“Claire! Jamie!” Mom called. “Come for ice cream!”

Claire didn’t even look toward the kitchen. “Of all the kids in MYF, you’re the one he met first, and you’re the one he likes the best. He did it for you, Jamie. He did it for you.”

Then she went into the kitchen, leaving me to stand by the woodpile, feeling stunned. If Claire had stayed a little longer and I’d had a chance to get over my surprise, I might have told her my own intuition: Reverend Jacobs had been as surprised as we were.

He hadn’t expected it to work.

III

The Accident. My Mother’s Story. The Terrible Sermon. Goodbye.

On a warm and cloudless midweek day in October of 1965, Patricia Jacobs popped Tag-Along-Morrie into the front seat of the Plymouth Belvedere that had been a wedding present from her parents and set out for the Red & White Market in Gates Falls—“She gone groceryin,” the Yankees at that time would have said.

Three miles away, a farmer named George Barton—a lifelong bachelor known in town as Lonesome George—pulled out of his driveway with a potato digger attached to the back of his Ford F-100 pickup. His plan was to drive it a mile or so down Route 9 to his south field. The best speed he could manage with the digger attached was ten miles an hour, so he kept to the soft shoulder, thereby allowing any southbound traffic to pass safely. Lonesome George was considerate of others. He was a fine farmer. He was a good neighbor, a member of the school board, and a deacon of our church. He was also, as he would tell people almost proudly, “a pepileptic.” Although, he was quick to add, Dr. Renault had prescribed some pills that controlled the seizures “just about perfect.” Maybe so, but he had one behind the wheel of his truck that day.

“Probably shouldn’t have been driving at all, except maybe in the fields,” Dr. Renault said later, “but how can you ask a man in George’s line of work to give up his license? It’s not as if he has a wife or any grown kids he can put behind the wheel. Take away his driving ticket, you might as well ask him to put his farm up for sale to the highest bidder.”

Not long after Patsy and Morrie set out for the Red & White, Mrs. Adele Parker came down Sirois Hill, a tight and treacherous curve where there had been many wrecks over the years. She was creeping along, and so had time to stop—barely—before striking the woman staggering and weaving up the middle of the highway. The woman had a dripping bundle clasped to her breast with one arm. One arm was all Patsy Jacobs could use, because the other had been torn off at the elbow. Blood was pouring down her face. A piece of her scalp hung beside her shoulder, bloody locks of hair blowing in the mild autumn breeze. Her right eye was on her cheek. All her beauty had been torn away in an instant. It’s fragile, beauty.

“Help my baby!” Patsy cried when Mrs. Parker stopped her old Studebaker and got out. Beyond the bloody woman with the dripping bundle, Mrs. Parker could see the Belvedere, on its roof and burning. The stove-in front end of Lonesome George’s truck was pushed against it. George himself was slumped over the wheel. Behind his truck, the overturned potato digger was blocking Route 9.

“Help my baby!” Patsy held the bundle out, and when Adele Parker saw what it was—not a baby but a little boy with his face torn off—she covered her eyes and began to scream. When she looked again, Patsy had gone to her knees, as if to pray.

Another pickup truck came around Sirois Hill and almost slammed into the back of Mrs. Parker’s Studebaker. It was Fernald DeWitt, who had promised to help George with the digging that day. He jumped from the cab, ran to Mrs. Parker, and looked at the woman kneeling in the road. Then he ran on toward the site of the collision.

“Where are you going?” Mrs. Parker screamed. “Help her! Help this woman!”

Fernald, who had fought with the Marines in the Pacific and seen terrible sights there, did not pause, but he did call back over his shoulder, “She and the kid are gone. George might not be.”

Nor was he wrong. Patsy was dead long before the ambulance arrived from Castle Rock, but Lonesome George Barton lived into his eighties. And never got behind the wheel of a motor vehicle again.

You say, “How could you know all that, Jamie Morton? You were only nine years old.”

But I do know it.

 • • •

In 1976, when my mother was still a relatively young woman, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I was attending the University of Maine at the time, but took the second semester of my sophomore year off, so I could be with her at the end. Although the Morton children were children no more (Con was all the way over the horizon in Hawaii, doing pulsar research at the Mauna Kea Observatories), we all came home to be with Mom, and to support Dad, who was too heartbroken to be useful; he simply wandered around the house or took long walks in the woods.

Mom wanted to spend her final days at home, she was very clear about that, and we took turns feeding her, giving her her medicine, or just sitting with her. She was little more than a skeleton by then, and on morphine for the pain. Morphine’s funny stuff. It has a way of eroding barriers—that famous Yankee reticence—which would otherwise be impregnable. It was my turn to sit with her on a February afternoon a week or so before she died. It was a day of snow flurries and bitter cold, with a north wind that shook the house and screamed beneath the eaves, but the house was warm. Hot, really. My father was in the heating oil business, remember, and after that one scary year in the mid-sixties when he looked bankruptcy in the face, he became not just successful but moderately wealthy.

“Push down my blankets, Terence,” my mother said. “Why are there so many? I’m burning up.”

“It’s Jamie, Mom. Terry’s out in the garage with Dad.” I turned down the single blanket, exposing a hideously gay pink nightgown that seemed to have nothing inside it. Her hair (all white by the time the cancer struck) had thinned to almost nothing; her lips had fallen away from her teeth, making them look too big, and somehow equine; only her eyes were the same. They were still young, and full of hurt curiosity: What’s happening to me?

“Jamie, Jamie, that’s what I said. Can I have a pill? The pain is awful today. I’ve never been in such a hole as this one.”

“In fifteen minutes, Mom.” It was supposed to be two hours, but I couldn’t see what difference it made at that point. Claire had suggested giving her all of them, which shocked Andy; he was the only one of us who had remained true to our fairly strict religious upbringing.

“Do you want to send her to hell?” he had asked.

“She wouldn’t go to hell if we gave them to her,” Claire said—quite reasonably, I thought. “It isn’t as if she’d know.” And then, nearly breaking my heart because it was one of our mother’s favorite sayings: “She doesn’t know if she’s afoot or on horseback. Not anymore.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” Andy said.

“No,” Claire sighed. She was closing in on thirty by then, and was more beautiful than ever. Because she was finally in love? If so, what a bitter irony. “I don’t have that kind of courage. I only have the courage to let her suffer.”

“When she’s in heaven, her suffering will only be a shadow,” Andy said, as if this ended the matter. For him I suppose it did.

 • • •

The wind howled, the old panes of glass in the bedroom’s single window rattled, and my mother said, “I’m so thin, so thin now. I was a pretty bride, everyone said so, but now Laura Mackenzie is so thin.” Her mouth drew down in a clown-moue of sorrow and pain.

I had three more hours in the room with her before Terry was due to spell me. She might sleep some of that time, but she wasn’t sleeping now, and I was desperate to distract her from the way her body was cannibalizing itself. I might have seized on anything. It just happened to be Charles Jacobs. I asked if she had any idea where he’d gone after he left Harlow.