ANNIE HOLLERAN HEARS him before she sees him. Even over the drone of the cicadas, she knows it’s Ryce Fulkerson, and he’s pedaling this way. That’s his bike, all right, creaking and whining. He’ll have turned off the main road and will be standing straight up as he uses all his weight, bobbing side to side, to pump those pedals and force that bike up and over the hill. In a few moments, he’ll reach the top where the ground levels out, and that front tire of his will be wobbling and groaning and drawing a crooked line in the soft, dry dirt.

They’re singing in the trees again today, those cicadas. A week ago, they clawed their way out of the ground, seventeen years’ worth of them, and now their skins hang from the oaks, hardened husks with tiny claws and tiny, round heads. One critter called out to another and then another until their pulsing songs made Annie press both hands over her ears, tuck her head between her knees, and cry out for them to stop. Stop it now. All these many days, there’s been something in the air, a spark, a crackle, something that’s felt a terrible lot like trouble coming, and it’s been much like the weight of those cicadas, thousands upon thousands of them crying out to one another.

Annie has known all morning Ryce would be coming. It’s why she’s been sitting on this step and waiting on him for near an hour. She oftentimes knows a thing is coming before it has come. It’s part of the curse-or blessing, if Grandma is to be believed-of having the know-how.

They both have the know-how, Annie and Aunt Juna. That’s what Grandma calls it. The know-how. It floats just above the lavender bushes, trickles from the moss hanging in the oaks, drifts like a fallen leaf down the Lone Fork River, just waiting for someone like Annie or Aunt Juna to scoop it or snatch it or pluck it from the air. The two of them share the know-how because Aunt Juna is Annie’s real mother. Grandma has it too. She says there’s no evil in the know-how, though some are frightened of a thing they know little about. It’s my gift to you, Grandma is all the time saying, but that’s not true. The know-how passes from mother to daughter. Everyone knows that. Annie also has Aunt Juna’s black eyes. Not dark brown or almost black. But black, through and through. Folks believe that’s where the evil lives. In the eyes. It’s Annie’s fear, has been all her life, that evil passes from mother to daughter too.

Most days the know-how is like a whisper or a sigh, but with the approach of Annie’s half birthday-her day of ascension, they call it-the know-how has swelled, and this something in the air has made Annie startle for no reason, hold her breath when she thought she’d heard something she ought not have heard. All her years, fifteen and a half of them when she celebrates her day of ascension tomorrow, Annie Holleran has lived with the fear of turning out like her Aunt Juna. All her years, Annie has lived with the fear that Aunt Juna will one day come home.

Pushing herself off the bottom step and not bothering to smooth her skirt or straighten her blouse, Annie walks into the middle of the drive, kicking up dust with her bare feet. With every step, her middle caves and her shoulders slouch, Annie’s favored posture since she sprouted last summer. That’s what Mama called it… sprouting. And ever since, Mama has been telling Annie to stand straight and show some pride, as if being taller than most every other girl should be a prideful thing.

In addition to nagging about improper posture, Mama will be after Annie with soap and a rag by lunchtime, and she’ll remind Annie no more going barefoot once a girl has ascended.

“Thought you’d be working today,” Annie says as Ryce’s bike slows to a stop. She crosses her arms and hugs herself, another way to shrink an inch or two.

Ryce kicks out his right leg and lets his bike tip until he’s carrying his weight on that one foot. He’s wearing dark trousers, one leg rolled up to his shin so it doesn’t catch in his chain, double-knotted leather boots, and a white undershirt covered in the same dark smudges that mar his forearms, hands, and face.

“Lunch break,” Ryce says. He’s holding on to his handlebar with one hand. In the other, he holds a crumpled white kerchief. “All the fellows get one.”

This is the summer Ryce will buy himself a truck. He said the same last summer, but his daddy put all the money Ryce earned setting tobacco and picking worms in the bank and said college was but a few years away and it damn sure didn’t pay for itself.

“You come here expecting I’d feed you?” As has happened so often in the past days and weeks, the nasty words pop out before Annie can stop them. She crosses her arms. In addition to shaving another inch off her frame, this is also a fine way of hiding her chest so Ryce won’t notice it’s not one bit bigger than the last time he saw her. No matter what he says, Annie catches Ryce sometimes staring.

“Didn’t come expecting no food,” Ryce says, studying that crumpled kerchief like it’s something important. “Come to see if you was going tonight.”

“Might. Might not.”

“What does that mean? ‘Might. Might not.’”

“Might not want to.”

“You ought want to go,” Ryce says.

The sun has lightened his hair a shade or two, and now it’s the exact same color as his pale-brown eyes. Sometimes, Annie catches herself staring too.

“Says who?” Annie asks.

“Every girl, that’s who,” Ryce says, tugging on the edges of that kerchief. He’s got something wrapped up inside, and because of the way he’s using only his fingertips, it must be some kind of treasure to him.

When, several days ago, Annie first noticed the spark in the air, Grandma had smoothed the tangles in Annie’s ordinary yellow hair, given her a squirt of lavender-scented lotion to rub into her hands and elbows, and said not to worry. That spark was not a sign of trouble-to-come. No, indeed. That spark signaled the arrival of the lavender.

Annie is almost of age, midway between fifteen and sixteen, and so is finally coming into her own. She’s ascending into womanhood, though she prefers to think she’s ascending into adulthood. “Womanhood” makes her think of the wide-bottomed women who sit in church, tissues always in hand to wipe clean the noses of whatever children crawl across their laps. “Adulthood” sounds not so confining as “womanhood.”

All kinds of yearning come with a girl’s ascension-so says Grandma-beautiful, glorious yearning that will twist up a girl’s insides, wring them this way and that. Seeing as she has the know-how, Annie will feel things now she’s never before felt. She’ll feel things the ordinary girls will not. The arrival of the lavender is only one of them. Acres of it grow around Grandma’s house, acres and acres, and the sweet smell has been gathering since last year’s crop was cut. There is coming, Grandma said, a single moment when those flowers, rows and rows, mounds and mounds, will explode into full bloom. Yearning, Grandma had said. You’ll soon know much about yearning.

Ryce is right about one thing: All the girls in Hayden County look forward to midnight of the day halfway between their fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays. They buy special nightgowns and new cotton robes. They stay up late to curl their hair and dab on a coat of pink lipstick, and as midnight approaches, these girls of Hayden County sneak out of their houses, travel to the nearest well, usually the well at the Fulkersons’ place, and peek down into it in hopes of seeing the reflection of their intended. They huddle around the well, the girl who will that very night ascend and her best friends or closest relations, while their mamas and daddies stand at a distance, smoking a cigar or sipping whiskey from a coffee cup. The mamas will call out, because it’s the mamas who worry most about who their girls will marry, “Who you see down there?” The girls will giggle, squint into the darkness, wave their flashlights in one another’s eyes, and call out the name of a favorite boy.

“Could ride up here after supper, if you want,” Ryce says. “After everyone’s in bed. Your bike working? We could ride down together.”

“Why would I want that, Ryce Fulkerson?”

Ryce’s daddy is the sheriff, and before that, his granddaddy was sheriff, and hand to God, his grandma too, which makes Ryce think he’ll be sheriff one day. It makes Ryce think he’s more of a man than he really is.

“Just offering,” he says. “Thought you might not want to make the trip alone.”

For the past ten years, most every girl has made her way to the Fulkersons’ on her day of ascension. Mrs. Fulkerson makes a big show of keeping up the well at their place. In the spring, she plants marigolds around it, and in the winter, she makes Ryce shovel a path through the snow. Sheriff Fulkerson has even been known to pace nearby as a girl looks into the well, one hand resting on the handgun hanging at his waist because a person never knows what might happen when the spirits are being conjured. Even though it’s dark, he’ll wear his hat and march back and forth because nothing is more important than the virtue of the young women of Hayden County. Then he’ll share a sip of whiskey with the dads and uncles and whoever else may have come to bear witness. Grandma says they never had such pageantry in her day and doesn’t much appreciate the sheriff making light of tradition. Daddy says there isn’t a thing wrong with a bit of pageantry or a good shot of whiskey.

“Not such a long trip if I go to the Baines’ place,” Annie says, nodding up toward the tobacco barn at the top of the rise behind her house. “There’s a perfectly fine well right up there. Still got water in it, so I hear.”

Everyone knows there’s only one thing beyond the Hollerans’ place, and that’s the Baines’ place. Everyone also knows Hollerans don’t go near Baines. Aunt Juna was the start of all the hatred between the families, and even though she’s been gone a good many years, the hatred has stayed put.

Juna Crowley is a legend. She’s the one the girls sing about as their jump ropes slap hot concrete. Over and over the girls of Hayden County chant… Eyes like coal, she’ll lead you astray… How many Baines will die this day? And the ropes swing around and around until their fibers turn frayed and prickly to the touch. Last summer, Dorothy Howard visited her grandma in Topeka, Kansas, and she said even those girls all the way up there were singing about Juna Crowley. One Baine, two Baines, one hundred and four Baines, those Topeka girls chanted. And if they’re chanting in Topeka, they must be chanting all over the country.

Course, there were, are, only seven Baine brothers. No telling how many are still alive. Aunt Juna killed only one of them. Some twenty years ago, she saw to it Joseph Carl hanged by his neck until dead, and all these many years later, Browerton is still the town known for-known only for-being the town to last hang a man in plain sight for all to see.

Just last month, Arleen Kellerman caught three of her grandsons, who were visiting from Atlanta, Georgia, as they were about to kick the box out from under the neighbor boy. The rope was strung up over the pole that holds one end of her clothesline, the other end anchored to the side of her house. Every one of those boys got whipped. The one dressed up as Aunt Juna got the worst of it.

“Your daddy ain’t going to let you go to the Baines’ place,” Ryce says, smiling in a way that lets Annie know she’s a damn fool for saying such a thing. “Your mama ain’t going to allow that either.”

“What makes you think I care what my daddy says? Or my mama?”

“Don’t think you should go to the Baines’ place, that’s all.”

Still holding on to that kerchief, Ryce rolls his bike backward a few feet until he can see around the side of the house. He’ll be wondering if a person can see the Baine place from here, but he won’t be able to. He won’t see it unless he runs up the hill behind the house and past Grandpa’s tobacco barn. From there, he would see the rock fence that separates the two places, and he’d also see the well. And he might see old Cora Baine, the only Baine left, sitting in her rocker, a shotgun cradled in her lap.

It’s only been a week since school let out and Annie last saw Ryce, but already he looks different, bigger, taller, thicker somehow. The neck of his undershirt is stretched from him having used it as a kerchief all morning. He’ll have been tugging it up over his mouth, even chewing on it until it droops and frays. It’s a nasty habit, and his mama will get on him for it when he goes home for supper. And while the neck of that undershirt sags, the rest of it is all the sudden too small. It pulls across his chest and looks to be cutting him under the arms. His jawline has squared off some since school ended, and his nose has sprawled, no longer has the ball on the end that the women of town were all the time tweaking. Or maybe it’s his overgrown hair. Hanging down past his ears, it slims him out in the face, and his skin is darker for having been out in the sun all day every day for a week. Damn it all, Annie looks just the same.

