A Distant Horizon

      On the day his father died, a hapless victim of British hubris and mindless cruelty, 26-year old Amos Ives, a farmer of Meriden, Connecticut, found it impossible to resist the notion that the the impalpable compact that had always bound his family together had dissolved, leaving in its wake an echoing emptiness, a void so seemingly limitless that no amount of discipline, prayer, or positive thinking could fill it. The man who had been their anchor, their mentor, their beacon, their hope, the man who in a very real sense had been the gravitational center of their universe, was gone. Although Gideon had always worked hard to maintain his family and his farm, to protect his children and provide for them to the best of his ability, he was never the wheeler-dealer his father had been. For all his efforts and good intentions, silver slipped through his fingers like water through a sieve. Despite that shortcoming, which he never denied, it had always been his dream to create an estate of sufficient size to enable him to set up his four surviving sons as independent farmers. Unfortunately, that dream never materialized. What that meant, very simply, was that, as the traditions of primogeniture required, his eldest son Amasa would inherit the house and the farm, and that it would be up to each of his three other sons to forge his own destiny, whatever that might turn out to be…