Autumn tree colors are overly hyped for beauty; there's a time when those trees look inside out, like they're hurt, like they're hemorrhaging.  Ed's thinking that the majestic and century-old hardwood sprawl wreathing his father's immaculate backyard looks like it's made of eviscerated flesh and he doesn't know why such a revolting thought would occur to him in this instant, this moment of profound and inconceivable grief.  But he's had dreams like that, too:  dreams so sadistic and inappropriate that he wonders if there's some serious self-loathing slinking around his quiet places.  He doesn't wonder long, the thought's too disturbing:  these dreams have not made sense, and likewise, the raw meat tree image makes no sense, and suddenly, without warning, he begins to cry in great heaving wrung-out waves, then there's some vomit, then more sobs . . . his first upchuck of emotion since he learned that his father had died, in fact, his first tears since puberty.  He's incompetent with emotions, and he doesn't know how to stop them when they refuse to clot on their own.  His sound becomes tidal, high-pitched and ludicrous.  He thinks he sounds womanish, so he tries to redirect the noises into masculine bellows of the kind he thinks his father might have approved given the circumstance, but the keening won't be told.  It dumps and pours and gets brutal, and he wonders if someone could heave himself to death.  He begins, for a brief time, to slam his head against the pretty beveled glass of the attic window.

A moment earlier, he'd flung the window open, because the day's grown awfully warm for October in Northlakes.  That's when he noticed the red trees out side.  And when he had the crazy thought about blood on the leaves.  The attic's been unbearable with the window closed; unbearably hot, but even worse, unbearably neat.  His father's been a fastidious man:  choice relatives have insinuated that he's been compulsive about cleanliness since his final tour of Marine duty during the Sixties.  Ed's mother, eaten alive by pancreatic cancer during Ed's seventh and eighth year, had been a rational housekeeper, and people don't note the old man's ultra-tidy quirk until after she drops out of the picture.  Ed accepts this much, and in fact has some small share of the hang-up himself . . . things needing to be 'just so' . . . a demand for symmetry and order, even in food cans on the shelf.  But this is too much.  Over the top.  There's a limit to what fastidious is obligated to do:  yet, somehow, way up here in the attic, there are no fly shells on the sills of the cut-glass window, no dust behind the trappings, no mites, no mouse shit, no chaos at all.  Geometrically arranged stacks of furniture stand by, lots of it classic, original Victorian, heirloom stuff born when the house was born, yet each piece looks newly waxed and polished as though it had arrived from the carpenter that morning.  His glance trails to the window.  Outside, the lawn is perfect, violently green and healthy-looking, while the elms, the sycamores, the beechwoods, are all bleeding to death.

It's been four days since his father died.  Ed was in Hawaii when the news came down, so he's tan and buff throughout his meltdown.  The funeral was yesterday and now, he's rifling through attic because he's hoping that something tangible festers among the stored minutiae, the affects of his father's life, some clue that might explain to him why this spruce, two-term mayor of Northlakes, this former leatherneck, this respected businessman, this fifty-eight-year-old angler, this loving and omnipotent protector, hung himself in the garage while Ed and his wife were vacationing.  No note, nothing but an oak rafter and a rope and a cell phone underneath the body from which he'd made his final demand of reality, a call to Sheriff Dieghton whom he'd known since grade school; a quick, terse, 'Deet, better come on by the house, there's a dead man in my garage.' Now, Ed's mind won't allow him to understand his own convulsions of despair, but he must conclude that his father sedulously and painstakingly cleaned the entire house, including the attic, before the plunge.  Ed is desperately touched by the poignancy of such an act, though he hasn't yet realized this.  He cries for ten more minutes, clumsy pendency, choking on thick saliva and sluicing snot while a small grape-colored welt forms on his brow beneath the hairline.

