Gerard de Venteillon

Gerard de Venteillon, called Jonas McGillicuddy in the backwoods tale, returns at sunset to see his wife and children on the cabin steps — then everything erupts in flame, and he wakes to cold ashes and a neighbor's claim that the fire was four days past. His dazed insistence that he saw them alive collides with a reality that refuses to hold. That fracture between what he witnessed and what the world reports drives the story's uncanny middle, making him both witness and unreliable ghost of his own grief.