The spark that has nagged at Annie all these days has been like the ache in her legs that Mama calls growing pains or the stings that speckle Annie’s calves when she gets into a patch of nettles. It’s made her irritable, disagreeable, most especially with Ryce Fulkerson. When Annie told Grandma that her yearning felt nothing like a yearning should feel and that she didn’t much like it, Grandma smiled, even laughed. She laughed harder still when Annie said she most certainly did not yearn for Ryce Fulkerson because he was a gosh-darn fool, when what she really wanted to say was that he was a Goddamn fool, but Annie knew better than to curse in front of Grandma. This made Grandma throw her head back and laugh right out loud.

Annie would have stomped away from anyone else who laughed that way, but not Grandma. Grandma’s laugh made Annie want to cry because the yearning and the coming of the lavender and the feeling that something was lurking and not wanting to turn evil like Aunt Juna had stuffed her full and there was no room left. Grandma knew this and stopped her laughing, stroked one hand over Annie’s cheek, and said this is exactly how a yearning should feel.

“I suppose I’ll be going where I please and if I please,” Annie says, and this time she feels the nastiness coming but can’t stop herself from spitting it out. “One thing’s for certain. I damn sure won’t be seeing you down in that well.”

“Course you won’t,” Ryce says. “Lizzy Morris already seen me. Don’t suppose a man can be a husband to two women. Don’t suppose he’d want to.”

At the mention of Lizzy Morris, Annie turns on one bare heel and walks toward the kitchen. Lizzy Morris is one of those girls whose hair is always brushed, pulled back, and tied off with a bow, a Goddamn bow. Isn’t that Lizzy Morris a lovely girl, Mama is all the time saying when they happen upon Lizzy at the café or in church or at the market.

“I figure that’s a good thing then,” Annie turns and says. “Hate to think you’d grow old alone.” Then she marches on toward the house.

“Hey,” Ryce calls out. “Hold up. I brought this for you.”

Annie takes a few steps back toward Ryce. He smells of wet dirt and soggy leaves. Been pulling tobacco from the beds, most likely.

“Thought it might be helpful.” He smiles and nods, urging her to come closer. When she’s within arm’s reach, he gives the crumpled kerchief a shake and something drops in Annie’s palm.

“What on earth is this, Ryce Fulkerson?”

But Annie knows what it is. She knows exactly what it is. She already has the same hidden up in her top drawer just behind her Sunday stockings. It’s the white, shriveled body of a dead frog.

“Not that I think you’ll need it,” Ryce says. “But just in case.”

Annie closes her hand around the chalky body and swivels on that same bare heel. She must have told Ryce about the dead frog; otherwise he’d have never known. Men, boys, don’t have the know-how. He means for her to grind it into a fine white powder and sprinkle it on the head of whatever boy she sees down in that well tonight. The powder of a dead frog will make the boy love her even if he isn’t inclined toward Annie, which is likely because as hard as Annie tries to say her pleases and thank-yous like Mama is all the time insisting on, and as hard as Annie tries to brush her hair and wear clean clothes and smile the way her sister, Caroline, does, and as much as she tries not to look a person straight on with her black eyes because they have a way of frightening folks, most people are still not inclined toward her. This dead frog will make her intended love her despite her being doomed to turn out just like Aunt Juna.

Squeezing her fist as tightly as she can, Annie crushes the small body and lets the bits and pieces drop at her feet.

“I damn sure won’t be coming to your place tonight, Ryce Fulkerson,” she says, then walks up the stairs, across the porch, and inside without looking back.

I’M STILL LACING my boots as I walk out the door. Hunched over and moving with an awkward gait, I tug those laces tight, tie off the both, and glance back at the house. It stands already in the shadows, though the sun has barely risen. No one watches me from the doorway or from the window. Not Juna or Dale. Not Daddy. No one is watching, so I walk faster and faster still. I take deep breaths of clean morning air to flush the smoke from the cigars Daddy is all the time sucking on. I fan my blouse and my skirt because the stink of them clings to my clothes, and I walk faster and faster until I’m running.

Ellis Baine always gets an early start. He and his brothers will be driving by on their way north of town to check the land passed down through their mama’s side of the family. They always do it first thing and leave the youngest two to see to what needs doing. If they spot me walking alongside of the road, they’ll offer me a ride. They do it for Juna most mornings. She tells me this at the end of each day, even knowing what an ache I have for Ellis. She tells me how they hoist her onto the back of that truck, talk with her and smile at her until they drop her wherever she’s going. Sometimes Ellis hops down ahead of her, reaches up, and lets her fall into his arms as she hops down too. She tells me even though I have such an ache.

Up ahead, the lay of the hills is such that the sun breaks through and the shadows end. The hollyhocks are in full bloom here. They’re waist-high already, and by July, they’ll be covered in mites. I run on toward that sunlight and toward the road and hope like hell Ellis and his brothers didn’t already pass by.

There was a woman in my childhood, Mary Holleran, and I know her still, who knew I was a girl when I was no more than a sickness that woke Mama every morning for six weeks. On Sundays, after the preacher finished preaching, Mary Holleran and the other women would gather around Mama, all of them congregating on the worn, dry grass outside the church’s double doors, and Mary would close her eyes and lay her hands on Mama’s belly. The women would cackle, Mama would say, debate the height of the bump in her belly, the flush in her cheeks, the thickness of her hair. They would pat Mama’s damp face with a kerchief, lead her into the shade thrown by a cluster of red maples, and sit her on a stump or the tail end of a wagon.

As Mama’s belly grew and the leaves shifted from green to red to gold and the winds swung around to the north, the gathering moved into the church basement. The women would sip hot coffee, and always, every Sunday, they settled on my being a girl. You’ll name her Sarah, Mary Holleran said. Mary, same as Juna, has the gift, the know-how.

Mama liked the name Sarah, liked it even more when Mary Holleran said it meant I would be a princess. Mama clung to the idea of giving birth to a princess. The thought of me made my mama want to sweep the wooden floors in her small house, even the corners. The thought of me made her want to wash her clothes in hot soapy water, cut away dead branches, and weed the garden. The thought of me lit up the years ahead. As the women sipped their coffee and dropped napkins at Mama’s feet to foresee the date of my birth, Mama would smooth the strands of hair that poked out from under her white cap, stroke her full belly, and try to lose the sound of her own husband’s voice among all the other voices. A princess would bring some light, some joy, into her home.

Mary Holleran and the other women shied away when next Mama was pregnant. A few mornings, early on, before Mama’s belly began to swell, they laid their hands on her. A boy, they said, again in agreement. All of them except Mary Holleran. She said nothing. After that, the ladies didn’t cackle. They didn’t run their fingers through Mama’s hair or tap their kerchiefs to her cheeks. Mama asked what she should name her baby boy. Is there a name that means prince, she had asked. The women shook their heads and looked to Mary Holleran. Again, Mary said nothing. When Mama’s second was born a girl, the women would not speak to her. They didn’t look down into the face of my sister and coo about her sweet pink nose or the tenderness of each finger. Only Mary Holleran pulled aside the blanket and looked into my sister’s eyes. “I’ve no intent to be unkind,” Mary had said to Mama, “but be wary of this child. Take extra care.”

No one would tell Mama what to name her new baby, not even Mary Holleran, who had named me, and since Mama had been preparing for a boy, she struggled for days. She wondered how to hold this new baby, how to feed it and change it and swaddle it for the night. Daddy wanted no part of the child, wanted no part of giving it a name. He knew he was cursed by this baby who was meant to be a boy. He and his whole life… cursed. Because Mama had no one to help her or to tell her what to do, and because my sister was born in June, Mama named her second child Juna.

Mama’s thirdborn, Dale, killed her. After giving birth, Mama lived three days. She lived long enough to hold her boy, touch his slender nose, kiss the tips of each finger, and give him a name. For those three days, Daddy was happy. The whole house was happy. Dale was a boy, and that meant Daddy would live on. He’d live on forever. Dale being a boy made him most precious, but the relief of him being born ended when Mama died. Daddy had been right. Right all along. He had been cursed by the birth of a girl who was meant to be a boy, and then with Mama’s death and the nine, almost ten years that followed during which no woman would agree to take Mama’s place, and year after year of crops that faltered and failed. Daddy was right. Juna was a curse.

As I near the main road into town, I slow to a walk. I take a deep breath in through my nose, pucker my lips, and blow it out through my mouth. I do this several times over to calm myself. I tip my face toward the sun. I’ll have a new place to live one day, God willing. Someplace where the sun shines from sunup to sundown, and I’ll clean the windows every day because always there will be sun.

The road ahead is empty as far as I can see. I jog another few steps until I reach it, settle back into a walk, tuck my blouse into my skirt, straighten the cap on my head, and feel for the strands of hair I plucked loose before leaving the house. I wrap one around my finger like I’ve seen Juna do, hold it there as I keep walking-slow now so when they pick me up, my ride will be long-and then let that strand of hair go and hope it pops into a soft curl falling alongside my face.

There is a rattling. It’s a tailgate with a latch that doesn’t close up so tight and side rails grown loose from someone all the time leaning on them. The rattling grows louder. I don’t look back, but I know they’re coming. Hope they’re coming. The pitch of the engine’s hum drops, and brakes squeal.

“Hop on,” one of those brothers hollers at me.

I lift a hand to shield my eyes from the sun. “Sure will,” I say.

First thing this morning, the coffee had been boiling and the biscuits were nearly done, their spongy white centers firm to the touch, when Daddy first made mention of the horsemint and crabgrass taking root in the lower field. I had already sliced through one tomato, one of the first good ones we’d taken from our garden, and was cutting the rotten spot out of a second. Dale was sitting next to Daddy and chewing one of those tomato slices. As quick as a dribble of juice ran down his chin, Dale dabbed at it with a napkin he held wadded up in one fist. I didn’t have to ask if he’d washed because his hands, nails, face, are always clean. Dale being that clean has always troubled Daddy. Juna was standing at the window, waiting on the coffee and soaking up the only bit of sunlight we’d get in the house all day.

I always do the cooking. Juna is never allowed. Daddy fears her sinful nature might bleed into the pone if she were to mix it or taint the slivers of ham if she were to brown them. Instead, I do the cooking and Juna is, every day, sent out of the house first thing in the morning with chores enough to keep her busy until sunset. Busy and far from home. This makes Juna the harder of us two sisters, and me the softer. Dale too is soft because Daddy has always figured Dale is safer if he spends his days with me. Being soft was tolerable when Dale was young, but now that he is almost ten years old, being soft has started to be something that might carry on into manhood. It has started to be something shameful.

Daddy sat at the kitchen table, his plaid shirt hanging open. Wiry black hair dotted with gray formed a small triangle in the center of his sunken chest, and beneath it, his skin was white. His face had gone a week without seeing a razor, and the stubble and tufts that had managed to fill in were streaked with gray. As he did every morning, he was blinking and staring at the fingers on each hand and counting them as best he could, trying to decide if he could see them as clear today as he did yesterday. He was making sure the whiskey hadn’t worked on his eyes while he slept. Seeing Daddy doing his counting reminded me to put out the lamp we leave to burn through each night. Daddy never wants to wake to blackness. He worries that if the kerosene burns out, his eyes will burn out too.

