Fall

Fall is the season of Rusty Sabich’s first days beyond the trial, when the terror of possible imprisonment has ended but its damage has not. The season turns apparent release into a more complicated return to ordinary life: relief gives way to anger and depression, and an October day in the yard brings the murder back into view through the Whatchamacallit he had cleaned after the trial.

The Season of Release

The Fall section opens with Rusty’s sense that the worst is over. He describes the terror of the trial and its imagined future of prison as past, and experiences freedom as an immense physical and emotional release. Yet that relief does not hold steadily. It gives way to anger and depression as he considers what it means to endure a trial that, in his view, has brought disgrace and uncompensated damage. The season therefore begins not with uncomplicated restoration but with a sharp alternation between liberation and the memory of what it cost.

A Slow Return to Ordinary Life

Rusty’s recovery proceeds gradually. In the waning summer and stirring Fall, he spends much of his time alone, despite a stream of calls from people who had not spoken to him during the preceding four months. He accepts their congratulations partly because he knows he may need them again, but their well wishes do little to draw him back into society. Instead, ordinary time returns through quiet activity: he keeps Nathaniel Sabich out of school for a day to fish with him from a canoe, and on other days walks for hours in the forest. Their near-silence on the canoe is not presented as estrangement; Rusty is content simply to be with his son and believes Nathaniel understands that. As the inward storm of the previous months subsides, Rusty begins to notice the world around him again.

Home and Unresolved Tension

The return home does not resolve Rusty’s marriage. His neighbors suggest that he write a book, but he is not ready to take on a new enterprise. Barbara, whose irritation had been held in check, now seems disconcerted by his presence. She does not openly complain or answer him with sharp sarcasm; instead, Rusty sees her troubled, angry gaze, followed by a sigh and a turn away. Fall thus brings Rusty back to the household without restoring ease within it: his freedom from the prosecution coexists with Barbara’s difficulty in speaking her mind and the tension between them.

The October Return of the Murder

In October, while working in the yard to replace fence posts and attach the beeftail, Rusty recognizes the Whatchamacallit as the tool used to kill Carolyn Polhemus on April 1. The black iron implement, part claw hammer and part crowbar, had come to the house with other household and yard equipment after the death of Barbara’s father, brought by Barbara’s mother. Rusty recalls that, just after the trial, he saw a crust of blood and a blond hair clinging to one of its teeth. He stared at it for a long time, carried it to the basement, and washed it in the laundry tub; Barbara came downstairs while he was doing so. The seasonal movement into ordinary yard work is therefore interrupted by a concrete reminder of the murder and of Rusty’s own concealment of the weapon’s traces. Fall offers him some distance from the trial, but it does not put the past safely behind him.