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at best and he seemed to have arrived at some idea of where he fit or did not fit into the scheme of things.
    The old man was contrite. He grasped Tippydo’s hand and pressed into it a twenty-dollar bill. Twin tears crept down his pouched cheeks, etching paths of cleanness out of the grime. He’d never do it again. Wouldn’t have done it then but for bad whiskey. There seemed little whiskey that was good that year for soon he was at it again. He seemed in a constant state of anger which Tyler seemed to bring into focus.
    By the time he died Tyler could have whipped him instead, but he never did it. He never hit him, never cursed him, just did his best to stay out of his way. Honoring some biblical restraint of parental honor.
    Already he was groping for a way to live, to accommodate himself to the world or it to him. He felt that if he fell upon his father with murder in his heart that he had proven irrevocably that he and the old man had the selfsame cankered blood in both their hearts and if this was so all was lost. The day the old man died he was standing on the stairs to the attic. He’d stopped a minute to rest and catch his breath, and then he’d come on and batter at the door. Tyler imagined the door charring beneath his ceaseless tirade of invective. Against Tyler, against the uncaring God who’d let such twisted fruit of his loins thrive.
    The way Tyler always imagined it God had been sitting before the fireplace with his feet propped up on the hearth. Or maybe just on midair—God could do that. He was reading an old hymnbook or maybe a seed catalog. Listening with one ear and trying to concentrate on his reading. Finally after years andyears of this just getting totally fed up and throwing his book against the wall of Heaven and turning and fixing the old man with his fierce eye. God’s eyes flickered with electric blue light and the old man’s heart exploded in a torrent of black blood and corruption and he just dropped like a stone, dead before his body touched the stairs, and God went back to his seed catalog.

    For the first week after the briefcase disappeared from the trunk of his Lincoln, Fenton Breece lived on tenterhooks, waiting for the other shoe to fall. Dark visions haunted him waking and sleeping. The faceless burglar in an alley or a stone culvert hurriedly slashing open the briefcase and dumping out its spare contents, expecting money or who knew what but certainly not expecting the neat stack of photographs. Riffling through them an act of sacrilege. A greasy thumbprint perhaps on the pale bloom of a breast. A thin fingernail of ice traced the nape of Breece’s neck and down hispine.
    I’ve just got to do something, he thought in his brisk businesslike manner. But there wasn’t anything to do.
    Then in a few days a measure of reason returned. No one had called him. Nothing sinister in the mail, the sky had not fallen. At length he began to see the faceless thief glancing at the rubberbanded photographs in disgust and tossing them away in a ditch. Mud, debris, shards of broken glass, and clotted leaves hid them modestly from prying eyes. Yellow water opaque with mud sent them turning dreamily, pale washedout ghosts of themselves, toward the muddy sanctity of the Tennessee River.

    The woman behind the desk had an officious manner and carefully coiffed bluelooking hair. She seemed to have appraised the girl by some abstract standard she kept in her head and found her wanting.
    Mr. Breece is not in right now, she said.
    I reckon I’ll just wait then, the girl said.
    It may be a good while, the woman said.
    Then I reckon I’ve got a good while to wait, the girl said. She crossed the narrow office and seated herself in a contoured yellow chair. She took up a magazine and sat staring at it though she could have told you no word that it said. She could hear the woman shuffling papers importantly about. After a while the woman cleared her throat.
    What was it about?
    It was about me seeing