“Take a hoe on over there, and Dale should take one too,” Daddy said, reaching for a second biscuit before swallowing the first. “Should take the better part of the day.”

He was talking to Juna. I didn’t know this because he was looking at her. He never did. Daddy is afraid of Juna. She has the know-how, but that isn’t what frightens Daddy. He has always been certain there is evil living inside Juna and that it makes its home in her eyes. Those eyes are dark, almost black. A person as fair as Juna should have pale-blue eyes or maybe soft hazel, but hers are black. Daddy never looks Juna square on.

“You’ll see to the fields today,” Daddy said, and using his fingers to tear off a piece of that biscuit because his teeth aren’t rooted solid enough to do it for him, he popped it in his mouth. “And I want Dale going too. About time the boy did some real work.”

Daddy had seen the same as me. He’d seen Dale swiping away those dribbles of our first good tomatoes before they could reach the tip of his chin and those clean nails of his and smooth knuckles. And Dale had been wearing a freshly washed shirt buttoned up under his chin and he’d been smiling. Smiling for no reason. Daddy couldn’t do much about poor land and little rain, but he could damn sure see to raising his boy to be a man.

After first pouring herself a cup of coffee, Juna swept past Daddy, close enough her skirt brushed his knees. He jerked his legs aside, and she sat opposite him, where she shielded her eyes with one hand as if the sun were too bright. But it wasn’t. She was playing with Daddy’s fear, making him worry his eyes were fading.

“Thought to gather blackberries today,” she said, squinting into sunlight that wasn’t there. “Hadn’t planned for tobacco.”

She laid her head off to one side at an awkward sort of angle that made a person wonder what she was looking at. It made a person think Juna could see things others could not.

“Too early for berries,” Daddy said.

“Come early this year.” It’s part of the know-how, having a knack for knowing where the best berries will be found. “Don’t think today is the day for tobacco. I have a feeling.”

And then she tipped her head in that way she does and gave me a nod too. She sometimes catches me watching her while she sleeps or staring at the fire when she walks into the room to see if it sparks and hisses as she draws near, and so she knows I sometimes worry Daddy might be right. Sometimes, I’m afraid of Juna too.

Two hands reach down from the back of that truck. With the sun hitting me full in the face, I can’t be altogether certain whose hand I’m grabbing, but I make my best guess and I guess right. I can feel it the instant his hand wraps around mine. It’s a large hand, strong, tight grip. It’s Ellis’s hand I’m holding on to.

He gives a tug, and I pop up onto the back of the truck. One of those brothers pulls the gate closed, and as the truck starts up again, the sound of the engine growing louder and the side rails rattling all around us, that same brother hollers at me to hold on.

A flatbed trailer of sorts takes up most of the back of the truck so that everyone is leaned up against the edge and holding on to those railings as we bounce over the deep ruts cut into the road. Two metal tubs, both covered over with tarps and tied off with thin rope, sit on top of the trailer. Two brothers, one to each tub, are holding them in place so they don’t bounce about or slide off altogether, and another brother is shuffling things around, stacking tin buckets, one inside another, tossing a pair of leather gloves to each man.

“Where’s the pegs?” Ellis hollers over the sound of the truck and the wind rushing past our ears.

I stand directly at his side and can feel his one arm brushing against my shoulder as the truck knocks us about. I lean up against the railing that wraps around the truck’s bed just like all the brothers are doing, my arms stretched back behind so I can hold on.

“God damn it all,” Ellis says as the brother who was stacking pails continues digging through all that’s piled up inside the truck and not finding those pegs.

Ellis Baine has thick, dark hair, nearly black, and tanned olive skin. He’s broad through the chest in a way few men are anymore. Though he’s not the oldest of the Baine brothers-that would be Joseph Carl, who doesn’t live here anymore-he’s definitely the most solid.

I loosen my grip as the truck gains speed, and I wait for a deep rut in the road to come along. When it does and the truck lurches to one side, I fall forward in a way I hadn’t intended. I had planned to fall into Ellis Baine so he would wrap me up in his arms, hold me, and tell me to be careful. Our faces would nearly touch. I’d be close enough to smell the lye he’d have washed up with this morning, the icy-cold water he’d have splashed on his face. But the truck is going fast and the ruts in the road are deep, and I fall forward and not into Ellis Baine. My arms fly up. I let out a squeal I’ll later wish I hadn’t let out, crack a shin on the flatbed trailer, and nearly fall into the tubs of seedlings headed to the field.

Someone grabs me by one arm and hauls me back, and I’m hoping it’s Ellis and it is Ellis. In one smooth motion, he yanks me back to right, swings one arm across the front of me, and grabs onto the railing, one hand on each side of me, trapping me between himself and the side of the truck. With my face pressed up against the center of his chest, pressed so close my cheek warms and I can feel his beating heart, I close my eyes.

“Won’t be berries left if I don’t get to them today,” Juna had said as she kept on staring at Daddy across the kitchen table. She scooted her chair to avoid the sunlight that wasn’t shining through the window. Daddy glanced over one shoulder and then the other, looking for that sunlight.

If Daddy were to send Juna to the tobacco field, Abraham Pace might not find her. No matter how often Juna fusses about Abraham Pace or how poorly she speaks of him, she’ll want him to find her. Since Juna was fourteen years old, Daddy has been beating Abraham back, telling him he is too old for Juna and that fact will never change. Too old will always be too old. Every Sunday for two years, Abraham has combed his reddish hair, tucked his shirt and buttoned it as best he could, and has come to call.

It tires Daddy out, makes him shake his head and dig the palm of one hand into the flat spot between his eyes to see Abraham coming. Abraham has been particularly insistent since Juna marked her day of ascension a few months ago and swore to him she saw his face in that well. She said something different to me, and something different still to Daddy and to Dale and to the Brashears, who live down the road, and to their granddaughter, Abigail Watson. Juna has had a different story for every person who would listen.

As eager as Daddy is to rid his house of the likes of Juna, he is more afraid of making her angry. Just one time, that’s all it took. Juna made a face like she was tasting a sour apple when Abraham Pace stood on our porch and tapped on our door. That was sign enough for Daddy, and he didn’t dare rankle Juna by forcing on her a man she did not want. The push and pull is the thing Juna needs. Daddy always pulling. Abraham Pace always pushing. Juna has no intention of trading Daddy’s house for Abraham’s house, but she has said more than once that she doesn’t have to marry Abraham to take what he’s offering. That must be why she told Abraham she saw his face down in that well. So he’d keep offering.

“I could go for the blackberries, Daddy,” I said, cutting into another tomato, and as quick as I did, Dale snatched it up. “If I go for berries, Juna and Dale can go to the field.” And then, because I knew that first juicy tomato dribbling down his son’s face and getting blotted away with a napkin was testing Daddy’s temper, I said, “I’ll see to it Dale puts on something more fitting for the fields.”

I had been thinking more and more about Abraham Pace, and at that moment I was thinking it might be best if he didn’t find Juna. I should have told him months ago that if Juna has been telling him she loves him and wants to be with him if only Daddy would allow, then she’s telling him lies. Same as Juna has claimed to see any number of men down in that well, she’s enjoyed the touch of just as many. Abraham is something to fend off the boredom, nothing more.

“You especially like the early berries,” I said to Daddy and poked at the fire that was already hissing and spitting, which made me glance at Juna because I was wondering if she had stirred up those flames. Juna tipped her head the littlest bit, her blond hair falling over one shoulder, those large black eyes stretched wide, so I would believe she did.

I was thinking of Abraham Pace, that’s true enough, and trying to spare him a painful outcome, but I was also thinking of Ellis Baine. I didn’t often have reason to be walking along the side of the road first thing in the morning, but if I were to have a reason, and if I were walking there early enough, Ellis Baine would happen by in the Baines’ pickup truck, he and all his brothers, and they’d offer me a ride.

“Today ain’t the day for me to work those fields,” Juna said and said it like she knew something we didn’t, as if she could see trouble coming. “Dale should be here with Sarah. It ain’t the day for going to the fields.”

As Daddy sat, chewing his biscuit, he studied Dale because he didn’t dare look at Juna. Even though Dale is old enough to take on a few chores, do some toting or gathering or even topping the tobacco if it hasn’t grown too tall, he still has dimples on the backs of his hands and his cheeks are pink. He has blond hair too and blue eyes, and he is polite when told to be so and says please and thank you and ma’am and sir.

“Take the boy,” Daddy finally said to Juna. “Take the boy and go on to the lower field. And you,” he said to me, “you go for those berries.”

Ellis Baine keeps on hollering at the brother who forgot the pegs. They’re already late getting this tobacco in the ground, and they damn well can’t set it without the Goddamn pegs. I listen to the sound of his voice through his chest. And the angrier he gets and the louder he yells, the more his chest lifts and lowers. I let go of the railing and leave my hands to hang at my sides. He smells of sweet tobacco and fresh-brewed coffee.

The engine slows, the road evens out, and when I open my eyes, one of the brothers, one who is a year or so younger than me, is staring at me and shaking his head.

Ellis drops the arm he had stretched across me and leans back against the railing where he started. My neck and chest are damp from our having been pressed up against each other.

“You get off here too,” Ellis says to the brother who is still looking for those pegs. “You can damn well walk back and get them.”

The younger brother jumps down ahead of me and walks off without offering me a hand. Ellis starts rattling off a list to a brother still on the truck, not jumping down so I can fall into his arms the way Juna is all the time doing. I tuck under my skirt, lower myself onto the gate, and slide on down to the road. I forgot to bring a pail or a bag for carrying the berries, and Juna never told me where to look. Sometimes she says they like the cool, damp dirt; sometimes they’ll favor a spot that is sandy and dry.

Ellis is still hollering about those pegs when the truck pulls away. I press one hand over my head to stop my cap from pulling loose and give a wave with the other. No one waves back. I walk on toward home and hope Abraham Pace finds Juna down in the field so she won’t be angry with me. I do believe it sometimes. I believe she makes the fire spark and that she can see things we don’t. I believe I might have made a mistake sending her to those fields.

ANNIE STANDS NEAR the stove in Grandma’s kitchen. The air is thick and damp, steamy even. Every window is closed, and Grandma has not turned on any lights. Instead several candles burn, their wax just beginning to spill over. Dim light flickers on the pale-yellow walls. Long shadows fall from chair legs and table legs and from Grandma, who stands near the sink. Two cast-iron pots sit on the stove, a low flame burning beneath each, and clouds of steam rise. Grandma, wearing her best quilted robe and her Sunday morning slippers, is carving a loaf of bread.

“Water’s ready,” she says to Annie and tips her head in the direction of the two heavy pots simmering on the stove. “Will you see to it?”

