“Look there: isn’t that old Henry Stamper and his boy Hank? What the hell they got there in back?”) Dreamily, still staring down at the cave-in, Jonas runs his tongue over the nails in his mouth. He starts to turn back to the house, then stops again, his face running gradually into a puzzled frown. He takes one of the square nails out and holds it in front of his eyes. The nail is rusted. He looks at another nail and finds more rust. One at a time he removes each nail from his mouth and looks at it, studying for a long time the way a slight powder of rust is already splotching the iron like a fungus. And it didn’t rain last night. In fact, it hasn’t rained now in almost two incredible days, that was why he hadn’t bothered tacking the lid back on the nail keg when he finished work the day before. Yet, rain or no, the nails have rusted. Overnight. The whole keg, come all the way from Pittsburgh, four weeks on the road, bright and shiny as silver dimes . . . rusted overnight . . . “By golly, you know, it looks like a coffin!” the sailor said. . . . So, nodding to himself, he replaces the nails in the keg and lays the hammer on the dewy grass, then walks thigh-deep through fog to the river and gets in the boat and rows across to the dirt road where a lean-to stables the mare. And saddles the mare and goes back to Kansas, to the dry, flatiron prairies where sage struggles for a grip in the meager soil, and jackrabbits nibble barrel cactus for the moisture, and decay goes on slow and unseen under the baked brick sky. “It is a coffin! In a shipping box like on trains.” “Oh, look what they’re doing!” The other sailor and his girl untangled swiftly, and the four of them watched the old man and the boy on the launching dock unload the pick-up’s cargo and drag it across the planks and tip it into the bay—then get back in the pick-up and drive away. The sailors and the two girls sat in the car and watched the box up-end and slowly sink over many minutes. Eddy Arnold sang: There’ll be smoke on the water, on the land an’ the sea, When our Army and our Navy overtake the en-ah-mee . . . as the box gave a stiff lurch and finally slid under, leaving a spreading circle, trailing bubbles down through winding kelp and algae into the green-brown purple-brown avenues of rubbery sea grass where crabs with eyes on stalks patrol a dreary collection of bottles, old plumbing, blown-out tires, iceboxes, lost outboard motors, broken porcelain, and all the other debris that decorates the bottom of the bay. In the pick-up, home from the docks, the tight-knit little man with the bottle-green eyes and the hair already turning white tried to ease his sixteen-year-old son’s curiosity by reaching over to knuckle the boy’s head. “Watcha say, Hankas? How’d ya like to drift down to Coos Bay tonight an’ watch the old man tie one on. I’m gonna need a level head to look after me.” “What was in it, Papa?” the boy asked (didn’t even know then that the thing was a coffin...). “Was what?” “In the big box.” Henry laughed. “Meat. Old meat I didn’t want stinkin’ up the place.” The boy glanced swiftly at his father—(Old meat, he says ...Pa said....And I didn’t know any better for lord, it’s hard to say, for a couple of months anyhow when Boney Stokes—who’s been the local doom-teller around town as far as I can remember—took me aside when he was out to the house visiting and we sit there for a good half-hour, me squirming around and him all the goddam time laying that goddam spit-dripping hand on my leg or my arm or my head or any other place he could get to me with it like he just won’t rest a wink till everybody else is saddled with whatever germ it is he’s vending. “Ah, Hank, Hank,” he says, wagging his head back and forth on a neck about the size of his skinny wrist, “I hate to do it but I feel it my Christian duty to tell you some of the hard facts of life.” Hate to, bull: He’d rather play the ghoul with other people’s dead than ride a speedboat. “About who was in a great notion that box. Yes, I feel someone should tell you about your grandfather, and his early years in this land . . .”)—but said nothing. They drove on in silence. (“. . . in his early years, Hank, child”—old man Stokes leaned back and let his eyes get misty—“things wasn’t just the way they are now. Your family didn’t always have a big logging business. Yes... yes; your family, one might say, suffered some terrible misfortunes . . . back then...”) That foggy morning the eldest boy, Henry, was the first to wake and discover his father missing. He took up the hammer and, working along side his two brothers Ben and Aaron, completed more work on the house tha............