A single-edged ax sticking from a round chopping stump directed his eye on toward the old port-red barn. One side of the barn was covered with the yellowing leaves of an ambitious grapevine. On the front, tacked on the huge sliding door sagging off its trolley, a display of coon and fox and muskrat hides dried and stiffened. Who trapped the animals and stripped the hides? In this world, in this day? Who played at Dan’l Boone in a forest full of fallout? And at the side of this door, distinguished and alone, looking more like a big, ill-cut window than an animal skin, was the massive dark patch of a bear hide. What tribe is this so sunk in itself that it dreams in a night gone crazy? He stared at the dark pool of fur as at a dark window, trying to see through it, as Hank entered the house . . . (When I got on in the kitchen I saw the old man’s already up to his elbows. I tell him the kid’s come home and he looks up with a chop bone sticking out of his greasy mug like the tusk out of a wild hog. “What kid?” he hollers around the bone. “What kid’s come home where?” “Your kid’s come home here,” I tell him. “Leland Stanford, big as life. Christ, look at you; you didn’t waste any time tearing inta the groceries, did you?” Cool and matter-of-fact because I don’t want him blowing a gasket. I turn to Joe Ben. “Where’s Viv, Joby?” “Upstairs powderin’ her nose, I imagine. Her an’ Jan here are—” “Hold on! What’s this you was talkin’ about, this kid?” “Your kid, goddammit, Leland.” “Bullshit!” He thinks I’m shucking him again. “Ain’t nobody come nowhere.” “Have it your way.” I shrug and make like I’m going to sit down. “Just thought I’d tell you—” “What—” He whangs the table with his fork—“the hell’s going on behind me now, I wanta know! By god, I won’t tolerate—” “Henry, take that bone outa your mouth and listen to me. If you’ll quit stuffing your face a minute maybe I can get something through to your ears. Your son, Leland, has come home—” “Where? Let me see this bullshit!” “Easy, dammit. This is why I got to talk to you; if you’ll slack off a minute—I don’t want you shoveling him in your mouth an’ half gumming him to death before you catch on he ain’t a pork chop. Now listen. He’ll be in in a jiffy. But before he is let’s get some things straight. Sit back down.” I reach out and ease him back down and straddle a chair myself. “And forchrissakes take that bone outa your face. And look here.” Lee turned his head, mechanically. Beyond the yard a pen of pigs worked the ground like quarrelsome grubs. Farther still a grove of runty fruit trees offered shriveled apples to the sun. And beyond this hung the vast green curtain of forest, woven from fern and berry and pine and fir, a flat drop of forest scenery furled down from the clouds to the earth below. These hokey sets went out with “The Girl of The Golden West”; what audience still attends such period pieces? What actors still act in them?) That green curtain had been one edge of Lee’s childhood world; that steel-plated river, the other. Two walls, running parallel. Lee’s mother had striven to make him as conscious of these two imprisoning walls as she was. He was never, she intoned, to go up into that forest, and above all never to go near the edge of that river. He was to consider those mountains and that river as walls, did he understand? Yes, Mother. Was he sure? Yes. Was he sure? Yes; the mountains and the river were walls. Very well then, run on out and play ...and watch out. But what of the other walls? The east and west walls that should have been joined the southern wall of the forest and the northern wall of the river to form a completed cell? What about up river, Mother, where there were slick and mossy rocks perfect for the breaking of clumsy bones? or down river, where the rusty guts of an abandoned sawmill threatened blood-poisoning at every turn and a herd of marauding hogs ate men whole... what about that? No; only the forest and the river. Her cell had only two walls; his cell needed but two walls. She had been sentenced at conception to life imprisonment between parallel lines. Or not quite parallel. For one day they had crossed. But who chopped that firewood and slopped those pigs and raised those apples from the crippled earth? And what kind of freak of optics lets a man see that spare star of trillium beside a silver-gray step of fir, and not see the fly agaric growing there? How could one look at the dusty rose sun shining off the river and not see the slabful of gore with a tag still tied to her toe? “Look at the sunset my eye!” (And dammit the thing is when I finally do get the old fart to get the bone out of his mouth and get him settled across the table from me with a streak of pork gravy running into his eyebrows, waiting for me to say what’s on my mind, I realize I can’t say what’s on my mind. “Look here,” I say, “It’s just that . . . well, Christ, Henry, for one thing it’s probably been a long hard old trip on him. He told me he’d come all the way on the bus. That right there’s enough to make him green around the gills . . .”—can’t say it on account I don’t want the old man to get all fired up and go to asking all the questions I’m thinking . . .) Over his shoulder Lee saw the stricken sun drowning in a putrescent mire, and its icy cries sank deep into his flesh. He shivered and walked on up the path to the front door and stepped inside. Whoever had redecorated the exterior of the old house had stopped there; the inside was even more cluttered and unsightly than he remembered it: guns, paperback Westerns, beer cans, ash trays overflowing with orange peels and candy wrappers; greasy parts of invalid machinery convalescing on coffee tables . . . Coke bottles, milk bottles, wine bottles—all spread so evenly about the room that it almost looked as though an effort had been made for uniform distribution. The Northwestern trend in interior furnishing, Lee concluded, trying to smile: the junk motif. I can see it: “I think this side of the room is overbalanced by that; get some more bottles scattered around here ..............