Grandma’s long white hair hangs loose down to her waist. Wiry strands, frayed and broken off, frame her watery blue eyes. That long hair and the soft light from the candles and the tone of Grandma’s voice, pitched ever so slightly deeper than normal, make her look and seem less like a grandma and more like a woman Annie doesn’t know so well. Grandma gave Mama her name. Long before Mama married Daddy, Grandma knew Mama would be born a girl and named her Sarah. Watching Grandma now, Annie imagines she looks like the woman she was before she became a grandma.

Knowing she shouldn’t speak while the water is simmering, Annie nods to Grandma and sidesteps around the table where Mama and Caroline sit. The rims of Caroline’s eyes are red from all the crying, and she is letting Mama hug her and stroke her hair. She’s probably thinking about that husband-to-be of hers and wishing he were here to comfort her and protect her. Annie wishes he were here too because then he could get a good look at Caroline when she isn’t looking so pretty.

Before doing as Grandma asked, Annie glances at Mama, but she doesn’t shake her head or give some other sign of disapproval, so Annie opens the cupboard next to the stove, reaches into the back, and pulls out a small dark bottle. The glass is smooth and warm in her hands. She protects it from the light by wrapping her fingers around it, and holds it away from her body so as to not warm it. Grandma taught Annie to do these things always when handling lavender oil. She unscrews the bottle’s small lid, lays it on the counter, taking care not to touch the inner rim, and tips the bottle over the first simmering pot. One, two, three drops. She does the same over the second pot.

“Think the water’s got too much get-up-and-go, Grandma,” Annie says, even though she thinks no such thing. “Should I let off a little?”

Caroline doesn’t have the know-how and so won’t know what “get-up-and-go” means, and as bad as it is to use the know-how in a way that will make a person feel bad about not having it, Annie figures Caroline brought it on herself. She stole Annie’s vision, but someone is dead up there at the Baine place, and that’s what Mama and Daddy will care about. They won’t trouble themselves with Annie’s visions, and Annie shouldn’t be troubling herself with them either, but she can’t stop thinking about Ryce and that dead frog and every kid who will want to know who she saw down there in that well and was he a boy who will want to kiss her. They’ll not believe her if she tells them Caroline stole her vision.

They’ll not believe Annie if she tells them there was a man-a dark-haired, blue-eyed man-who was meant for Annie. They’ll not believe Caroline saw him first because she always does things first or better or faster. Instead, they’ll say what a pity there is no one for Annie, no face in the bottom of her well. It will be worse than having the boys run from her. They’ll pity her. All of them. But when someone’s dead, no one will care about such things that trouble Annie.

Grandma leans over the pots, waves a hand through the steam, and coughs. The lavender will sting the back of the throat if the water is too hot, so maybe Annie is right after all.

“Sure enough,” Grandma says, giving Annie the soft sort of smile people give when someone has died. Later, Grandma will tell Annie what a good student she is and what a great knack she has for the know-how. Not everyone who has the gift has such a good knack. But Grandma will only say those things when Mama isn’t near enough to hear. “Just a smidgen though,” she says and gives a wink. “Want to keep a lively steam going.”

Lavender makes bees lazy, has a calming effect on them, and that’s why Grandma simmers it in this way. From daybreak to dusk, the bees light upon the bluish-gray blossoms that will soon enough burst into full bloom, and then they float, don’t fly, aimlessly, weightlessly back to their hives. Drunkards, Grandma calls them on those days when she watches the lazy dance from her kitchen window. The lavender soothes them. These are the most peaceful bees you’ll find. That’s what Grandma says, and she must figure the whole family is going to need a good bit of calming before the night is over.

Abraham Pace was the first person Annie and Caroline woke after leaping the rock fence, running through the lavender, and throwing open the kitchen door. Annie shook him by his large shoulder. He snorted, tried to roll away, but finally opened his eyes when Annie said that a dead person was lying by the tomato garden up at the Baine place.

Grandma had put on the coffee while Mama gathered up trousers, boots, and fresh socks for Daddy and Abraham. Daddy stumbled as he balanced on one foot while trying to tug on a boot. Mama yanked it away, loosened the laces, and asked if he would care for coffee before attempting to walk on his own two feet. Daddy took the boot, its laces dangling, pulled it on his foot, and then made out like he was balancing on a narrow plank by stretching his two arms to the side, stepping one foot precisely in front of the other, and moving steady as a sober judge. Mama didn’t have to say it out loud. Daddy was supposed to have followed Annie up that hill, but the whiskey had gotten the better of him.

“We’ll fetch Buell and give the place a look-see,” Daddy said, two boots on his feet, both sets of laces dangling loose. “And you all stay put.” He pushed open the door, but before walking outside, he turned back to Annie.

“You’re sure about this?” he said. “Sure about what you seen?”

Annie nodded. “I’m certain, sir.” She linked her hands, stood with her feet together and her back straight. She was of age now and so should feel differently, should act differently. More like a lady, she supposed, and wouldn’t a lady link her hands and stand with good posture? “Just as certain as can be.”

Daddy and Abraham were heading up to the Baine place, and Hollerans never go near Baines.

DADDY CARRIES JUNA home, up the gravel drive and toward the house. I run ahead, and when I near the front porch, I slow to a walk because someone is sitting on the top step. I draw in a few deep breaths and think to holler at Dale to go inside before Daddy gets ahold of him. Daddy will whip Dale for causing all this fuss. Taking a few more steps and glancing back to see if Daddy has seen Dale yet, I hurry ahead so I can warn him without Daddy hearing, but as I walk another several feet toward the house, I see it isn’t Dale sitting there on the step. It’s Abigail Watson.

Still wearing her long-sleeved dress and the same white cap, Abigail stands. A white apron is tied at her waist, and her skirt is stained at the knees, most likely from working in her grandma’s garden. “Something’s wrong,” she says. “Ain’t it?”

“Did you find him?” I ask. “Did you ever see Dale today?”

Her face is small enough to hold in one hand, and she’s reached that stage where her arms and legs have grown too long and thin for the rest of her body.

“I didn’t never see him, Miss Crowley,” she says, taking a swipe at her small, teary eyes with the heel of one hand.

“You go on,” I say to Abigail as I run up the stone stairs. “Go on and bring Abraham. Tell him to come right away.”

I throw open the front door and call out for Dale. The air inside is stale, smells of warmed-over coffee and Daddy’s cigars. In another house, folks might not concern themselves so with a boy Dale’s age staying out past dark. But Dale is sweet and soft, so sweet and soft he shames Daddy. Dale is meant to carry on the family name long past the day Daddy is dead and buried, something Juna and I can’t do. A soft man might not be fit to do so either.

I look for the pail I packed with Dale’s lunch. He is as tidy as he is clean. He would have hung it on the hook near the door where it belongs. The hook is empty. The spot near the stove where he always sets his shoes, side by side, is empty.

Daddy walks through the door, pauses long enough to see in my eyes that Dale is not here. He walks with his head turned off to the side so as to not look at Juna and carries her through the kitchen and into the bedroom where she and I sleep. In bed, she sinks into the feather ticking, rests her hands on her chest, runs the tip of her tongue over her cracked lips. Daddy looks down on the bed, but not into her eyes, and then, remembering his hat, he pulls it from his head and slaps it against his thigh. He is waiting for Juna to tell us where Dale has gone. He slaps that hat against his leg. Slapping it harder and harder. The smell of him, sour and salty, rises up with each slap. Already, he’s asked Juna four times where Dale has gone off to, screaming at her the last time.

“Won’t do no good,” I say. “She’ll come around.”

Daddy shudders as if to rid himself of whatever blight Juna might have left behind and, without speaking another word, walks from the room and closes the door.

“Let’s sit you up,” I say, sliding one hand behind Juna’s head. “Too much sun, is all. Be feeling better soon.”

I strip her of her limp dress, leaving her to lie in her cotton slip, its straps frayed and yellowed from too many washings. Then I help her lie back again and drape her with a sheet. Outside, the orange light has faded. Shadows dart past the window, bats frightened from under the sill. I leave and return with a saucer. I douse a stiff gray rag and twist it with both hands. Water drips through my fingers and into the saucer. Outside, insects buzz. Trucks crunch over the gravel. Footsteps pass by. I pat the cool cloth to Juna’s cheeks, chest, and forearms. The sharp smell is vinegar-vinegar water to soothe her sunburned skin.

“You need to drink as much as you can manage,” I say, pressing a tin cup to her mouth.

The cool water makes her lips shine. Her face is burned to a dark red, and a white streak cuts across her forehead where she had been wearing a hat. Her hair, which usually hangs in loose waves well past her shoulders, now hangs like twisted straw. Her fingers are stained brown. Each time I try to clean them with my rag, she cries out. After she drinks the water, I feed her cornbread dipped in cane syrup. The yellow pieces crumble as I press them into her mouth, and bits fall to her chest and onto the sheets.

“You’ll tell us what happened when you wake,” I say, but Juna’s eyes are already closed.

They find Dale’s hat straightaway. Daddy stomps up the stairs, waving it in the air and then in my face. John Holleran follows. He removes his hat and dips his head in my direction. I try never to think much about John Holleran even though I know he has a liking for me. His mama gave me my name, and she has the know-how and is all the time saying John and I have a clear and bright future together. John is a good man, much kinder than Daddy, but he can only offer me the life I’m already living. I take the hat from Daddy and look from one man to the other, waiting for one of them to explain.

“You wake her,” Daddy says, pointing at the closed door. “You see to it she tells us where the boy has gone, or I damn sure will.” Even as he says it, Daddy fades from the door. He’s weighing what’s before him. Juna already took his wife, his crops, and now she’s making it clear she can take his boy too, if she’s so inclined.

John Holleran takes the hat from me, lays it in the center of the table, and sets about lighting more candles. I motion toward the pot of coffee and walk into Juna’s dark room. With nightfall, the air has turned damp and cold. To warm my hands, I rub them together before wrapping one around her shoulder and shaking her awake.

“They found Dale’s hat,” I say when her eyes flicker open. They’re like black stones looking up at me. “Daddy found it. That’s good.”

I sit next to the bed on a small round stool I brought in from the kitchen, dip the rag in the cool water still tangy with the vinegar, fold it in half, and drape it across Juna’s forehead.

“You have to tell me what happened,” I say, hoping I don’t sound afraid. “You didn’t leave him? Little as he is, you must have been with him, must have seen what happened. You’d never leave him to his own.”

Most boys Dale’s age would fare just fine on their own, but not Dale. He should have been born in the city, where life is easier on a body. His coming into this family was a mistake. Dale’s kind of softness can’t be beaten out of a boy.

I pause then, waiting for an answer. Juna’s black eyes stare up at me. When the silence stretches and she says nothing to fill it, I nod, urging her along. I stroke the back of her hand, lightly, brushing the tiny hairs against the grain. The small lantern, the only one in the room, dims, and the glow shrinks and falls lower on the walls. Overhead, the ceiling is black. I try to smile, always the one to smile.

“I know you’d not leave him,” I say again. “Can’t you tell me what happened?”

Another pause as I wait for Juna to tell the truth.

“You must know something,” I say. “You have to tell. Daddy, he thinks you know. He thinks it for sure, that you know and you’ll not tell because he loved Dale best. He says you’re punishing him. He thinks you’re wicked and that this is proof of it. He says he’s always known it. Tell me it’s not true. Tell me what happened.”

