Summary

In Minnesota, Paul Milton Perry attempts to sleep during a hot July night. He sprays a can of insecticide against his screen window to kill mosquitos. His wife, Grace, awakes and gives him a brief massage. Perry thinks of his younger brother, Harvey, who will return the next day from the Vietnam War. He wonders “what great changes the war might have made in his kid brother” (6). Unable to sleep, Perry walks to Pliney’s Pond. He thinks of his dead father, a preacher, who forced him to swim in the scummy pond. At his father’s request, Harvey built a bomb shelter on the property. Perry calls Harvey “the Bull, the old man’s pride” (9).

The next day, Perry and Grace drive into the small town of Sawmill Landing. Perry recalls meeting Grace at the University of Iowa, where he briefly studied divinity...