiotic as the evening weather report he was thrown out of step the next day when the report proved inaccurate.

As far as religion was concerned the whole question of God was still up in the air. His father was an atheist of sorts, though he did admit to praying during a typhoon in the South Pacific when he was a radio man on a hospital ship. It was the wounded that made him pray, not his own safety, he insisted. The floating and pitching wounded, the wards awash with vomit, blood, the Pacific. So his father had tried to still the ocean with prayer and the punch line to his story was that it didn’t work. In contrast his mother, in the hideous pain of her deathbed, would sing a hymn in Swedish in a high almost querulous voice, then add Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost:

Tryggare kan ingen vara

Än Guds lilla barna

skara Stjärnanej på himla fästet

Fågel ej i kändá nästet

Who was this Holy Ghost, Warlock had thought holding her hand as she flopped almost fishlike in terminal pain. It was hard to think of the triumvirate as being particularly friendly when his mother ended life as a flopping fish. His brain was a cloud of ill-formed prayer then and his eyes turned upward to the ceiling and hopefully the sky beyond that, where just as hopefully God and the other two sat or stood and he uttered a prayer for his mother. He didn’t have words. It was a capsulated longing for a pre-Adamic earth where mothers could float heavenward in bliss accompanied by flute music and seventy-seven doves.