Juna closes her eyes, but opens them again when I grab her by both arms. She has always been leaner and stronger than me. Daddy says a man will be tempted by a beautiful girl and she’ll make him do things he ought not do. A man doesn’t need a beautiful girl; he only wants one. It says something about a man if he walks with a beautiful girl at his side, but a man will eventually get his fill. Eventually, he’ll leave her for a pleasing girl. A man will always come home to a pleasing girl because she doesn’t think so much of herself as a beautiful girl. This is what a man needs. A man needs something soft to bring him joy, something to rest his head against, something to sink his fingers into. I am all of these things. You’re lucky, Daddy will sometimes tell me when the house is dark and quiet and we’re alone, to be one who’s not so tempting. In the end, a man can’t help what he needs.

“You have to know something,” I say, clinging to Juna’s hand. I lift it, press it to my mouth. “Daddy says you’ll not be long for this house if you won’t tell. Surely you seen what became of Dale.”

IN A FEW weeks’ time, maybe a month, the wild grapes on the sunniest slopes will begin to ripen and the vines will fail under the weight of the swollen fruit. The willows near the road will droop, and the soil will turn velvety with the rains and will fatten up the elms and great walnuts. The ragweed will turn dusty, and folks will begin to sneeze, and the spring sky, clear and high-reaching, its sun glittering, will give way to a sky with a softer glow. And finally, the lavender will bloom, and folks from across Hayden County will come to Grandma’s farm.

They’ll come because five years ago, Grandma decided she would see things change for the Holleran family. All these years, folks have kept themselves at a distance, not because of hatred or meanness but because of fear, particularly the older folks who best remember. They remember that before Juna, Joseph Carl had been a decent man, the best of all the Baine brothers, but then he looked into those eyes of Juna Crowley, those black eyes the exact same color as Annie’s, and they made him do things that led to his hanging.

That Aunt Juna could do such things to a man as kind and simple as Joseph Carl Baine made folks fear for themselves, most certainly not so kind or simple as Joseph Carl. The older Annie grew and the more she favored Juna, the more folks shied away. But folks like a gathering-that’s what Grandma said the first year of the harvest. The lavender would tempt them. It was in the nature of these Kentucky folks, the coming together, so they wouldn’t be able to resist.

Some will come by car, others by foot. They’ll sip iced lavender tea, eat warm slices of Grandma’s lavender bread, punched down twice and left to rise on the sill, and buy freshly cut bundles. Some will choose blossoms narrowly in bloom and hang them upside down to dry in a spare bedroom like the farmers hang tobacco from the rafters of their barns. Others will choose bundles in full bloom and display them on their dining room tables.

Grandma will wear her best blue cotton skirt on that day, its pleats painstakingly ironed for just the occasion. She’ll waltz among the ladies and instruct them on how best to sprinkle lavender oil on their pillows for a good night’s sleep or how many drops to add to a warm bath to soothe a crabby child or even a crabby husband. There will be music and food, and the men will sip corn whiskey and smoke cigars. The ladies who come on that Sunday will wear their churchgoing dresses and hats and will pin up their hair. They’ll listen, though they won’t stand too close, as Grandma rattles off instructions for tending a skinned knee with a cotton ball and a few drops of oil. The ladies will nod, smile, sip their tea, but they’ll be ever so slightly wary of Grandma because she has the know-how, and didn’t Aunt Juna have it too? And what about that Annie? She has those eyes, you know, those black eyes.

Every year, this is how it happens, and this year will also include Abraham Pace and Abigail Watson saying their “I dos.” It was Grandma’s idea. The whole town will join in. The ladies will come and their husbands. There will be food and drink. There will be smoking, chewing, spitting, singing, the gathering of beautiful bouquets, but it all will begin, as it does every year, with the explosion of the lavender. It will be a powerful moment, and Annie has, these past many days, been feeling its approach much like a person might feel an oncoming train through the rattle in her feet that carries first through the rails and then through the ground and finally through the air. The coming of such a lot of splendor will fill a person up, near to the rim. This is what Grandma said when Annie complained of the spark, the sizzle, the something that clawed at her. But Grandma had been wrong. That spark wasn’t the lavender and it wasn’t a yearning of any kind. It was Aunt Juna coming home again.

ALL NIGHT AND into the next day, the men come and go, more of them as the hours pass. They promise, every one of them, to find Dale straightaway. Folks bring food, what little they have managed to grow in their gardens. I am better with a garden than most, but folks share what they can-cucumbers, tomatoes, thick stalks of rhubarb. Someone brings eggs, only a few so they’ll stay fresh and because it is likely all they have. I fry those eggs in a spoonful of lard until there is no run left in the yolks and feed them to Juna so she’ll feel strong again and tell us about Dale. The men, most visitors too, leave straightaway because they’re afraid to be in a house with Juna, and with Daddy and me as well. Word has traveled from our house to theirs that a curse has taken Dale from us.

While no one counted out the days for me, everyone in town knew when Juna would come of age. Some mothers sent their sons to stay with friends or relatives in the weeks leading up to Juna’s day, thinking distance would save their boys from being the face Juna Crowley saw in the well. It wasn’t Juna’s know-how that frightened the mothers of Hayden County. There have been other girls with the gift, a knack for knowing things, and once these girls ascended, their gifts ascended as well. Their know-how rounded out, became something larger, greater.

Folks were unsettled by these girls who knew more, saw more, felt more, but the girls didn’t give rise to fear. The evil living in Juna’s eyes is what prompted these mothers to pack up their sons and send them away. They wondered if the evil would ascend too. Now that Dale has disappeared and Daddy’s life is cursed, folks know for certain that Juna’s evil has rounded out. It’s larger, greater than ever before.

Irlene Fulkerson comes to the house early in the day. Her husband was the sheriff until he died two months ago, and now Irlene is sheriff. Her oldest son, Buell, who is my age and has a family of his own already, is with her, as well as a handful of other men who were good to her husband and now are good to Sheriff Irlene. She wears a gray dress that scratches my cheek and neck when she pulls me into a hug. She’s full through the chest, soft, holds me a good long time and whispers that she’ll see to Dale. All these fine folks will see to finding Dale. She smells smoky, as if she must have had a time getting her stove lit this morning. When she leaves along with all her men to get on with looking for Dale, it’s like losing my mama all over again.

Near sunset, Mr. and Mrs. Brashear and Abigail come with milk from their cow, and Mrs. Baine brings two heads of cabbage, the first of her crop. They’re scrawny, have been picked too early, but they’re likely all she has to share. The four stand on the porch, all of them swatting at mosquitoes. I look for Ellis among them, wondering if maybe he drove his mama here. But there is no truck parked outside, meaning the four of them walked. I invite them into the house, offer them coffee and a seat, and while they settle in, I pour a cup of milk for Abigail and lower the rest into the well to keep it cool.

Back in the house, I place my best folded linens on the table-snow-white tea napkins my mama hand-stitched-and four silver teaspoons, tarnished, though I polish them regular with baking soda. I serve Abigail the last biscuit to go along with her milk. I wonder if she’s slept since we first realized Dale was gone.

“You shouldn’t waste what little you have,” Mrs. Brashear says, meaning Abigail isn’t allowed.

“Please,” I say. “It’s no waste. Abigail has been such a help to me.”

Since daybreak, Abigail has been at the house, brewing coffee and digging the mud out of the men’s boots, but she won’t go outside to pick from the garden unless someone goes with her. She’s even washed the clothes Juna had been wearing when we found her in the field. Three times Abigail has scrubbed the dress as if hoping once it’s finally clean, Dale will come home.

“Go on and eat,” I say to Abigail, slipping the white cap from her head and brushing my hand over her hair.

“We seen a fellow,” Mr. Brashear says as I freshen his coffee. He leans over the kitchen table as he speaks, his long, slender frame tipped forward, and he presses one ear toward me.

“We did,” Mrs. Brashear says. “Both of us seen him. Ordinary-enough-looking fellow.”

Mrs. Brashear, short and stout to her husband’s long and lean, wears a pale-yellow dress, always pale yellow even in winter, and a white kerchief nearly the same shade as her graying hair is wrapped over her head and tied under her chin. Next to them, Mrs. Baine clings to her coffee cup with both hands and keeps her eyes lowered. I’ve always thought her like a dog that has carried one too many litters. Her long hair, mostly brown but for the many wiry gray strands, hangs down her back. She is a tiny woman with narrow hips and shoulders who must have once been bigger, stronger, because the clothes she wears have a way of hanging on her such that she’s always tugging at them and tucking them in. They must have fit her at one time, probably before all those boys of hers wore her down.

“A fellow?” I say.

“What’s that?” Mr. Brashear shouts.

“You say you seen a fellow?”

Mr. Brashear slaps the table, causing his coffee to slop over the edge of the cup and Abigail to startle. “Took a shirt right off Mother’s line.”

Mrs. Baine lifts her head, her hair falling back just enough to let me see her face.

“A fine shirt,” Mrs. Brashear says. “Good, heavy shirt.”

“Figured to let him have it,” Mr. Brashear says. “What with Abigail in the house, we don’t want no trouble. If that’s all he wanted, figured to let him have it and move on.”

Mrs. Baine, still clinging to her coffee cup, scoots forward on her chair. She is looking at Mr. Brashear. “With buttons?” she says. “And a fine stiff collar?”

“He went on his way,” Mrs. Brashear says, her voice having risen to a shout, and she nods yes in answer to Mrs. Baine. “Didn’t think so much about it, except to be sorry that shirt was gone. It always pressed up real nice. Thinking now maybe that fellow is worth knowing about.”

We all turn toward the back of the house at the sound of a door opening. Mr. Brashear lowers his eyes when Juna walks from the bedroom into the kitchen, and his slender shoulders roll away from her. Mrs. Brashear turns her eyes too, pats the table with a flat palm, and points at Mr. Brashear to leave the house. He pulls his hat over his silver hair, nods in my direction without letting his eyes follow, and steps out onto the porch.

Juna’s cotton nightgown covers too little. Even in the dim light, we can see the rise and fall of each curve, the dark shadows of her intimate parts. I sweep past her, stirring up the flames of the candles I lit before dusk. A few are snuffed out. A few others dance, dwindle, and then rise again to throw a steady light. I slip a blue blanket over her shoulders and pull it closed under her chin.

“You don’t want a chill,” I say, even though the house is closed up and the air stuffy. “You shouldn’t be out of bed.”

“There was a fellow,” Juna says, clinging to the thin blanket with both hands. She leans into me as if struggling to stand upright. She’s not been out of bed, barely eaten or taken a drink since Abraham placed his claim on her. Each time he’s come to the door, she’s told me to send him away and have him come another time. It’s likely why Abigail has barely left the house. Abraham will have asked her to keep watch over Juna.

“I seen him too,” Juna says. “Wore a fine white shirt, buttoned to the collar and at each wrist.”

Mrs. Baine stands, her fingertips resting on the table. Her brown hair hangs nearly to her waist, and her gray dress is tied off with a thin leather strap.

