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reach as far as the resignation of President Richard Milhous Nixon on August 8, 1974, which coincided with the death of Margaret Brasso, the mother of Violet and Olivia and wife of James Brasso, pastor for twenty-five years of Words Friends of Jesus Church. During those blessed times the nation had defined itself in terms common to Words—farmers, shopkeepers, and reliable traditions. People had mattered then, and provincial citizens had waxed confident in the knowledge that they represented—in every movement and thought—the soul of the nation.
    But times changed. First the railroads came, or rather didn’t come to Words, then electricity and telephones, cars and interstate highways, all promising more community, commerce, and culture. But one by one, those promises were broken to Words. The economy restructured, large families divided, and Words filled with abandoned homes, rusted automobiles without wheels on streets named for families no longer there.
    Driving slowly over Thistlewaite Creek Bridge, Violet remembered the exodus years, when people she had known all her life, even whole family trees, simply vanished into the wider civilization. And even when some had tried to return, something prevented it. They had forgotten how to be themselves; the old ways of thinking could no longer conceive. The human chain had broken inside them.
    The new, dominant culture moved on, forgot about Words and
     thousands of similar rural communities as though they had never existed.
    But of course they did exist, and of the people presently living in and around Words, about half could remember the village as a vital business and community center, though this group was rapidly aging. A smaller portion of the local residents were the offspring of this shrinking majority, who refused for whatever reasons to follow their brothers, sisters, cousins, and children into distant cities. A third group, smaller but growing in relative size, were people now escaping those same cities, moving into the area from Chicago, Milwaukee, Sheboygan, Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Des Moines. Generally better off, this group usually built new homes and, to Violet, seemed like tourists on permanent vacation. And finally, there were the Amish, coming in with their black buggies, blue bonnets, and strange Anabaptist customs. About them, no one knew what to think.
    But in real numbers, the population of Thistlewaite County had been shrinking for decades. Sometimes the only reflection of earlier homesteads was patches of daylilies and iris growing in ditches, perennial reminders of bygone housewives sowing blue and orange along driveways.
    The only businesses in Words today were the Words Repair Shop and the church. And though some would argue that a church was not a business, it was, as Olivia was fond of pointing out, “God’s business.”
    In the Grange grocery store, twenty-three miles away, Violet accepted a free cup of coffee at the bakery counter and spoke with Florence Fitch about the funeral. Florence was bringing her Crock-Pot chicken and dumplings, and her cousin Margie was making her usual macaroni and four-cheese casserole, with ham. She wondered if Violet had arranged for anyone to bring a bean or rice dish.
    They discussed the deceased briefly. Both already knew the pertinent details of the death and the family, and they soon exhausted all there was to share on the subject. Then they drifted into a more fertile conversation about the national decline. Things had changed for the worse.
    The whole country, it seemed to Florence and Violet, suffered
     from a moral ailment whose symptoms could be readily identified: high divorce and crime rates; profanity; drug and alcohol use; pornography in movies, on television, and inside popular magazines; promiscuity; homosexuality; personal and corporate greed; political corruption; and misbehaving children. The symptoms were stark and clear—but not the cause. Today, Florence thought the blame could be