He cries so loudly, so wretchedly and inconsolably, that two floors below, Sheila hears him plainly; she imagines that crying is a rational reaction to this irrational nightmare, but it unsettles her, then begins to scare her, and augments the anxiety attack which has immobilized her from the moment she'd set foot within the dead father-in-law's house-shell.  She's never heard a sound like this from Ed before.  She's repulsed and rattled because there's no emotional adhesive left between this husband and wife, only a papery façade of civic onus and shared memory.  Not even lust, which has never been her inclination to begin with, but which she likes to regulate in Ed.  Likes the capacity.  No more though, and not for a while; Hawaii has been sexless and difficult, and she's relieved to be away from the giggly teenagers in strings and thongs.  She's happy to be home, no matter the reason.   What exquisite guilt she should feel at that selfish thought.  And more:  she understands that as a wife she should go try and comfort this big, distant, imploding husband whose prominent dad has done to him a deed more incomprehensible than anything her own perverted beer-sucking father ever did to her.  She ought to, but can't find the slightest force of will to do it.   To do anything but sit with a frozen face in a tight knot on the sofa before the pink marble fireplace and smoke her Newports.  She hasn't smoked more than one or two cigarettes per day since high school, five years gone by, but she's smoking them steadily now, one after the other.  It hides the smell.  When they entered the house after the funeral, the first time since the suicide, all she could smell was smoke, wretched exhalations which had certainly not come from Ed's residue-obsessed dad, but probably from Sheriff Dieghton or one of the deputies who'd gone through the house with a pipe or cigar; further evidence is a half-drunk cup of cold Tim Horton coffee on the mantel.  It's filled with cigarette butts.  The smell is foul enough fresh, but days old, clinging to the wainscot, the curtains, the wall portraits, it will now and forever be for Sheila the smell of irrational nightmare, of dead men with ropes on their necks inside their own garages.  It adds to the confusion in a mind which generally demands non-confusion with a certain near-hysterical desperation.  There's no room up there for processing an unprompted hiccup and this is quite a bit more than that.  So she sits and smokes, shivering in the warmth as her vile Newport breath keeps her from getting physically sick.

Sheila is not big on abstract thought; her epiphanies sidle in.  Gradually, one settles over her:  With Ed's father gone, with Ed the lone heir and she the only daughter-in-law, this imposing house is probably hers already.  Rather than impressing her, the idea torments her.  Even when Ed's dad lived, she's not been able to appreciate the tenth of it, the Moorish arches, flocked walls, pierced brass chandelier, molded frieze, onyx mantelpiece . . . what sort of house is this for a bachelor, war hero, a fisherman?  Northlakes crackers joked . . . but if truth be known, the old man loved the femininity of the place, built in the last century by a lumber baron for his tubercular bride.  Nothing 'off' about it; the baron had been a man's man also, a bullish figure with bushy eyebrows whose portrait still hung over the console table.  In almost cruel contrast is the house where Sheila has grown up; a rude, dispirited, weed-choked, half-mobile shack between the Northlakes train depot and the grain elevator; a welfare hand-out coated in cheap orange shag; a shotgun hallway where her Atlas-breathed father would pin her, running his hands up her shorts and calling her Ladybug while Mom, a wisp, a coward, a receding cipher with endless migraines, vegetated under a comforter behind a flimsy but inarguably locked bedroom door.  Within Sheila's alternative inheritance, it's every babe for herself.  Since girlhood she's imagined her domestic paradigm, a tidy cottage with white ruffled curtains and wood floors that shine like polished pennies; the idea of inhabiting this hollow stinking dead man's cavern makes her dizzy.

In time, the blubbering sound trails off like a train passing into the distance and Ed comes lumbering down the stairs, clutching the burled walnut rail, face puffed and crimson, ashamed of himself, confounded, dreadfully silent now, and he passes Sheila without a word.  But there's a glance.   A single distorted instant when eyes meet and she might have found some word of solace or commiseration or something, but his face is a horror, swollen to the point where it appears that pressures behind the skin are reaching critical mass.  Her eyes are listless, she looks like she would like to check her watch.  This is a defensive and inaccurate facial expression:  Ed's eyes are filmy and wild and profoundly pathetic, very lost and betray needs so gigantic that she's terrified of being overwhelmed and eaten up.  The moment ebbs.  He's gone into the kitchen to wash himself.   And she's grateful for it, or so she signals:  an exhale, then a quick intake of smoldering toxins.