“That’s good,” I say, speaking as if Juna were a child. She is about to tell us what we’ve been waiting to hear, and as Mrs. Baine begins to slide around the table toward the kitchen door, I worry she’ll scare Juna, interrupt whatever she is about to say.

“Please,” I say, stroking the hair from her face. “Keep on.”

“His nose, it was bent.” Juna’s black eyes are empty sockets except when they catch the candlelight. “Crooked in a funny sort of way. Like it had been broke.”

“Good, good,” I say.

“Why, that’s him,” Mrs. Brashear says, giving the table another whack. “That’s sure enough the fellow we seen. Abigail, don’t you figure? Don’t you figure it’s the same fellow?”

“It’s the same fellow,” Abigail says, staring at the table instead of Juna.

Mrs. Baine isn’t the type of woman a person would notice. In church or at a summer gathering or on the street in town, a person wouldn’t remember her walking among the others. She is a woman who blends in, and I’ve often imagined she’d make a fine mother-in-law. I would hope to live one day under the same roof as her and call her son my husband. She is quiet, humble, happy enough to be overlooked, but as I stand next to Juna, holding her, stroking her, waiting for her to say more, I can’t stop staring at Mrs. Baine. I can’t stop the worry creeping up from the soles of my feet.

“Go on,” I say. “What more do you remember?”

“Thought it was a fine shirt,” Juna says. “Too fine for any day but Sunday.”

Mrs. Brashear nods. “Yes, it was a fine shirt. Mr. Brashear’s best. That was the fellow.”

“A fine shirt,” Abigail says.

“That don’t mean nothing,” Mrs. Baine says. “A man can walk down a road if he chooses. And he can wear a fine white shirt too. Don’t mean he stole it.”

It is the most words I’ve ever heard Mrs. Baine say. Mrs. Brashear must be surprised too, not so much by what Mrs. Baine is saying but that she is saying anything at all.

“Please,” I say, “have a seat, Mrs. Baine. Daddy or John, they’ll walk you home. It’s too dark outside. Sit a bit, wait. They’ll stop in soon.”

Mrs. Baine backs toward the door. “Don’t mean nothing, that man walking down the road.”

Juna steps forward into the glow of the candles that burn around us. She drops the blanket. It slips from her shoulders and pools at her feet.

“That’s the fellow who took our Dale,” she says.

“That ain’t so,” Mrs. Baine says, and I know the man in the white shirt is one of her boys.

There are seven Baine brothers, but only six who still live in Hayden County, all of them with their mama. All of them except Joseph Carl. He left a half dozen years ago to travel the country. He was, still is, the oldest of all the brothers. Because he’s been gone so long, he’s the only one the Brashears wouldn’t know because they moved here in the years since he left. He’s the only one Juna might not know if she were to see him walking down the road.

“That just ain’t so,” Mrs. Baine says again, and I know I’m right. Joseph Carl is back home.

“He’s the one,” Juna says. “The one in the fine white shirt with a bend in his nose. He’s the one who took Dale.”

ANNIE WATCHES UNTIL Ryce disappears over the rise and she can no longer hear the squeal of his bike. Sheriff Fulkerson is watching too, and when he turns to greet Daddy, the sheriff is shaking his head like he doesn’t know what gets into that boy. Mama sometimes shakes her head the same way at Annie.

“Why don’t you come on with us,” the sheriff says to Annie when she starts up the stairs to go inside and help Grandma in the kitchen.

Daddy gives a nod, which means he thinks there’s no harm in it, so Annie calls out to Grandma that she’ll be back shortly and follows Daddy and the sheriff.

“You keep a sharp eye, John,” Grandma shouts from the porch. Since breakfast, she has repinned her hair, and her apron hangs straight now. “Keep a sharp eye on Annie.”

Partway up the hill that’ll lead them to Grandpa’s tobacco barn, Annie stops because Daddy and the sheriff stop. She knew they would. Visitors always do. Especially this time of year. This is the spot-halfway between the house and the tobacco barn-where folks take a break, usually saying they need to rest even though it’s not such an uphill climb. They brace themselves, feet planted wide apart, hands on hips, and look across the land that rolls down toward the house and lifts up again and stretches to the horizon. As far as a person can see in most any direction, rows of lavender, swelled to their full size, run side by side. They’re evenly placed, four feet on center, precisely, exactly, every one of them, as only Daddy would have it. It’s a trick of the eye and the work of distance that draw the rows closer and closer as they travel toward the horizon until eventually they meld into a single field of lavender covering the hills. There aren’t many prideful moments in growing lavender, so says Daddy, but this is one of the few.

Standing next to the sheriff, who can only shake his head at the splendor of it, which makes Annie wonder if he was shaking his head at the splendor of Ryce, though she doubts it, Daddy takes off his hat, slaps it against his thigh, and nods along. It’s about the proudest a person will see Daddy. He never walks folks around to the other side of the house and to the top of the rise that looks off in the other direction. There, the lavender has already been harvested. It’ll be distilled into oil and so is always taken before it breaks into bloom. It’s not such a pretty sight once the slender lavender-tipped stems have been hacked off, leaving behind only a jagged mound of greenery.

Like folks always do, the sheriff lays his head back and inhales. Usually, Annie doesn’t notice the sweet smell because she, and the rest of the family too, lives with it every day. It builds slowly over the season, little by little, and so is never fresh or new, but when a visitor comes along, like the sheriff, Annie is reminded of it by the look on his face.

Just this last week, she’s felt like a visitor might. The smell has been stronger, sweeter, thicker, like new again. She should have known it was a sign her life was about to change-same as she should have known the one warped board on the porch, and the star she saw falling from the sky last Tuesday night, and the shiver that woke her this past Saturday all meant death was closing in.

“Beats the hell out of growing tobacco,” the sheriff says as he takes one deep breath. His large belly lifts up and out, his eyes close, the lines around his mouth soften, and he exhales long and slow. Then he slaps his hands together, gives Daddy a wave, and they continue on toward the barn.

By the time they reach the top of the hill, Sheriff Fulkerson is red-faced and can’t talk for breathing so hard. He mops his forehead with a limp white kerchief and rests a hand on his belly, which swells up until his shirt gaps between his buttons. Ryce is already taller than his daddy but is a good bit smaller around the middle.

“This where you crossed over?” the sheriff says without looking at Annie. His voice has changed. It’s slipped lower, and he’s likely not smiling anymore. Grandma says Sheriff Fulkerson spends too much time politicking. This is the voice he saves for discussing serious matters with serious men. He’s not politicking just now. Waiting for an answer, he leans over at the waist and looks down the length of the rock fence. Maybe he’s looking for rocks knocked loose or oversize footprints, or maybe he’s admiring what Grandma calls fine Irish fence building.

“Yes, sir,” Annie says, looking for some sign that Ryce hadn’t been entirely truthful and that his daddy does think Annie killed Mrs. Baine. So far, the sheriff is being friendly enough. “Best I can tell,” she says, glancing at Daddy. He gives her a nod that means keep on. “It was dark. Crossed over right about here.”

“Just jumped on over?” Now the sheriff gives her a smile and his voice lifts a bit higher. He’s politicking again, and that’s Annie’s first warning that the sheriff isn’t altogether trusting of what she’s telling him. “You can do that? Girl small as you?”

“Sure can,” Annie says.

It’s not often someone calls Annie small these days. She outgrew Caroline and Mama a year ago. Daddy has started saying he worries she’ll outgrow him next. She’s about to show the sheriff how easily she can manage that fence, but Daddy is shaking his head at her. If she were still thirteen, or maybe even fourteen, Daddy wouldn’t have minded. But she’s halfway to sixteen and that’s altogether different from being thirteen or fourteen.

“Caroline done it too,” Annie says, wondering straightaway if that was something she should have not told. “Both of us, we climbed right on over. It’s not so high.”

“You all get up here often?”

Daddy points his thumb toward the barn’s open doors. “Lavender drying in there this time of year. Otherwise, no. Have a look.”

The sheriff steps up to the barn’s open doors and leans inside. Three-inch bundles of lavender hang from the wooden crossbeams, their bluish-gray buds dripping toward the ground.

“Doors always open?” the sheriff asks, leaning inside.

“Circulation,” Daddy says.

The sheriff nods, doesn’t have to ask. He knows all about circulation. It’s the same for tobacco. Fresh air moving across the plants means less chance of mold.

The sheriff steps farther into the barn and runs one hand across the tips of the lavender. Tiny petals pop free and flutter to the ground.

“Today is your day, then?” he says without looking at Annie. “Fifteen and a half?”

“Yes, sir.”

Ryce was right. That’s the thing that has folks worried. For girls like Annie, those with the know-how, turning of age is something special. Or maybe something worrisome.

“Fifteen and a half,” Annie says, repeating the sheriff.

“But you and your sister, the both of you, come up here to look in that well over at the Baines’ place?”

Annie nods, which makes Daddy poke her in the back. “Yes, sir,” she says. “Me and Caroline, both.”

The sheriff can’t see a nod because he’s still studying that lavender, which shouldn’t be all so interesting, even to a visitor. He’s studying it like Annie had been studying it when she thought, hoped, Daddy was in there watching over her as she made her way to the Baines’ well.

“No well of your own?”

If she wasn’t certain before, she’s certain now. The sheriff is circling around her, closing in ever tighter with each question.

“Dried up,” Daddy says, and he says it easy and casual like he isn’t at all worried about what the sheriff’s thinking.

“Didn’t figure to see nothing in a dried-up well,” Annie says, and then so the sheriff won’t think that’s something only people like Annie know about, she says, “Everyone knows that. Just ask. Just ask anyone.”

The sheriff jostles a handful of lavender petals in one hand and walks from the barn.

“And what did you see when you got over there?” he says, squinting into the sunlight and dumping the petals. “You have a light of any kind?”

“Caroline did,” Annie says. “Daddy’s flashlight. Didn’t see much except for Mrs. Baine. She was on the ground there by the well. Didn’t know it was her at the time. Just seen an arm, what I thought was an arm. It was real dark.”

Mrs. Baine was old, just about the oldest person Annie has ever seen, and that’s why she died. She had slender lips that rolled in on themselves because she didn’t have teeth where she should have had them. Her fingernails were thick, yellow, and squared off like she whittled them down with a gutting knife, and dark patches-age spots, Grandma called them-covered the backs of Mrs. Baine’s hands and the sides of her face. Deep lines ran from her forehead to her chin, and her hair was like pulled gray cotton hanging down her back. A person can only grow so old. Grandma is always saying it’ll get us all eventually, God willing. But as Sheriff Fulkerson asks yet another question, and as he settles his eyes on Annie and keeps them there, it’s certain he is of a different mind. He’s of a mind that something other than old age got its claws into Mrs. Baine.

“There were the cigarettes,” Annie says, kicking at the ground near the barn doors. “They were around here somewhere.” She keeps digging at the dirt with the toe of her shoe. “A pile of them.”

“Yours?” the sheriff says to Daddy.

Daddy shakes his head. “Never smoke up here. Too dry.” Daddy glances at his watch. He should be out to the fields, helping Abraham set his tobacco. “Never smoke most anywhere. Sarah, you know. She don’t like it. Smell don’t agree with her.”

