Cyrus drills his two sons

Adam Trask is born on a Connecticut farm in 1862 while his father Cyrus is at the war. Cyrus comes home with his right leg off at the knee and the gonorrhoea he passes to his wife; she invents a god of vengeance, writes a confession and drowns herself in a shallow pond. Within a month Cyrus marries seventeen-year-old Alice, who bears Charles and hides her consumption. Cyrus reinvents himself as the great authority on the war he barely fought, rises in the Grand Army of the Republic, and drills his sons like recruits. Adam catches him out — "the gods are fallen and all safety gone" — and retreats behind "the long tunnels of his eyes". When Adam beats Charles at peewee, Charles clubs him senseless. Cyrus tells Adam he will make a soldier of him, and that he loves him better; Charles beats him again on the dark road, then hunts him with a hatchet while Adam hides in the ditch water.

Cyrus builds a war he did not fight and runs his household as a garrison, with the sons as material. Charles beats Adam because the peewee win exposes a preference he already suspects, and the unhoned birthday knife confirms it. Adam's answer to violence is to disappear behind his own eyes.