With everything behind him, he approached the edge, a chasm snowing with stars. From here, I can make out only something quite different. It is a bright Ontario mid-summer day, and you can see, in the punishing sunlight, that a teenaged girl in a lime green halter top and white shorts is sprinting across the stubble toward an approaching tractor that pulls an empty wagon, waving her arms and shouting soundlessly into gusts of wind. The tractor, baler, and full load she has abandoned sit marooned on a small rise in the centre of the field where the coil of raked hay always ends. Behind the red baler there is a crooked body which, having tipped off the front of the wagon, lies on the soil like a doll. But the bent mannequin is really a man, grandpa, a man, father; not only dead, but having swallowed his history and taken it with him (these words retrieve nothing) demonstrating that contrary to the assertions of all our philosophies, silence too is a human need.