The smell reminds Mama too much of her daddy, she once said. The sheriff gives Daddy a pat on the back as if he knows all about wives and the things they don’t much like, and the three of them keep on studying the ground and searching for those cigarettes.

“Went looking for them last night when Annie first mentioned it,” Daddy says. “Didn’t want a fire springing up on top of everything else.”

“Right around here,” Annie says, pointing at a patch of ground just outside the open doors. Those cigarettes had to belong to someone, so maybe the sheriff was right. Maybe something else, or someone else, did get its claws into Mrs. Baine. Those cigarettes will mean that the someone else was not Annie.

Daddy steps up behind Annie and squats. He groans on the way down. With one hand, he pats the ground and riffles through the dirt. “You sure it was cigarettes?”

“Positive,” Annie says, and all those good feelings Daddy stirred up when he hauled off that rocker are gone as quick as they came because Daddy doesn’t believe her and he’s saying so right in front of Sheriff Fulkerson. “One was still lit even. At first, I thought they was yours. I thought they meant you was out here too, that Mama sent you. I looked for you in the barn.”

Annie says these things even though she knows they’ll hurt Daddy. Mama did send him, but he and Abraham had been drinking their whiskey. They’d been doing it more and more lately because Abraham would be getting married soon. Fun’s over once you say I do, Daddy was all the time saying and then he’d wrap Mama up in a hug and rub his stubble against the underside of her chin. Mama would swat Daddy away, but he’d keep at it until she closed her eyes and leaned into him instead of pulling away. Daddy sleeping when he should have been watching over Annie was probably why Mama burned the toast this morning. Grandma is always saying a cook who burns the biscuits is an angry cook, indeed. The same must be true for a cook who burns the toast.

“Yep,” Daddy says. “I should have been here. But wasn’t me. Wasn’t my cigarettes. Maybe you was mistaken.”

Sheriff Fulkerson joins them but doesn’t try to squat. “Probably mistaken,” he says, repeating Daddy.

“But one was orange-tipped,” Annie says, digging two hands into the dirt, gathering it in her palms and letting it filter through her fingers. She stares up at both men, looking them in the eyes so they’ll know she’s telling the truth. “It was still burning. I’m certain. Certain as can be. I snubbed it out. Daddy’s always saying we have to be careful. But I thought they was Daddy’s. I was sure.”

“There anything else, Annie?” the sheriff asks, planting the sole of his black boot right where Annie had been rummaging in the dirt. “Anything you ought tell me?”

Annie can’t tell him about the spark that’s been in the air or the trouble that’s been lurking. Folks, regular folks, don’t like to hear about things like that. But for a week, Annie’s known it was coming, and here it is, and now folks think she killed Mrs. Baine.

“No, sir,” she says. “Nothing more to tell. But I seen those cigarettes, and if they ain’t here, that means someone took them.” Annie was wrong. Aunt Juna isn’t coming home. She’s already here. “I think they were Juna’s cigarettes. My Aunt Juna’s.”

Sheriff Fulkerson starts shaking his head again, and it’s surely disappointment making him do that and not the splendor of Annie.

“Think we’ve seen all we need to,” he says and looks off toward the house. “I see my deputy’s here.”

On the drive below, a dark-blue sedan has parked behind Daddy’s truck.

“Thought he could stay close to you folks,” the sheriff says, “for the next few days.”

“Why do we need someone staying close?” Annie asks, shielding her eyes and looking down on the parked car.

When no one answers, she drops her hand and turns to the sheriff. He’s looking at Daddy as if wondering what should and should not be said.

“You think Aunt Juna’s come home, don’t you? You think it too.”

Daddy lets out a long breath. He’s not so good at politicking. The sheriff, however, opens up a big smile and wraps an arm around Annie’s shoulders. It almost makes Annie forget he most certainly thinks she had something to do with Mrs. Baine dying. Grandma is right. He is awful good at politicking.

“Come on down and meet him,” the sheriff says. “You’ll probably remember him. Jacob. He’s a year or so older than Ryce.”

“Jacob Riddle?” Annie says a little too quickly.

“You do recall, huh?” The sheriff gives her a wink and squeezes her so tight she feels his damp underarms on the side of her face. “Been helping me out since he got back in town. Maybe he’s the fellow you seen down in that well? I’ll be sure to tell Ryce he’s got himself some competition. What do you think of that, John? Think you’d have Jacob Riddle for a son-in-law?”

Stretching one hand overhead, the sheriff waves it side to side so Jacob will see them. The driver’s side door of the sedan swings open, and Jacob Riddle steps out. No mistaking it. That’s Jacob Riddle all right. He waves back in the sheriff’s direction, but it isn’t a wave to say hello. It’s a wave to say hurry on up. There’s something bad going on down here.

DALE WAS SWEET. That’s the first thing Juna says when Daddy and I and Sheriff Irlene sit with her at the kitchen table. Daddy sucks on a cigar, little more than a stub. He blows his smoke in our faces. Simply put, Dale was sweet. Though he looked just like Daddy, even given the baby fat that hadn’t yet burned away, he had none of Daddy’s meanness. Juna says these things like Sheriff Irlene never met the boy. She says these things like Dale is already gone. Gone for good.

Juna is smiling as she talks even though Daddy is sitting right there to hear her every word. He starts to push away from the table, but Sheriff Irlene points a finger at him and he settles back in.

“Dale had hair like mine, you know?” Juna says. “He was smart too. But he had a softness he wasn’t inclined to outgrow. We worried for him, all of us.”

She tells us they had made their way, she and Dale, to the end of a row of tobacco when they saw the man coming. The road runs straight for a good long time, so they saw him when he was just something rising up out of the horizon.

“Which way had he come from?” Sheriff Irlene asks, sipping from her coffee and leaning back in her chair like she isn’t all too concerned with the answer. “Which way was he headed?”

“Come from town,” Juna says. “Headed toward the Baine place.”

I stare at Sheriff Irlene, waiting for her to say something more, to ask Juna how she knows he was headed to the Baine place. John Holleran said, when leaving me at my door and telling me not to worry, that Irlene Fulkerson was a sharp woman and would see to things. A man walking in the direction of the Baine place could have been walking to one of a half dozen places or more. But Sheriff Irlene says nothing. Instead she reaches across the table, pats Juna’s hand, and gives a nod so she’ll keep on with her story.

“That’s when Dale started tugging on my skirt and pointing,” she says. “He kept on, and the sun was good and hot, so I stopped my work, pulled off my sweater, and watched that man coming toward us.”

There on the southern slope, the air is warmer and drier than back home. The first mistake our daddy made was a lasting one. He built our house on the northern side of the hill. He built our house in the shadows, where the sun rarely falls and the winds are always at their worst. We spend our lives wearing damp socks and clothes that smell of mold because they never dry through and through, not even on the line, not even in front of the fire. Our fingers, cheeks, the tips of our noses, are always cold, all because we live in the shadows.

“The man kept coming,” Juna says.

Sheriff Irlene reaches for Juna’s hand again. “Don’t let it upset you,” she says because she must hear the same rise in Juna’s voice I hear.

Juna nods, takes in a deep breath as if to calm herself, and tells us the fellow was small. Not so tall, not so wide, and walked with a slouch. That’s true for most fellows who walk alone down our dirt roads. They have heads that hang, heavy shoulders, and caved-in bellies. Daddy calls them hoboes. He says they aren’t altogether bad because they bring news of things happening in other parts. Last fellow who came through told of storms so bad they lifted up whole fields and blew them from one state to another, blew red dirt to places where the dirt was once brown, and brown dirt to places were the dirt was once black.

“I thought to say hello, is all,” Juna says.

She craves news of places other than this one almost as much as she craves the feel of a man lying alongside her and his calloused hands moving across her belly. She doesn’t say this to Daddy and the sheriff, but I know.

The other thing Daddy says about hoboes, besides saying they sometimes carry news, is that Juna and I shouldn’t talk to them. That’s a job for the men and damn sure not his girls. Keep yourselves clear, Daddy is always saying.

When the fellow was within shouting distance, he called out to them. How you all doing today? You all got water?

Juna imitates the man’s voice as she tells us what he said. She holds one hand up to her mouth like she is hollering out across the road.

“But I remembered what you’re always saying, Daddy, and I didn’t say nothing back to that man. Only answered a question or two. Didn’t say nothing more.”

Juna looks in Daddy’s direction, but as quick as she does, he turns his head. Sheriff Irlene gives Daddy another look, a warning for him to stay put. He won’t be going anywhere near Joseph Carl until Sheriff Irlene hears the rest of Juna’s story.

Juna told the fellow he’d find water up there a ways and pointed off toward the sycamores growing along the far side of the road. Those trees throw a nice slice of shade the fellow could have walked in, but he didn’t. He crossed into the sun to walk closer to them. She told him he’d find the river on beyond those trees. But the fellow kept coming.

She didn’t recognize him as a Baine. He’d been gone for years, at least five. She sure didn’t recognize him. You’ll hear it before you see it, she told him, and he asked was it good cool water. And he kept on toward them, kicking at the dirt with his leather boots. He stirred up dusty clouds that moved closer with every step.

“He asked was that water deep enough to wade in,” Juna says.

“Joseph Carl asked you that?” Sheriff Irlene says. “He asked how deep was the water?”

Again I wait for Sheriff Irlene to say something more. I wait for her to wonder after why Joseph Carl would ask for the nearest water and was it deep enough to wade in when Joseph Carl had grown up with the Lone Fork and the sycamores and already knew the answer to every one of those questions.

Dale asked the man where he’d come from and how far had he traveled. He asked the man real polite, but the man didn’t take notice of Dale or his questions and asked again where he’d find that water.

That is the next surprising thing about Juna’s story. Folks don’t ignore Dale. They might have started to whisper about him being awfully soft for a Crowley boy, but they all love him. The church ladies will smooth his hair for him. The fellows might give him a lure or a penny or maybe an old cane pole they don’t so much need anymore. Folks never ignore Dale because he makes them smile.

The man next stopped in the middle of the road, yanked off his hat, and ran a hand over his fair hair. The knot in his throat bobbed up and down as he spoke, and his eyes focused on the ground at Dale’s feet. Those eyes were trimmed with fine, pale lashes, and his skin, instead of tanned to a leather hide by the sun, was pink.

There wasn’t much interesting about the man. His trousers were cut from denim that had gone soft, and his white shirt was buttoned at the cuffs and at his throat. Strangest thing about the fellow was how clean and white his shirt was. Only other interesting thing about him was the bend in his nose. Someone must have broke it for him. Juna thought it might be a story worth hearing to have the man tell how he happened upon a shirt as white as the one he wore and a nose as crooked as the one on his face.

Can’t miss it, is what Juna told the fellow, and she stretched out her hoe, lifted it a few feet, and slapped it to the ground. You’ll hear that water before you see it.

“It was a clumsy thing, what the man done next,” Juna says, staring at Daddy, her head laid off to the side in that way of hers. “He took a few more long steps that led him right up to Dale. Put them almost nose to nose. And then the fellow asked had Dale ever seen a deck of cards.”