Ed's mission upstairs has flopped and worse, and now he stumbles around by the sink, guzzling water from one of the flowered tumblers which his father could never quite free from contaminants, mystery residues which had never existed to begin with.  Ed remembers the repetitious washings, strange rituals of stacking dishes, unstacking, restacking; he remembers videos on the machine when at every interruption . . . the phone, a dog's bark, even Ed tiptoeing through the room . . . his father seems compelled to rewind the movie and start it all over again, from the beginning, every single time, cursing softly and wearily, without zeal.  A telling decline, a trackable collapse, but what does Ed know?  Then or now?  He remembers being twelve years old, driving with his father down Salem Church Road, hitting a pothole; the old man is suddenly, utterly convinced that he's just run over a hitchhiker and they spend the next hour and a half rummaging through the scrub for a phantom corpse.  Numerous incidents since then are equally bizarre.  Has he been dilatory, Ed wonders?  Remiss?  In fact, he has no doubt that he has; so grotesque do the quirks become that at sixteen, inundated, embarrassed, he moves from the main house into the slumpstone boathouse that overlooks Grass Lake on the lower end of the property.

At sixteen, his buddies think his new living arrangement is the whip . . . hardly reduced circumstances . . . and he never lets on to them any genuine explanations.  Why would he?  Inside the boathouse, it's nothing but pussy and low-stakes poker and cases of Ballantine and headbanger garage bands on the Alpine stereo system.  That world is now six, seven, eight years gone away.

Dad has left no doubt as to what's expected of Ed in his life, there's no wiggle room, and he doesn't disappoint:  today, he's a cum laude graduate of Tabor Tech, already Quality Manager at Puritan Sugar in nearby Standish and on a high career program.  And here, suddenly, standing before the sink, hands folded on a nascent paunch, he feels indelible agony at having abandoned his father to work out these compulsions alone in the loopy old house while he cuddled comfortably in his boat house, his dorm room, his Standish tri-level.  To Ed, the house is sodden with the tics and anguish of troubled souls; the very foundations feel permanently off kilter.  Sheila might benefit from his instantaneous and permanent conviction, which is never, never to live here again in the fear that he might become his own father by the potency of osmosis.

And he dredges up another, unexpected memory:  he's five, maybe six years old and his mother is hovering here by the burner, cooking something special for some occasion, and he's standing beneath her, smiling stoically, handing her pots and spoons as she calls for them, a proud big boy.  It's an image too sweet for him to stomach; there's nausea behind his sensation of utter aloneness.  An absurd new status filters through to him:  he's an orphan, a six-foot-three, two hundred twenty pound foundling without any more genetic buffers between him and cold eternity.  He backs to the cellar door, then trundles heavily down a narrow flight of stone steps.  At the base, there's a narrow corridor ending in an arch; he reaches into the cool space beyond it and finds the light switch and continues to rummage in search of the elusive treasure, resolution.

He won't find it down here either; the basement is equally sterile, done over, demented, devoid of dust, dirt, dampness or effects more intimate than his father's logs and records.  But the spread of records, the domestic bureaucracy!  It engorges the main room, the side rooms, so that there's hardly room to slither through.  It's been years since Ed's been down here, and it's worse than he remembers.  This is ground zero for some brand of psychosis, no doubt, the old man hasn't just kept track, he's hoarded track.  Each household expense is filed in triplicate; there's ledgers, books, endless accounts in Gaukler boxes, receipts monitoring the rising price of Skippy peanut butter, there's thousands of Christmas cards arranged alphabetically by sender, cans of file cards detailing the most obscure of finances, church tithes, tips to the newsboy, grocery bills dating back twenty years.  Less a basis for order than a universe shrunk and measured and squirreled away.  Ed can't grasp the significance of any of this, but it scares the shit out of him and forces him to give up the search for easy answers.  He's exhausted anyway.   Sick of the whole thing.  There's a task left to do, something tangible, the real reason he and Sheila have come (alone, as the Aunt Kittys and Uncle Bibs give them grieving space) and he figures he better get on it before it gets dark.  He's upstairs shortly thereafter, fetching a small, stainless steel tube from the carved center table in the great room; Sheila hasn't moved except to stub out cigarettes.  He's more composed this time, and says, "I'm gonna go do the lake thing now, awright?"

