Tom wonders if his son will ever come home again. The war in Europe is a long way from Gainsborough, a dusty village dropped into the southeast corner of Saskatchewan, the cluster of clapboard houses surrounded by golden prairies and looming grain elevators.

The rear bedroom his only child occupied for eighteen years is small, the closet bursting with boyhood dreams: stamps from across the world catalogued in thin, measured print; oddly shaped coins bartered using marbles or, later, cigarettes—his son doesn’t know Tom knows this, but he does—and a red-and-black Lindy tin airplane, his boy’s initials etched underneath. He wonders if his son packed the plane or left it on the windowsill. A daily reminder.

Tom leans against the black ’38 Ford pickup, a pipe jutting from his pressed lips. He waits for his son—his only boy—to slip on his Royal Canadian Air Force uniform, adjust his epaulettes, and don his wide-brimmed hat. Tom chews the pipe. He could say he’s proud; he could do that final kindness, split open his leather heart stitched over with time and grief and witness to too many things when he last wore a uniform.

Instead, he spits on the ground and watches the wetness disappear into the earth.

Carrie Lee sits on the front porch framed by Lady’s Slippers and Bluebells, a starched handkerchief pressed to her mouth. The son steps onto the porch a man. It’s too much, these changes, and Tom stares at the wheat-filled prairie and ignores the ease that Carrie Lee takes as she enfolds their boy in her arms. Wind whips grit in Tom’s eyes, and he passes a weathered hand across his face.

He’ll take his son to the train station in Regina three hours away but won’t say anything on the drive. They could be going anywhere—to the hardware store in town, or across the field to help a neighbor rig a trap for the raccoons that prowl at night and steal. Always stealing the best.

Plumes of dust rise from the road on the drive. Jagged words stick in Tom’s throat. He knows the folly, how he lost more than his mind in those years in damp trenches, rats skittering across his boots at night while he hugged his rifle and prayed to a God he won’t speak to anymore. He knows he returned a different man. Silent. Meaner.

The son stares out the window and, for a moment, Tom follows his gaze. Silver Buffaloberry and Chokecherry edge the road. High above, a plane weaves in and out of cotton ball clouds. The Ford follows the plane’s path, a string tethered to a kite. The plane drifts out of sight, and his boy, his dearest one, leans forward, palm pressed to the window, the sky clear and blue and less beautiful than before.

*