All Things Cease to Appear Read Online Free PDF

talk to him. He knew his wife better than any of us. We could certainly use his help.

    His mother said something he couldn’t make out and they left. From the window in his bedroom George watched them walk down to the beach, their jackets filling with wind as they stood at the shore. One of them scooped some sand into his hand and jiggled it around like pocket change. The partner said something and he laughed, and they glanced up at his window. Caught, George backed away, letting the curtain fall into place over the glass.
    —
    A WEEK OR SO LATER, he drove back to Chosen to pick up some things—his bank book, checks, his wife’s jewelry. The trick to hiding something, she’d told him once, is to put it right out in plain sight. His father had offered to go along, but he needed to do this on his own. He needed to be alone in that house, with her.
    He took the three-hour drive in silence. In the freedom of his car he allowed himself to think of the girl, and how she’d looked at him that last time.
    At last he turned down their road, where he feared some unseen surveyor might be watching him. He scanned the trees, the outlying fields, but saw no one. The house looked abandoned. As he stepped out of the car, it occurred to him that he was frightened. His mouth was dry and his head ached. He had history here, he reminded himself, and some of it had been good.
    The police had come and gone. The house felt used, trampled by strangers. Their old room looked bare. Someone had come in to clean up the blood. You couldn’t see any on the walls. He wondered who had done it, if it was a specialized job. He stood over the bed, looking down at the space his wife had filled. On impulse, he grabbed the mattress and jerked it upright and jostled it into the hallway and down the stairs and out the front door, sweating and cursing. He dragged it into the field over ice and snow and left it there on the hard ground. Then he went to the barn to look for gasoline. The can wasn’t full, but there was enough, and he poured it out over the mattress. It only took one match.
    And he stood there and watched it burn.

Chosen, New York, 1978
    1
    JUST BEFORE WINTER they took the cows. Their mother had sent them upstairs, but the boy and his brothers watched from their window. There were two trucks with slatted sides and he could see the cows all pushed together and he could hear them moaning, for this old farm was the only home they’d ever had. Then the boss, a carton-shaped man in a plaid shirt and gloves, whirled his arm around like he was working a lasso and the first truck pulled out and a thick brown dust rose up in the air. Their father waited, his arms crossed on his chest like someone about to be hit. The man shuffled over in his untied boots, kicking up the dirt, and handed him a slip of paper and said something, the words turning to smoke in the cold air, and he touched the brim of his hat like he was sorry and climbed up into his cab and jerked the gears and rolled out. Again dust filled the air, and the sun went away. For a minute or so they couldn’t see their father, and the boy thought it was like a trick, how one minute you have everything, the next you don’t. It went quiet for a little while, and then the sky opened like it was cut, and the rain fell into the dirt and yammered on the old tin buckets.
    Ignoring his brothers, he ran down the staircase hung with crooked pictures of dead relatives, the banister black with filth, and across the scuffed floors, vaguely aware of his mother in the kitchen, and pushed open the storm door and ran out into the rain, past the barns with their empty stanchions, into the field of broken grass, and kept on running. Up the hill, over the hard ground, along the ridge with its mangled dandelions, and finally, when he could run no farther, he stopped with his hands on his knees, gulping the cold air, knowing he had finished crying and also that he was too old for it now. He looked down at the