About this Book

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ANN PATCHETTIn rural Illinois two tenant farmers share much, finally too much, until jealously leads to murder and suicide. A tenuous friendship between lonely teenagers - the narrator, whose mother has died young, and Cletus Smith, the troubled witness to his parent's misery - is shattered. Fifty years on, the narrator mourns words left unsaid, and attempts a reconstruction of those devastating events and the atonement of a lifetime's regret.