One spring afternoon while ploughing the land of his family’s 10 acre farm in West New York State, Jack ran over and killed his younger brother, David, as his young sister, Phoebe, looked on screaming. David’s death leaves the family devastated. Dale, Jack’s father and a usually cheery man and poet, spirals into a suicidal depression that sends him off on long, lonely, and contemplative trips, abandoning his family and his work on the farm. Jack’s mother is similarly overwhelmed by the death of her youngest son—spending nights exhaustedly, silently crying in her room— but still manages the responsibilities of the house. Since the accident, Jack is plagued by its tragic memory; he spends the time doing chores vacantly contemplating David’s death and suicide, his anguish churning and growing inside him. David finds some short-lived reprieve and “community” in the cows he must tend to, in their rhythmic, ocean-wave-like chewing, but becomes incensed by their stupidity.

Nearly two years later, after a particularly long day on the farm and three weeks of his father being absent, Jack sees his family— his mother, sister, Uncle Walt, Aunt Ruth and their children— siting in the living room of their house crying. He enters the room and sees his father, kneeling on the floor with his face in his mother’s lap, “sobbing like a baby.” Dale calls Jack to him, both of them crying. Jack softly whispers “I hate you.” 

Afterwards, Dale regains control of his emotions and house once more and returns to his life of church and poetry, an obviously life-worn man ,and Jack takes up playing the French horn with a famous Russian musician, Arkady Yegudkin, whose imperious style unsettles a timid Jack.