Isaac's return to Buell and attempted confession

Isaac English’s return to Buell ends his flight not with an arrest but with an attempted confession to Bud Harris. After choosing the familiar road home and deciding that he must tell Harris what happened at the factory, Isaac walks into the police station and offers himself up. Harris, injured and already entangled in the case, refuses to let him finish. Their meeting turns the return into a negotiation over truth, loyalty, and trust: Isaac comes prepared to accept responsibility, while Harris chooses what can safely be said and what must remain concealed.

The Road Back to Buell

Isaac’s journey home begins with a ride east from Dayton. The driver drops him at an on-ramp, gives him five dollars, and advises him to get dinner. Isaac walks about a mile to a truck stop on I-70 and orders a meatball sandwich. He tries eating inside, decides it does not feel right, and takes the food outside to the curb. Ten minutes later, an eastbound truck carrying tractor parts picks him up. When its driver asks where he has been, Isaac says he is from Michigan; to make the ride more interesting, he then tells the driver that he has been riding trains and is going home to his family. The driver accepts the story, and they travel together mostly in silence.

After dark, the truck turns south on I-79 and leaves Isaac a few miles past Little Washington. He walks east, climbs a hill, and looks toward the Mon River, about twenty miles away. Hitchhiking from a gas station might be quicker, he considers, but he decides instead to go home the way he left. The choice makes the return a deliberate reversal of his escape: he does not simply arrive back in familiar territory but chooses to retrace his way into it.

By the time he reaches Speers, Isaac has walked nearly twenty miles in a day; Buell is only eight miles farther. He crosses the I-70 bridge, looks over the Mon River, and descends toward the train tracks. A group of teenagers beneath the highway falls quiet as he passes, and he realizes they have noticed Isaac's hunting knife. Once out of their sight, he unfastens it and throws it into the river. The unceremonious gesture marks a decision to relinquish a weapon and the identity attached to carrying it. In his thoughts, continuing to live becomes an act made of ordinary choices: putting one foot in front of the other, then doing so again.

Choosing to Tell the Truth

Isaac continues south beneath a clear night sky. His thoughts connect the stars, the earth, human life, and his mother’s death, imagining a passage in which a mother becomes river, ocean, and rain. The meditation does not settle his practical question of whether he can go home. He expects that the people there may talk him out of returning, just as he might try to dissuade them. Instead, south of Naomi, he stops beside the river for the night and resolves to speak to Harris the next day. He recognizes that Henry English had tried, a judgment that holds affection and disappointment together, but concludes that telling Harris what he did is the right thing.

The decision contrasts sharply with Isaac’s earlier conduct after the factory killing. When shouting began inside the building, he first waited outside for Billy Poe, then went back in when Poe did not emerge. Isaac struck Otto the Swede with an industrial ball bearing to stop him from harming Poe. Afterward, Isaac and Poe left rather than calling the police. On the journey back, Isaac does not try to erase his part in the death from himself: he means to tell Harris what happened, even though he expects to face consequences. The return therefore changes the direction of the story from flight and silence toward a voluntary, if incomplete, account.

The Meeting with Harris

At the station, Isaac speaks first to Steve Ho, the officer behind the desk, and asks for Harris. Ho tells him Harris is unavailable. Isaac nevertheless goes down the hall, knocks on the metal office door, and opens it before hearing an answer. Harris is inside, pale and disheveled, with a blanket around his shoulders and one hand in a splint. Isaac tells him that he is turning himself in.

Harris stops Isaac before he can proceed. He checks the hall, closes and locks the door, and asks him to sit. Isaac then says that Billy Poe did not kill the homeless man. Harris looks stricken and asks him not to say anything else. When Isaac insists that he is telling the truth and begins to explain his connection with Billy, Harris interrupts him again. The attempted confession is not completed: Isaac approaches the police chief ready to disclose more, but Harris actively limits the conversation.

Harris explains that the district attorney has just called to say that the two men from the factory have been found dead. In his account, all three men from that night are now gone; the only people who remain are Isaac and Billy Poe. The revelation reframes the confession. Isaac had come to tell Harris what he had done, but the case has changed while he was away, and Harris treats further speech as a danger rather than an uncomplicated route to justice. When Isaac asks what happened to the men, Harris says it could have been anything.

Harris’s Choices and the Case’s Aftermath

Harris’s restraint at the station follows a series of choices shaped by his personal ties and his understanding of local policing. Earlier, after finding Billy Poe’s jacket at the crime scene, he hid it from an arriving state trooper. He regarded such discretion as part of an unwritten community practice in which doing right could sometimes mean letting someone go rather than enforcing the law mechanically. Later, he watched Isaac and Poe from a police vehicle and said they looked fine from a distance; he proposed giving them a ride home rather than laying hands on them. When he did decide to arrest Poe, he allowed him to go home for the night, warning him to destroy the shoes and receipts that might connect him to the crime and promising to pick him up before state police did.

The return takes place after Harris has made a still more consequential choice. He knew that the witness, Murray Clark, was receiving a hundred dollars a week through a state-funded arrangement called witness protection, although Harris believed it did not actually protect him. Harris considered frightening Clark away to protect Billy. He also recalled a killing he had carried out in Vietnam, and reflected that the dead had once been alive. He went to confront Clark armed; during the encounter, Harris shot him, was attacked, and shot him again as he tried to escape. By the time Isaac reaches the station, Harris is physically injured and knows the surviving account of the factory night has become more precarious.

Harris does not tell Isaac that Billy has been stabbed in prison and nearly died after refusing to see his lawyer. He also recognizes that the district attorney may ask questions and that he must prepare an account of where he was the previous night. The secrecy is not presented as a clean resolution: Harris has helped keep Billy’s jacket from the investigation, has killed the witness, and now prevents Isaac from completing his confession. Yet he regards both young men as worth saving. His decision to protect them is inseparable from the compromises and risks it creates for himself.

Departure and a Tentative Trust

Isaac tells Harris that he will leave Buell and may live with Lee English in Connecticut. Harris approves of the plan. When Isaac asks what will happen to Billy, Harris estimates that the authorities may have no choice but to release him after about a month. Harris gives Isaac his cell and home numbers and offers to meet if Isaac begins to feel troubled. Isaac says he does not think that will be necessary and that he feels fine. Harris tells him he did the right thing by coming, while acknowledging that he cannot now give Isaac anything in return; he sends him home.

Outside the office, Isaac walks down the steps and toward town. Halfway through, he realizes he has decided to trust Harris, and to try trusting the others as well. The thought is provisional: he will see how that choice turns out. At the riverbank, he kneels and puts a hand into the water, watching the ripples spread as birds head toward open water. His return does not settle the legal facts or undo the harm. It does, however, leave him moving toward a life among other people rather than continuing alone, carrying the truth he came back to tell.