Dorrigo Evans remembers being a 9-year-old boy in 1916. He saw a man named Jackie Maguire crying at a kitchen table: “No one cried then, except babies” (3). Later, he sees a time when “[f]eeling became fashionable and emotion became a theater in which people were players who no longer knew who they were off the stage” (4). The only other time he can remember seeing a man cry is when his brother Tom got off the train after returning from World War I. The night he came home he would not talk about the war. He just stared into the fire. 

When Dorrigo is old, he ruminates about life: “A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else” (4). He is unsure of whether he made the quote up, or if he is repeating something he heard. On the day he saw Jackie Maguire crying, he had come in from playing outside. He had smashed his finger with a rock and needed his mother to puncture the blood blister with a hot knife. As she works on his fingernail, Jackie says that his wife left him and has vanished.

When he was 20, Tom lived in a cave several miles away.