John Saul: Nathaniel

He couldn't feel his father.

That, he decided, was what was strange about this room. Even though it was filled with his father's things, he couldn't feel his father.

That was something he'd never experienced before. Always, for as long as he could remember, he'd been able to sense his father's presence near him, even when Mark wasn't at home. It was as if any place his father had been, he'd left something of himself behind, something for Michael to hold on to. It was something special between himself and his father, and even though they'd never talked about it, Michael was sure his father had felt it too.

And yet, in this room, with all his father's things around him, Michael couldn't feel him.

He'd felt him in the dream, though.

In the dream, he'd seen his father standing in the hayloft, and he'd seen someone else, someone he couldn't quite make out, near his father.

And then there'd been a flash of movement, and suddenly his father was over the edge, falling.

It was as if Michael himself was falling, but even as he felt himself tumbling endlessly toward the haybin, he'd also watched as his father's body plummeted toward the darkness below.

He'd seen the pitchfork, its handle buried in the hay, its four gleaming tines pointed straight upward, waiting for him, waiting for his father.

He'd tried to cry out, tried to scream, but no sound would come from his throat.

And then he could feel the cold, knife-edged steel plunging into his flesh, but even as the pitchfork pierced him, he could see that it wasn't himself falling onto the dangerous tines, but his father. Yet even knowing it was not he who was dying, Michael could still feel the pain, feel the agony shooting through his father's body, feel the death that had come for his father.

And above, watching, there was someone else…

It was only a dream, and yet deep within himself, Michael knew it was more than his mind's imaginings.

It was real.

No matter how hard she tried, Janet Hall couldn't focus her mind on the reality of what was happening. There was a sense of wrongness to everything, and she found herself grasping at inconsequentials. Suddenly, in the warmth of the spring morning, she saw herself as she should have been right now, striding down Madison Avenue, past the Carlyle Hotel toward American Expression, the boutique that was the usual focus of her Wednesday morning shopping expeditions.

And Michael should have been sitting in his classroom at the Manhattan Academy, pretending to be paying attention to his teacher. He wouldn't be, of course. Instead, Michael would be gazing out on the bright and sunny morning and dreaming of spending the weekend camping with Mark in the Berkshires.

And Mark. Mark should be facing his eleven o'clock class, polishing his glasses and filling his pipe while he glanced over his notes on The Effects of the War in Viet Nam on the Middle-class Family.

That was the way it should be. A typical family-if not the almost laughably stereotypical family Mark had once called them-going through the routines of their normal, stereotypical lives. But things were rarely as they should be, and today nothing was as it should be.

Everything was wrong; everything was unreal.

Mark was dead .

That was the thing she had to accept; when she could understand that, then everything else would fit, and she would be able to orient herself to her surroundings.

She forced herself into reality, yanked herself out of New York and back into Prairie Bend, and fixed her eyes on the coffin that stood next to the open grave. That's Mark, she told herself. That's all that's left of him, and in a few minutes, they are going to put him in the ground, and cover him up, and then he will be gone. Gone . She repeated the word to herself, but it still had no real meaning for her. Mark couldn't be gone, not forever. It wasn't fair. And that, she realized in a moment of sudden clarity, was the key to it all. It wasn't fair . There hadn't been anything wrong with Mark, except perhaps that odd daredevil streak in him that had never fit with his professorial personality, those sudden, inexplicable urges to thrust himself into danger that had, apparently, finally killed him.

It hadn't always been that way. When they'd first gotten married, he'd been what she'd always dreamed of: a quiet man living a quiet life. And then, a year into the marriage- eleven years ago-two things had happened: Michael had been born, and Mark had bought a motorcycle. Though Mark had denied it, Janet had always been sure there was a connection between the two events. It was as if Mark wanted to prove to his son that he was more than a milquetoast professor, that he was some kind of he-man, or at least his own image of a he-man. The motorcycle had been just the beginning.

Finally, there had been the skydiving. He'd taken that up two years ago, after a year of dragging his family out to the Jersey meadows every weekend to "watch." From the beginning, Janet had been sure that her husband would not be content to stay on the ground, and she had been right. Six months after he started watching, he started jumping. Of course, he'd been careful, as he was careful about everything.

And there, she realized, was the irony. Two years of skydiving, two years of risking his life from thousands of feet in the air, only to die in what couldn't have been more than a ten-foot fall.

It simply wasn't possible-not possible that he was dead, had left her alone to raise Michael-Michael, and the baby. She had not told the Halls yet about the baby, and they hadn't seemed to notice. But soon she would have to face telling them. And telling Michael. And the guilty, disloyal thought came into her head once more: it was all Mark's own fault. If he'd come straight home from Chicago, as he'd planned to do, none of this would be happening. He hadn't been back to Prairie Bend in years. Not, in fact, in all the years she'd known him. So why had he gone back now?

It didn't make sense.

A wave of nausea swept over her, a twinge of the morning sickness that had plagued her far past the time when it should have ceased. Janet steeled herself against it, refusing to give in to it. Iwon't be sick , she told herself. Iwon't be sick at Mark's funeral. I'll get through this . Suddenly she felt a steadying hand on her elbow, and looked up to see Amos Hall watching her intently, his blue eyes-so like Mark's eyes-filled with concern. Shutting everything else out of her mind, she clutched her father-in-law's hand and forced herself to watch as they lowered her husband's coffin into the ground.

Michael stood quietly next to his mother, doing his best to keep his mind on what the minister was saying about his father. If he listened hard to the words, then maybe his headache would go away. But try as he would, he couldn't concentrate, for what the minister was saying didn't seem to be about his father at all. At least, not the father he had known. The minister kept talking about the importance of being at home and living and dying among your own, and Michael couldn't really see the connection between the words and his dad. Did the minister mean that if his father hadn't ever left Prairie Bend, then he wouldn't have died? But that didn't make sense-he'd been in Prairie Bend when he died.

Died. The word hadn't really had any meaning to Michael before yesterday. People died, but not people you knew, much less your own father. And yet it had happened. He stared at the coffin, knowing this was the last he would ever see of his father, but even as he watched it, he still couldn't believe that his father was really inside that wooden box, was really being buried in the ground, was really gone forever. He couldn't be…