The bleeding stopped but Bill had a headache. The top of his head throbbed beneath the bandage. He leaned against his workbench despairing a little, wishing the older kids would visit. But he knew that wasn’t going to happen right then. Emily was still besotted with her rich husband and their “work,” and Ned wanted to avoid any political arguments. It was hard for Bill to admit it, but his daughters were apparently horny and his sons were just not aggressive.

Rick’s shooting misadventure made him a juvenile felon, and while that wasn’t going on his adult record it was enough to keep him out of the army. At 27, Ned was too old unless he really pushed himself, and Bill knew Ned wasn’t going to do that. The girls wouldn’t serve because they didn’t have to serve.

It made Bill feel angry. Powerless. He knew it was corny but he opened his gun safe and started cleaning his revolver. There was something about the heft of the handle that was comforting.

“Things fall apart,” he thought then, and “The centre will not hold.” He saw the English spelling in his head and knew he was quoting poetry, but he couldn’t remember whose.

Mary, Liz, and Laney were still in the kitchen. Mary had been reminiscing about old games all day, and she suggested that they work on a jigsaw puzzle. The girls thought it would be fun. They didn’t know and Mary had forgotten how hard a jigsaw can be on the solvers’ lower backs.

They rejected the puzzle with the picture of Manhattan. They’d just agreed on the circular farm scene when the gunshots startled them. Each looked at the other and they hurtled to the garage.

It had been a rat. Bill was okay. He was cleaning his gun when he saw the nasty rodent poking around in the far corner of the garage, where it was darkest. On any other day Bill probably would have walked inside, made a comment, called the exterminator. He didn’t know what came over him, but he just aimed his gun and fired. Kind of nicked a hole in the garage wall but really blasted the rat. Got him right in the head.

Bill cleaned up the rat carcass. Everybody looked a little better to him after that. Mary didn’t seem so insipid. Liz might not die. Laney could mature. And Rick: well, actually Rick was doing better than anyone expected a few years back. Just as he had that thought, Rick himself appeared in the garage doorway. Home safe from the peace rally. Looking blonde and friendly. Looking like a kid.

“Hey, son…help me out. I’ve got a poem in my head. ‘The centre falls apart?’”

“That’s ‘The Second Coming’ by Yeats, Dad.” Rick didn’t like history or science but had an affinity for math and poetry. He quoted the ending: “And what rough beast, its hour come at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”

Something in Bill’s chest seemed to melt then, and he was filled with tender anxiety. Rick’s future loomed long and uncertain in Bill’s imagination, and he felt too tired to know what should be done. He clapped his right arm around Rick’s shoulder. They walked into the house.

Everybody felt a little better. It was like a storm had passed; the air was lighter, and clean. Together they started to work on the puzzle.

 
The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

– William Butler Yeats, 1920