His mother had died a month earlier. She had been dying almost as long as he’d known her, so her exit was expected, though the means of it was not. In circumstances that could not be explained she had suffered multiple burns while taking a short walk only yards from the cottage. As she didn’t smoke she had no use for matches. The day was not hot. There was no naked flame in the vicinity. Either someone had set fire to her — in which event she would surely, since she remained conscious, have pointed a finger of blame — or she had combusted spontaneously — and what counted against that theory was that her torso was not burned, only her extremities. She lay quietly on her bed for three days without complaining and seemingly not in pain. Her final words were ‘At last.’
But his father died — aged eighty though looking older — in a slow burn of ineffective rage. On the faces of some old men the flesh sags from lack of expressive exercise, the feeling man behind the skin having no more use for it; but on his father’s it grew tighter with approaching death as though the skull beneath could not control its grimaces. On his last night he asked Kevern to dig out an ancient music system he kept hidden under the stairs in a box marked Private Property and got him to play the blind soul singer Ray Charles singing ‘You Are My Sunshine’ over and over. He shook his fists while it was playing, though Kevern couldn’t tell whether at him, at Ray Charles, or at the cruel irony of things. ‘What a 
oke,’ his father said. ‘What a oke that is.’
He had to unclench his father’s fingers when the bitter light finally went out of him.
He let the music go on playing.
Kevern had always known about the box marked Private Property. Its futility saddened him. Would the words Private Property deter burglars? Or were they meant to deter him and his mother? What he hadn’t known was how many more boxes marked Private Property — some of them cardboard and easy to get into, others made of metal and fitted with locks, but all of them numbered — his father had secreted under his bed, on the top of the wardrobe, in the attic, in his workshop. Hoarding was proscribed by universal consent — no law, you just knew you shouldn’t do it — but he didn’t think this could be called hoarding exactly. Hoarding, surely, was random and disorganised, the outward manifestation of a disordered personality. His father’s boxes hinted at a careful, systematic, if overly secretive mind. But he’d read that people who kept things, whether they ordered them or they didn’t, were afraid above all of loss — the fear of losing their things standing in for their fear of losing something else: love, happiness, their lives. Well he didn’t need proof that his father was a frightened man. The only question was what he had all along been so frightened of.
Kevern knew the answer to that while maintaining that he didn’t. You can know and not know. Kevern didn’t know and knew. There were books in the redacted section of Bethesda Art Academy library with pages torn from them. Kevern sat in what appeared to Rozenwyn Feigenblat, the academy librarian, to be a concentration of profound vacancy, reading the pages that were no longer there.
One of his father’s boxes was marked for his attention. Another was marked for his attention only in the event of his considering fatherhood. What he was meant to do with all the others he had no idea. Hoard them, he supposed.
Going through the papers and letters in the box marked for his attention, Kevern discovered a shocking truth about his parents. They were first cousins. That fact wasn’t documented or brazenly trumpeted, but it was evident to anyone capable of reading between the lines, and Kevern lived between the lines. He couldn’t have failed to gather, from his mother’s and father’s misery and from remarks they let drop over the years, that they didn’t belong down here, that they lived in Port Reuben not out of choice, because they loved the sea or sought a simple way of life, but under duress; but he had never understood the nature of that duress, who or what had brought them and why they stayed. Now he knew. Down here no one would care about their incest (as Kevern considered it to be) even had they got wind of it. Cousins? So bleeding what! We are all one big happy family here. We don’t care, my lovelies, if youz is brother and sister.
Kevern didn’t miss out on wondering about that too. Was it worse than the letters intimated? Was ‘cousins’ a euphemism?
Such easy-goingness as Port Reuben and the surrounding villages exercised in the matter of consanguinity was not shared by the rest of the country. Blood needed to be thinned not thickened if there was to be none of that dense, overpopulated insalubriousness that had been the cause of discord. The county was allowed to make an exception of itself only because the authorities didn’t take it seriously. A cordon sanitaire could easily be drawn across the neck of the county, cutting it off from the rest of the country; and the existence of an imaginary version of that line — beyond which few aphids (as tourists and even visitors on business were contemptuously known) had ever wanted to stray — already prevented any serious cross-pollution. It was in the overheated towns and cities, where people talked as well as bred too much, that cousins needed to be kept apart. And it hadn’t escaped the attention of Ofnow that in acknowledging and encouraging nationality-based group aptitude — popular entertainment and athletics in this corner, plumbing in that — it ran the risk of allowing steam to build up in the enclaves once again. But that didn’t apply to Bethesda. The Bethesdans could mate with their own animals as far as the authorities were concerned.
In this, as in so many other matters, Kevern Cohen was not able to be as insouciant as his neighbours. Learning that his parents had been first cousins — if not closer — shook him profoundly. It had nothing to do with legalities: he didn’t know whether they’d done wrong in the eyes of the law or not. But their hiding away suggested that they felt they had. And to him it was an animal wrongness: first cousins! — it was too hot, like rutting. They’d run away to breed, and he was the thing they’d bred. Engendered in the steaming straw of their cow-house. Inbred.
He wondered if it explained the oddity of his nature. Was that the reason he had never married and had children of his own? Was he possessed of some genetic knowledge that would ensure his contaminated line would die out?
They’d always been too much of another time for him to feel close to them in the way other sons were close to their parents, so he found it difficult to attribute sins of the flesh to them. What they’d done they’d done. What he couldn’t forgive them for was not taking their secret to the grave. Why had they left incriminating documents behind? Shouldn’t they have kept him in the dark about what they’d done, as they’d kept him in the dark about almost everything else in their past — where they’d come from, what sort of family theirs was, who they were? There were few other papers for him to sort through. Most of the evidential story of their life, other than a number of nondescript notebooks and scrawled-over writing pads he kept for no other reason than that they had kept them, and a locked box which Kevern gave his oath he would open only when it looked likely that he would be a father himself — not before, and certainly not after — had been scrupulously destroyed. So he had to assume that they had deliberately not burned or shredded the handful of letters they had written to each other that proved how closely they were related. But to what end? Did they suppose they were helping him to live a better life? Or were the letters left where he could easily find them in order to give him a reason not to go on living at all? Was it their gift of death to him, like a single silver bullet or a suicide pill?