A sixteen-year-old boy from Indiana visits his Uncle Royce, who, according to his mother, made the confusing decision to follow in the boy's father's footsteps and become a journalist. Royce currently heads the newspaper the boy's father once worked at, and the boy takes a bus to Royce's town, eager to learn more about the paper and his father, who died when he was four. After his father's death, the boy and his mother moved to Indiana. Royce's paper continues to succeed because of the following of his readers in Lucius County, who enjoy that Royce reports whatever he wants. However, he wants. When the boy arrives at Royce's place of work, he asks about his father. Royce tells him roundaboutly that his father was not a good journalist and barely did his job. He also revealed that running a newspaper is not exciting work; you simply run the same ads and stories repeatedly each week. According to Royce, his father reported his marriage in the newspaper, and the boy's birth announcement and obituary were included. The boy is shocked to hear the events of his father's life described in such a way. Still, Royce, the husband of the boy's mother's sister, says he is not obligated to speak about the boy's father nicely and politely. The boy visits his father's old house with his Aunt Janey. Then, Uncle Royce offers to take him to where his father died, and the boy agrees. The two walk through the bush in the woods among the weeds until they reach the barbed wire. The boy helps his uncle through, but his foot slips and Royce gets caught in the wire. Royce removes the wire from his clothing, and they hear a shout. A farmer comes over and asks what they are doing on his land; when he realizes who they are, the farmer begins talking about the boy's father and how he died. He says the father liked hunting and was always very careful, but on the day he died, he went hunting alone and must not have been careful. Apparently, when the father slid his gun underneath a fence, the gun went off and shot him in the face. Royce and the boy were standing in the area where he died. The two go back, and the boy thinks that he knows more about where and how his father died, but he still does not know why. Without the why, it will never be a good story.