Una comes home in a box

Part Three opens on the Hamiltons, "tuned too high", and the ones who snapped. Una, Samuel's cleverest daughter, married a silent photographic chemist who took her north to the Oregon border, and came home dead — hands broken to the quick, feet gravel-cut and unshod — in what the family calls an accident. Samuel does not recover. The narrator remembers his uncle Tom, who left chewing gum under the children's pillows, could not tell his sister how to become a boy, and carved a wooden head that came alive with a fly inside it. Tom writes poetry he burns and swings between celibacy and San Francisco; when Dessie's hopeless love affair kills her laughter he rides all night to Salinas and is jailed by a sheriff his father has telegraphed. At Thanksgiving 1911 the clan realises Samuel has become an old man, blames Tom, apologises, and hatches a plan to invite the parents away. Samuel talks Liza into her first vacation in fifty years, sees through the scheme, and tells Tom he knows where he is going and is content.

Part Three begins by turning the family chronicle dark. The narrator's own childhood memories — the gum, the fly-head, the silent fishing — buy Tom enough affection to carry the harder material about him, and they date the telling: a grandson remembering. Samuel's ordinary teasing of Liza over the word "vacation" is what makes the last line land.