The lake thing means sprinkling Dad's ashes over the leaden water of Grass Lake.  She offers a nod but he misses it; he's already out the door, restless, and ready to be finished.  She's alone, and a moment later, the creepy, overheated house begins to suffocate her, even inside her summer-weight clothing; she feels as if she's being crushed against the chair, she feels like there's rough hands on her body; she panics as blurred and bloated memories begin to spin behind unflattering oversized eyeglasses . . . she regresses quickly, reliving some of the life she's had with Ed; the prize catch within the Northlakes High School caste.  She goes back further and remembers being fourteen, before meeting the handsome letterman (that happens the following year at a party in Clifton).  She has, like most of her kith, whispered about him, sniffed at the absurdity of him, wondered about his life behind the shell of privilege . . . and one night, while he's gone, she and a couple of her delinquent friends burglarize the slumpstone boathouse.  Nothing's stolen; they merely go through his drawers with curious animosity, reading his letters, finding his pornographic magazines, fingering his possessions, smelling his pants and shirts.  In an hour, they're gone, and the prank's never uncovered, mostly forgotten.  She doesn't mention it, even after they're married; she's learned to hold such secrets securely.  But in ways, those moments, heady and clandestine, were as close as she's ever felt to him.

She won't . . . can't . . . remain in the death house by herself.  She's quickly overwhelmed by the smell and gloom of antiques and by various other childish terrors, so she rises, flushed, scuttles out back, across the green yard, down to the only place on the estate with which she's ever identified:  the boathouse.   In early months with Ed, when their dating was kept clandestine (Sheila has both the characteristics and the address to make her unsuitable for the role) the boathouse becomes her hatch, where her real life, made of ramshackle privies and clotheslines and ADC subsidized random breeding, might fade off into a sick and inappropriate dream.

The door's bolted, so she pulls herself in through the rear window, like she did the first time with those scabby slices of jailbait, Lila and FaNee Pawlik.  No nervous spasms of laughter this time, though.  Melancholy quickly settles in.  The inside layout's changed since Ed's era; gone are the posters and audio equipment and the magazines and it seems that a lot of old Marine paraphernalia has been moved here, dress uniforms, footlockers, harnesses, pistol belts, greasy pieces of disassembled weaponry, duffels, tri-fold shovels, a couple of huge rock Vietnamese lions still sitting within shipping crates with a manifest from 1968.   Unlike the attic and the cellar in the main house, there is no sense of demented organization out here by the lake, but the opposite; it's chaotic and cluttered and smells like straw and moldy canvas.  She winds her way through, to a dusty dresser with glass on top.  Underneath it is a Polaroid of Ed and her at the Valentine's Day Sweetheart Ball.  He's wearing a pink blazer, impeccably handsome except for a sprinkle of chin acne; she's in a pretty ruffled dress, but wearing his Northlakes varsity jacket over it.  There's a small and rare smile on each face.  By then it's an odd, rebellious, discussed match:  star midfielder, a Key Club honors student, a preppy over-achiever who's clearly way beyond the 'cute' stage with a non-ambitious, frequently truant cracker chick from white-trash Clifton.  A simple enough summation of the breed, good enough for local standards; Sheila is, in fact, the end product of rejection and sexual abuse, and she manifests both a palpable eroticism and an undercurrent of shorn-lamb victimization which fulfils in Ed a sense of reality as strongly as it his unreal need to wrap his arms around something that will not easily evaporate.  She's been force-fed her precocious maturity and tempers it with a hungry sort of dependency.  In fact, he insists on such controls and wants potency in the face of imminent failures.  Such dynamics see them through several interesting months beyond the vows during which they play hard at being grownups; but that game soon unravels.  These days they hang on with the odd amity of strangers on a crashing plane.

Far off, on the steel surface of Grass Lake, she can see him in his wooden dinghy, rowing sadly across waters which his father had loved with a passion which might nearly be termed a romance.   On the shore, white birches punctuate the top heavy willows and the sky in the distance grows heavy with impending changes.  She musses her hair before the dresser mirror, winces at the reflection.  She's always been strange to this image, almost alien.  She's old for twenty-three, but still beautiful in an anemic, hyper-blonde sort of way, though too much a package of conflict to exploit it.

