Mr. Keane got into his cold car. Let the engine run a bit. The other men were pulling out of the drive and he saluted them as they drove past. They had done the work of their church. Solved the question of Mr. Krause. At home, there would be a light left on in the kitchen for them, or a lamp lit in the living room. A wife under a caftan, watching TV, or in bed, asleep already, or pretending to be. The scent of dinner still in the air. A child (probably Michael, but maybe even Clare) still awake. Some of them might open a beer or pour two fingers of scotch. Or walk the dog. Read the paper.

They were either immortal, or they were not. It was prayer, all of it, this talking to the dead, or it was howling at the moon. At the winter sky. At Orion. O’Ryan. It was another bit of misapprehension, another mistaken imagining-the dead pope hearing their prayers, his parents, his brother Frank, all the angels and all the saints, the other Jacob. Or it was true.

Absolutely, Mr. Gallagher.

Positively, Mr. Shean.

At home, his wife was at the dining-room table with Jacob. What distinguished this room from the priests’ was the clutter of bills and magazines on the server, the simplicity of the small chandelier (the priests’ was Waterford), the dust. A portrait of a pretty little girl in a wide-brimmed hat rather than the old pope. She had his history book before her and her forehead in her hands. Jacob was sitting quietly to her left, looking ready for sleep. “It’s late,” John Keane said, coming in, but she ignored him.

“Battle of Hastings,” she said and he answered, dejectedly, in his new voice, “1066.” His face was changing, too, growing thinner and longer, balanced somewhere between homely and beautiful.

“Magna Carta?” There was silence. The boy frowned. Swallowed hard, perhaps resisting tears. His Adam’s apple, also new, looked swollen. His father had an impulse to turn away.

From the couch in the living room, Michael called out, “1215,” and Jacob slammed his fist on the table and, standing, threw back his chair. “I’m going to bed,” he said, and his father might have reprimanded him if the boy had not also said, turning slightly toward them, “Good night.”

Mary Keane looked up at her husband. Her face was colorless and worn, as dimpled and lined as a potato. She ran her finger down a double page of dates and names and places. The end-of-chapter review. “He doesn’t know half of this,” she said.

He shrugged, walked through the living room where Michael, lounging on the couch in his pajamas, said, “It’s easy.”

His father said, “Don’t be a smart aleck,” and then, when he had hung up his coat, “Get to bed.”

Upstairs, in their room, Michael said, matter-of-factly, as if it were the middle of the day. “Battle of Hastings, 1066, Magna Carta, 1215…”

“I’m asleep.” Jacob had his back to him. His voice was muffled.

“I thought Jews were supposed to be smart,” Michael said. In the dim light from the hallway, he couldn’t tell at first what his brother had thrown at him-it missed anyway and hit the floor. But then he saw it was the flashlight Jacob kept at his bedside and the potential pain it might have caused filled him with indignation. They were on each other in seconds, legs and arms and blows struck into ears, into shoulders. The overhead light came on-if they hadn’t expected that it would they would not have begun the battle-and their father barked a single word. He dragged them apart, both of them splotched red in the cheeks and across their shoulders and throats, but whether from blows or their own fury, their father couldn’t have said.

He grabbed them, both of them panting, by their shirts. Their mother was in the doorway with Clare in her arms and Annie was next to her. “Enough,” was what he said.

He shoved them both down on the edge of their beds. “Sit.”

They glared at each other, across the short space between their beds, believing, each of them, that there was no greater flaw in all the vast design of the universe than these two made brothers, condemned to this same small room. Only their father between them, saying words, kept them from colliding again.

“Flesh and blood,” were the words their father was saying, standing between them. Michael’s eyes fell on the black flashlight, rolled just under Jacob’s bed, and he pointed to it as if it could bear witness. “He threw the flashlight,” he said, before his father cut him off. “Your own brother,” their father said, raising his voice again. “Who,” he asked with his finger in the air, “who do you think you’ll have on your side when your mother and I are gone? Who do you think you’ll be able to turn to when you’re as old as I am and there’s something you need-a buck or two, or a piece of advice, maybe just someone you can ask, Remember when? Your friends? Your Little League team?” He waved his broad hand. “They’ll be scattered to the four winds. They’ll have forgotten your name.” He paused, as if waiting for them to speak. And then he said, “Your family. Your flesh and blood, that’s who you’ll have. If you’re lucky. Your two sisters. Each other. That’s who you’ll have.”

Michael held out his arm once more. “It could have really hurt,” he said, trying again; the occasions when Jacob struck the first blow were so rare. Their father put his hand in the air. “Enough,” he said again. “Apologize,” he said, suddenly weary. “Then say your prayers and go to sleep.”

He walked past them, past their mother and the two girls, turning off the overhead light as he did. Into the darkness, with Clare in her arms, their mother whispered, “Think of poor Uncle Frank.”

“He threw the flashlight at me,” Michael said, all in a rush.

His mother peered into the shadowed room. His sisters, little Clare and Annie both, stared at him too, duplicating her eyes.

“Think what your father would give,” she told him, whispering, “to have his own brother beside him for just another night.” Then she walked away.

Jacob was slipping his pale feet under the covers, awkwardly, as if his feet were much bigger and his legs much longer than he could manage. He threw himself at his pillow like a landed fish, put his back to his brother and pulled the blanket up over his shoulder. After only a second or two of silence, he said, “Sorry, Michael.”

Michael said nothing. He remained seated on the edge of his bed, the lumpy whorls of the chenille bedspread just under his palms. He looked into the lighted hallway, heard his mother putting Clare back into her bed, and asking Annie to put her head down. Then he heard them praying, “Ever this night, be at my side…” Next door, Mr. MacLeod was playing his piano again, each note just a slight vibration against their bedroom wall.

Michael had only a vague recollection: Uncle Frank had looked like their father, only ugly. A broader, taller, bizarro-world version of their father with more hair and bigger teeth and a white handkerchief that he would mop his maroon face with, like Louis Armstrong. He drove Cadillacs and always spoke to them in a voice like Donald Duck’s. When he visited, mixed nuts and chips with onion dip were served, and they would hear him downstairs late into the night, telling long, loud stories that involved a multitude of voices-Porky Pig, Ed Sullivan, Jimmy Durante-stories that made his parents scream with laughter. Sometimes, lying in the dark, listening, missing most of it, he and Jacob would laugh, too.

Michael watched his mother cross the hallway to her own room. Heard his parents’ voices. On the floor by his feet, just under the fringe of Jacob’s bedspread was the flashlight he had thrown. Quickly, Michael bent down and picked it up and then slipped into bed with it. He turned it on under the blankets, put his fingers over it to see if he could count the bones. Turned it up to the ceiling. He wrote his name, drew a face. The light went off in the hallway. He moved the beam over Jacob’s back, the bedspread and the blanket, his dark head, his ear.