Chapter 5 Summary

In a religious knowledge class in September 1954, the boys' teacher asks them a series of unanswerable questions, or those to which the answer makes no rational sense. The point is to demonstrate the nature of religious faith and the ways in which religion as a school subject is different from subjects such as geography and mathematics.

By November 1954 the boy is at last able to piece together some of this family history and the story of what happened to Eddie. His grandparents, Eddie's parents, had both died in December 1921 and Billy Mahon had been murdered the month before. His father's sisters, Bernadette and Ena, had been sent to live at the farmhouse in February 1922 and were there for eight months before his father took them away in November of the same year.

At that time they told the boy's father about Eddie being...