"While Jim's mother and uncles had known and lived with Jim Glass, Sr., and Jim had constructed a man named Daddy from their stories, nothing had made Jim's father so real as the beating heart of Amos Glass. He had always felt as if he were playing a type of game with his father, that his father was just out of sight ahead of him, watching as Jim looked behind this door, or under that bed. And, although he knew that such things didn't happen, he had always secretly felt as if tomorrow might be the day he tracked his daddy down, that tomorrow he might meet him on a path in the woods, or find him sitting on a rock by the river. But now he understood that Amos made this possible. Once Amos died, Jim's father would become as ancient and faceless as a man in the Bible, a man walking away until he is finally impossible to see. Once Amos was gone, Jim would be alone in the world in a way he had never been alone before."Tony Earley, Jim the Boy (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2000) 223.
