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Uncle Sam leaned back in his chair to light a new Cignals, the dead one smoldering in the ashtray, smoke settling over his shoulder before squiggling in ribbons to join the coiled clouds hanging from the ceiling. After another drink and another suck, he leaned his head back and rounded his mouth into an O and blew a smoke ring to hang like a giant Cheerio above his head in a yellow-fogged halo, like the one in that picture of the upside-down Jesus. Leonard, a live-off-the-grid guy, decides to move his partner, Ruth, and children, Bobby and Rebecca, five and eight, to a remote, live-off-the-land farm on Manitoulin Island. The farm idea soon begins to unravel. Ruth, who suffers from bipolar disorder, retreats to her bed, too depressed to be a farmer's wife. To pay off the mortgage, Leonard works double shifts at the hog plant up the road. Rebecca and Bobby are left to fend for themselves. Enter Leonard's brother Uncle Sam, whose Vietnam War experiences have left him deranged.

As 14-year-old-Katria watches her father, Ivan, step-by-step sweep his spray of poison brew back to front over the lawn, she imagines the little creatures beneath the fall of his steel- toed boots curling up dead the minute he passes. She imagines his poison percolating through the soil and travelling underground to his patch of rhubarb stalks that he stewed in pots and forced Moms to eat in large quantities to make her lose weight. Then, Katria can hardly believe the voice she hears coming from her mother's grave: "HE POISONED ME. GET EVEN."