Get out! he mouthed. His cheeks and forehead, studded with newly arrived pimples, were flaming. His eyes were swollen. Get out, get out! Then, shocking me: Get the fuck out, cocksucker!

The first gray began to appear in my mother’s hair that spring. One afternoon when my father came in, looking more tired than usual, Mom told him that they had to take Con to a specialist in Portland. “We’ve waited long enough,” she said. “That old fool George Renault can say whatever he likes, but I know what happened, and so do you. That careless rich boy ruptured my son’s vocal cords.”

My father sat down heavily at the table. Neither of them noticed me in the mudroom, taking an inordinate amount of time to lace up my Keds. “We can’t afford it, Laura,” he said.

“But you could afford to buy Hiram Oil in Gates Falls!” she said, using an ugly, almost sneering tone of voice I had never heard before.

He sat looking at the table instead of at her, although there was nothing on it except the red-and-white-checked oilcloth. “That’s why we can’t afford it. We’re skating on mighty thin ice. You know what kind of winter it was.”

We all knew: a warm one. When your family’s income depends on heating oil, you keep a close eye on the thermometer between Thanksgiving and Easter, hoping the red line will stay low.

My mother was at the sink, hands buried in a cloud of soapsuds. Somewhere beneath the cloud, dishes were rattling as if she wanted to break them instead of clean them. “You had to have it, didn’t you?” Still in that same tone of voice. I hated that voice. It was as if she was egging him on. “The big oil baron!”

“That deal was made before Con’s accident,” he said, still not looking up. His hands were once more stuffed deep into his pockets. “That deal was made in August. We sat together looking at The Old Farmer’s Almanac—a cold and snowy winter, it said, coldest since the end of World War II—and we decided it was the right thing to do. You ran the numbers on your adding machine.”

The dishes rattled harder under the soapsuds. “Take out a loan!”

“I could, but Laura . . . listen to me.” He raised his eyes at last. “I may have to do that just to make it through the summer.”

“He’s your son!”

“I know he is, goddammit!” Dad roared. It scared me, and must have scared my mother, because this time the dishes under the cloud of suds did more than rattle. They crashed. And when she raised her hands, one of them was bleeding.

She held it up to him—like my silent brother showing YES or NO in class—and said, “Look what you made me d—” She caught sight of me, sitting on the woodpile and staring into the kitchen. “Buzz off! Go out and play!”

“Laura, don’t take it out on Ja—”

“Get out!” she shouted. It was the way Con would have shouted at me, if he’d had a voice to shout with. “God hates a snoop!”

She began to cry. I ran out the door, crying myself. I ran down Methodist Hill, and across Route 9 without looking in either direction. I had no idea of going to the parsonage; I was too upset to even think of seeking pastoral advice. If Patsy Jacobs hadn’t been in the front yard, checking to see if any of the flowers she’d planted the previous fall were coming up, I might have run until I collapsed. But she was out, and she called my name. Part of me wanted to just keep on running, but—as I think I’ve said—I had my manners, even when I was upset. So I stopped.

She came to where I was standing, my head down, gasping for breath. “What happened, Jamie?”

I didn’t say anything. She put her fingers under my chin and raised my head. I saw Morrie sitting on the grass beside the parsonage’s front stoop, surrounded by toy trucks. He was goggling at me.

“Jamie? Tell me what’s wrong.”

Just as we had been taught to be polite, we had been taught to keep our mouths shut about what went on in the family. It was the Yankee way. But her kindness undid me and it all came pouring out: Con’s misery (the depth of which I’m convinced neither of our parents comprehended, in spite of their very real concern), my mother’s fear that his vocal cords had been ruptured and he might never speak again, her insistence on a specialist and Dad’s on how they couldn’t afford it. Most of all, the shouting. I didn’t tell Patsy about the stranger’s voice I had heard coming from my mother’s mouth, but only because I could not think how to say it.

When I finally ran down, she said: “Come around to the back shed. You need to talk to Charlie.”

 • • •

Now that the Belvedere had taken its proper place in the parsonage garage, the back shed had become Jacobs’s workshop. When Patsy led me in, he was tinkering with a television set that had no screen.

“When I put this puppy back together,” he said, slinging an arm around my shoulders and producing a handkerchief from his back pocket, “I’ll be able to get TV stations in Miami, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Wipe your eyes, Jamie. And your nose could use a little attention while you’re at it.”

I looked at the eyeless TV with fascination as I cleaned up. “Will you really be able to get stations in Chicago and Los Angeles?”

“Nah, I was kidding. I’m just trying to build in a signal amplifier that will let us get something besides Channel 8.”

“We get 6 and 13, too,” I said. “Although 6 is a little snow-stormy.”

“You guys have a roof antenna. The Jacobs family is stuck with rabbit ears.”

“Why don’t you buy one? They sell them at Western Auto in Castle Rock.”

He grinned. “Good idea! I’ll stand up in front of the deacons at the quarterly meeting and tell them I want to spend some of the collection money on a TV antenna, so Morrie can watch Mighty 90 and the missus and I can watch Petticoat Junction on Tuesday nights. Never mind that, Jamie. Tell me what’s got you in such a tizzy.”

I looked around for Mrs. Jacobs, hoping she’d spare me the job of having to tell everything twice, but she had quietly decamped. He took me by the shoulders and led me to a sawhorse. I was just tall enough to be able to sit on it.

“Is it Con?”

Of course he’d guess that; a petition for the return of Con’s voice was part of the closing prayer at every Thursday-night meeting that spring, as were prayers for other MYFers who were going through hard times (broken bones were the most common, but Bobby Underwood had suffered burns and Carrie Doughty had had to endure having her head shaved and rinsed with vinegar after her horrified mother discovered the little girl’s scalp was crawling with lice). But, like his wife, Reverend Jacobs hadn’t had any idea of how miserable Con really was, or how that misery had spread through the entire family like an especially nasty germ.

“Dad bought Hiram Oil last summer,” I said, starting to blubber again. I hated it, blubbering was such a little kid’s trick, but I couldn’t seem to help it. “He said the price was too good to turn down, only then we had a warm winter and heating oil went down to fifteen cents a gallon and now they can’t afford a specialist and if you could have heard her, she didn’t sound like Mom at all, and sometimes he puts his hands in his pockets, because . . .” But Yankee reticence finally kicked in and I finished, “Because I don’t know why.”

He produced the handkerchief again, and while I used it, he took a metal box from his workshop table. Wires sprouted from it every whichway, like badly cut hair.

“Behold the amplifier,” he said. “Invented by yours truly. Once I get it hooked up, I’ll run a wire out the window and up to the eave. Then I will attach . . . that.” He pointed to the corner, where a rake was propped on its pole with its rusty metal tines sticking up. “The Jacobs Custom Antenna.”

“Will it work?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I think it will. But even if it does, I believe the days of television antennas are numbered. In another ten years, TV signals will be carried along the telephone lines, and there will be a lot more than three channels. By 1990 or so, the signals will be beamed down from satellites. I know it sounds like science fiction, but the technology already exists.”