Reba asks why people sit in The Chicken drinking beer and watching fat men wrestle until midnight, and Mason thinks it’s better than where he currently is, sitting in a kitchen and looking at moldy Clew family pictures. Mason’s aunt pulls one out that depicts a woman with two children standing in a white road. She tells him that the younger child is his father while the older one died of cholera shortly after the photo was taken. They are sitting in the house the photograph was taken in front of and Reba encourages Aunt with the pictures and he thinks he’d rather be at The Chicken. He and his aunt still own some of the original family property and it looks the same as it did in the photographs. That night, the Moon-Azures return and Mrs. Moon-Azure asks if he can help clear out the old willow that fell down the other day. When Mason looks out his window, he can see the cranky old bachelor Yogetsky’s junky trailer. Across the road from his trailer is the Beaubiens’ place. Yogetsky moved from Massachuesetts ten years ago and is a reader.

The Clew family raised apples and Mason remembers how he helped his father string barbed wire around the orchard. His father ruins their family when he sells maples for timber and buys 500 Baldwin apple seedlings, a fruit no one wants to eat. To stay afloat, his father sells pieces of the woodlot until they are left with the barn they have today. His aunt says that the brother who died young had the sense, not his father.   

Mason was born in the house that the Moon-Azures live in now and the family comes up from Maryland and stays from June to August. Their weekend guests drive up in Mercedes and Saabs. One Saturday, they come by the house and ask Reba to clean for them but she is insulted and says no and instead they ask Marie Beaubien and pay her a ridiculous amount of money to wipe tables and make beds. The Moon-Azures become obsessed with the Clew family heritage and ask Mason for information about the kinds of apples his father grew. Marie tells the neighbors that Mr. Moon-Azure is retired and the family will now stay at the house from June until Christmas every year. She doubts that they will last very long, and when it grows cold the Moon-Azures bother their neighbors with silly conversations.

A week before Thanksgiving, Mrs. Moon-Azure knocks on the door and asks Aunt to see the photographs and Aunt and Mason can see she wants to buy them. They fear that one day the family will get their hands on the photos and soon they will be pasted in newspapers and books with cold captions about their ancestors. After selling off the land, Mason’s father gets a job at the Ironworks County Electric Power Cooperative and sells electrical services to rural farms. One day, his coworker Diamond dies while trying to get a kite out of a line and his father decides to get into the appliance business and that’s the work Mason continues today out of the barn with Reba. Mason and his sister Bootie are fascinated by Diamond’s death as children and act out their father’s friend’s last moments for entertainment. 

They see cars outside of the Moon-Azures house and Reba and Aunt hope it’s a goodbye party. A group of people stands hunched over something in the distance and they wonder if the party has found a dead person. The next day, Yogestky tells Mason they found an Indian carving and reported it to the local paper. The newspaper photo depicts his father’s self-portrait, clutching three bolts of electricity in one hand. He laughs.