She's been withdrawn and scared and befuddled virtually since her first day of grammar school.  Ed's wound up as her dispensation from Providence.  From the night of the party in Clifton, she concocts stories from instinctive drives, without ethical restraints.  It takes her eighteen months, but she manages to carry off.  Actually, it's a well-rehearsed hustle in the repertoire of girls in her predicament.  She claims she's pregnant.  Lila Pawlik, who is, supplies her with any necessary backup.  Abortion is not an option Ed will seriously consider; at nineteen, he's a dedicated Salem United Church of Christ congregant and has actually protested in front of Metropolitan Medical Associates in Lansing.  Naturally, his father is less than delighted with this turn of events, but finally supportive of the proper decision.  She marries Ed four days after her seventeenth birthday, one month before he begins classes at Tabor Tech; he's convinced himself that he can juggle college and a family.  Both father and son are medically naïve, keen observers but lousy interpreters, since Sheila is not, cannot be pregnant, as her own father's had her popping birth control pills since the age of twelve; a lesser truth among her major secrets.  But she will not be abandoned by her college-bound Redeemer:  within her gallery of fears, abandonment is by far the worst.  The subsequent scenario, the miscarriage, comes off without a hitch; there's even sympathy from Ed's father.  By then the couple has reached some positive level of pathology and won't be pried apart for some time to come.  What follows is, as both will one day come to understand, the happiest months of their lives.

Deeper in the drawer, Sheila finds a separate stack; numerous pictures of Ed's mother, alternately bloated from fluid retention or cadaverous and wasted; she never looks like the same woman twice.  In her final images, she clutches her husband and looks like she's being propped up by him; but in the earliest, the wedding photos, they make a handsome, healthy couple.  Ed's father is tall and blonde and gorgeous.  Mom looks like Grace Kelly.  There's twenty views of the first house on Stonecroft.  Apparently they were prolific photographers, these in-laws.  (There are maybe a half dozen photos of Sheila in existence; all show a limp-haired kid with blank eyes perforating a sallow face.  She has kept only one of these for herself, one that also shows her brother L.J., who's moved well beyond that little wedge of hell.)

And then:  Still deeper, in the bottom drawer, toward the back, there's a small brass box.  There's a keyhole.  No key, but she pries the lid open without much trouble.  She spills a set of black and whites onto the dresser top.   There's maybe two dozen in all, printed on chintzy paper, like they were processed by a hack.  They're snapshots of old army days; the young marine in many of the pictures is the same as the man in the wedding photographs.  But she notices the incongruity at once; the fastidious freak she remembers as Ed's father, rewinding videos and aligning furniture, does not appear to have a lot in common with the dirty, sweating, shirtless teenage slob in the war pictures.  Except for the face.  She flips them over.  Each one has a penciled note on the back, Quang Tin Province from the air; Looking for firing positions; VC heavy machine gun captured in Mai Loc; Khe Sanh snipers; Henry M. being pulled out of mud in An Bang; and then a separate handful that are labeled simply, Girl.

She stops at Girl.  Curious, naturally, being one herself.  Who can it be?  She turns the pictures again.  A wad of gooey saliva catches in her throat.  The first snapshot shows Ed's father with his penis in the mouth of a frightened-looking peasant girl in black pajamas.  The peasant girl is crying, gagging, he's grinning at the camera lens.  Hard to judge with these Orientals, but this kid can't be fourteen years old.  In the subsequent shots, the same girl is forced into difficult, pornographic poses, and in the last one, Ed's father is slitting open her belly with a K-Bar knife:  her poorly focused intestines are spilling out onto the floor of a hooch.  His initials are already cut into her chest, between her breasts.  Many secrets are huddling inside a warped and filthy world, that's what Sheila thinks.  She carefully puts everything back inside the brass box and leaves the boathouse.  Sits inside the car and waits.

Way out in the middle the cold lake, Ed is opening the steel tube.  He'd like to say some words but can't think of a single one.  Bye?  He stands as a gesture of respect and slings rather than sprinkles what's inside the tube toward the water, which ends up being a mistake since a gust of wind suddenly takes the ash and blows it back into his face.  Keen reflexes kick in.  He does an instinctive inhale, then a swallow, and he breathes his father into his lungs, gulps him down, sucks his father into his stomach, snorts his father up his nose.   In other days, this will be a nightmare memory, but for now, he closes the tube, heaves it away, then rows the boat back toward an empty shore.