Summary

Chapter 1 opens with Dorrigo Evans recalling a very early memory, probably around 1915 or 1916, when a neighborhood man named Jackie Maguire arrives at the Evans home. Dorrigo recalls that Jackie is crying and that a grown man's tears made an impression on him. In Chapter 2, Dorrigo recalls more of that scene. He comes inside to have his mother tend a blood blister on his hand and Dorrigo listens to the adults' conversation. Jackie is crying because his wife, later identified as Ruth, has taken a train to Launceston with her youngest child, and has not returned. Jackie says that his wife had simply vanished.

Jackie sometimes works with Dorrigo's older brother, Tom. Dorrigo occasionally travels to Tom's house in a nearby community. Dorrigo doesn't reveal that he'd seen Tom in an erotic embrace with Jackie's wife just before her departure. He thinks about...