Up close, Juna could see the man’s shirt was something that belonged in a church and was meant for a larger man because the sleeves ballooned and the shoulder seams sagged down each arm. The man didn’t say anything else. He should have pulled a deck of cards from his back pocket, Juna figured, since he made mention of them, but instead he kept on staring at the ground beneath Dale’s feet.

“Dale asked the man if he had any,” Juna says. “Asked did the man have a deck of cards to show.”

I have always figured, because it’s what Daddy has always said, that Juna and I are the ones in danger when one of those fellows happens by. I would have never thought such a man would want Dale. Juna must have thought about it.

“He sure was interested in Dale,” she says, staring at the closed door now instead of Daddy.

The room is dark except for the lantern sitting in the middle of the table. It burns just bright enough to light up the lower half of each face.

Good cool water, is the last thing Juna said to the man. You’ll hear it before you see it.

And then he took Dale.

NO ONE EVER talks about Aunt Juna being Annie’s real mama, at least not in a place or in a way Annie could hear. When Annie was younger and would happen by a group of girls skipping rope and singing about Juna and how many Baines would die this day, sometimes those girls would stop and huddle, one whispering to another. They were the ones who knew Aunt Juna was Annie’s mama even before Annie knew. Other times, the girls, different girls, would keep right on jumping and singing and not knowing Annie was Juna’s relation.

The ones who stopped their jumping to whisper had grandmas and grandpas who had lived here all their lives. Those older folks are the ones who lived here when Joseph Carl Baine was hanged. They’re the ones who knew he was hanged not only for what he did to Dale Crowley but also for being the one to put the seed in Aunt Juna. Not even these girls who knew the truth would mention Joseph Carl Baine when Annie passed them by. They might have warned one another that the evil lives in Annie’s black eyes and pleaded with Annie not to curse their daddies’ crops or beg her to bring them a favorable winter, all the while laughing because Annie’s mama wasn’t her real mama, but they never dared mention Joseph Carl being her daddy.

But as Grandma hurries around the table, her wide hips bouncing off the counter and then the kitchen table, and wraps her arms around Annie, and as Daddy stands so quick his chair tumbles backward and bounces off the linoleum floor, it’s clear Joseph Carl Baine being Annie’s daddy is the thing that brought Ellis Baine into the Hollerans’ kitchen.

“You want to say that again?” Daddy says.

Ellis Baine leans forward, rests his elbows on the table, and nods at Annie. “Here to see that one,” he says.

Daddy lunges across the table, but before he gets a hand on Ellis Baine, the sheriff grabs him by the back of his shirt and gives a good yank.

“Good Lord, John,” the sheriff says, both he and Daddy stumbling over the fallen chair.

Ellis Baine stands too, though not as quick, and his chair stays on its feet. He holds his hands out to the side and backs away until he’s beyond Daddy’s reach.

Grandma tries to hide Annie’s eyes by wrapping her up in a hug, but Annie is a good half a foot taller than Grandma. Try as Grandma might, she can’t hug Annie tight enough to cut off her view.

As quickly as Daddy leapt across the table, he settles back. His chest is pumping again, and he’s staring in the direction of Ellis Baine, but it’s not the visitor who has drawn Daddy’s attention. Annie unwraps herself from Grandma’s arms to see what Daddy is staring at. It’s Mama. She stands at the bottom of the stairs, one hand covering her mouth, the other clinging to the banister.

“John?” she says.

Jacob Riddle is inside again, though Annie never heard him open the door, and he must have righted Daddy’s chair because it’s there for him when he collapses into it.

Mama’s hair is always pretty. She brushes it every morning and washes it at least three times a week, which is plenty given how thick and long it still is. She has a few gray hairs, but mostly Mama’s hair always looks nice. On Sundays though, Mama fixes it extra fine for church. She teases up the top and pins back the front, picking out a few stray, wispy pieces with the pointed end of her comb. She says it frames her face and that Annie’s hair would do the same if she’d ever take a set of bristles to it. The rest of Mama’s hair she leaves to fall down her back in long, dark waves, and if the weather is dry and accommodating, she’ll use that green gel and sleep in rollers so she’ll have long, smooth curls by morning.

Mama has done all these things today except for sleeping in the rollers. She’s also painted her lips with her best crimson-rose lipstick, and her lashes are long enough to throw feathery shadows on her cheeks. Annie watches Daddy watching Mama, and Annie knows, and Daddy knows, Mama did these things for Ellis Baine.

“Good to see you, Sarah,” Ellis says to Mama, bowing his head. His voice is rough like those of so many of the men who spent too many years in the mines. Wherever he’s been and whatever he’s been doing since he left Hayden County, he has spent a good bit of that time underground.

Mama slides one foot toward Ellis. It’s barely a movement, just enough to make the skirt of her dress sway from one side to the other, and then she stops. She crosses her arms loosely over her waist and says, “You look well, Ellis. My condolences.”

From his seat at the table, Daddy leans forward in his chair, rests his elbows on his knees, and with one finger waves Mama toward him. He studies Mama as she walks across the kitchen. She wears her bright-blue dress, the one with pale-yellow trim at the neckline. A white scarf is tied around her waist. Whenever she wears this dress, usually for a night of dancing in the church basement, Daddy wraps his hands around her waist to prove it’s not one inch bigger than the day they wed. His fingers never quite reach, though he always swears they do. On Mama’s feet, she wears her best white heels, the ones she won’t dare wear in the rain and that she stores in two cloth bags. Daddy drops his eyes to the floor as Mama slips behind him. He can smell it too… Mama’s best perfume.

Ellis sits back down, and his eyes settle on Annie again.

“That her?” he asks. “That your oldest?”

“Get out, Annie,” Daddy says.

Mama rests a hand on Daddy’s shoulder, but he swats it away.

“Now,” he says. “Outside.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” the sheriff says. “Go on outside, Annie. You’ll get some good light out on the porch. Make threading a needle a whole lot easier. You go on while we do some catching up.”

Grandma wraps an arm around Annie’s waist and turns her toward the door.

“He’s back because his mama’s dead,” she whispers in Annie’s ear. “She’s the one kept him away all these years. Don’t you stray, you hear?”

THE SUN IS rising, has barely broken the horizon. The light is lifting around me, the room turning from nearly black to gray. The fire was out when Daddy dropped Juna and me at home. Crossing through the doorway into a house where three people now live and not four felt like crossing into a stranger’s house. It was cold like that, cold like a house where you don’t know where to sit until someone pulls out a chair and you fidget because you don’t know what to do with your hands since you’re not the one doing the cooking or the cleaning or the serving. Cold like that.

Joseph Carl never told what he did with Dale. By the end, Joseph Carl was crying, and so much had been beat out of him, he didn’t seem altogether sure what he’d done and what he hadn’t done. He pleaded with Daddy to stop and said he would tell Daddy whatever we wanted to hear. Just tell him what to say, and he’d say it. He promised, swore to God almighty, just tell me what to say and I’ll say it. But no matter how much Daddy beat him, Joseph Carl couldn’t tell what he didn’t know, so Daddy and the others are still looking.

I sit at the kitchen table, the doors and windows shut up tight because this is the time of day I hate most. Usually, it’s because sunrise marks the start of another day just like the last. Today, it marks the time Dale has been gone. Out on the porch, the wood is too damp to use in starting another fire. This is how I’d find it if I were to look. Daddy doesn’t stack his wood right, so it rots, and that’s where the snakes take up. The box inside the house is empty, save a few scraps of kindling. It’s Dale’s job, his only job, to fill it every night. So this morning, there will be no fire.

The air is thickest at this hour, so thick and full it nearly drips, weighing heavy on everything. My clothes hang, and my hair wilts and will stick to the sides of my face and the back of my neck until I pin it up. And with the dampness comes a kind of cold that seeps in deeper than most. I’ll be trying all of the morning to warm myself, but even if I step outside, there’ll be no sun because Daddy built this house and Daddy is cursed.

The tapping at the front door is a strange sound. I don’t stand but instead listen, trying to work out what it is. In less than two days’ time, it’s become normal for folks to walk on inside, not bother knocking. They’ve come and gone with their cucumbers and tomatoes, eggs and milk. Not wanting to disturb Juna, not wanting to see her or be seen, they’ve slipped in and out, a few of them stopping long enough to say a hello to me and ask after what they can do. There is another tapping. I push away from the table, glance at Juna’s closed door, and stand.

I’ve seen Juna and Abraham Pace before. When I’ve gone to fetch her for supper because I’ve worried Daddy might find her first, I always know where to look. I’ve seen them on the patch of grass where the trees clear. They never hear me because the sound of the river, lazy as it is, covers over twigs and leaves snapping underfoot. I’ve seen Abraham trailing his fingers over the inside of Juna’s arm, the white part I know must be as soft as it is on me. I’ve seen him fill her mouth with his tongue and the way it makes her arch her back and press herself into him. I’ve heard sounds coming from Abraham, sounds that reached me before the sight of the two of them reached me, and those sounds made me turn away. From down near the river where they’d think I hadn’t seen, I’d call out for Juna to come on home.

These last few hours since Daddy dropped Juna and me back at the house, as I’ve been waiting for the sun to rise and the dampness to burn off, I’ve thought of those days and what I saw. But now, instead of seeing Abraham working his tongue over Juna or hearing the groans that roll up and out of his mouth, I see and hear Ellis Baine. I see his tongue and his fingers trailing across Juna’s body and hear his deep voice rumble through his throat as he calls out her name.

I open the door, and there stands John Holleran holding his hat in one hand, working the other around its brim.

“May I?” he says.

“There’s no fire,” I say, meaning there’s no coffee.

He hands me his hat and walks back to the woodpile. He gathers an armful of the logs stacked on top, sets them on the ground, and gathers another load from the drier wood beneath. He looks each piece over as he loads it in the crook of his arm and then carries it into the house. Inside, he nods at the wood box. Empty, I tell him. Like the flue at the Baines’ place, ours doesn’t draw so well, especially when it’s gone altogether cold. The fire smokes, but John is better at building one than Daddy or me, and soon enough it’s crackling and snapping and wearing off the chill. As John works the fire, I set to work on the coffee.

“I got to wondering,” John says, sitting at the table while I stand over the coffeepot, “if you’re safe here in this house.”

The pot always lets out something of a hiss just before the coffee gets to rolling. There’s no need of me standing over it, watching it, waiting for that hiss. Doesn’t make it come any faster, but I do. I wrap my hand in a scrap like Mrs. Baine did, grab onto the pot, and hold tight like it’ll slip from the stove if I don’t.

“You safe here, Sarah?”

The one lantern is still lit, the one Daddy always insists on so he never wakes to the dark, but the light in the room has lifted enough that the lantern does no good. I drop the handle on the coffeepot, walk to the lantern, and put out the flame.

It’s a disturbing thing to know someone loves you. It makes a person wonder why. That’s the first disturbing thing. But putting that aside, it makes the future spring up in a person’s mind. It makes a person see a house, a bedroom, a kitchen table, and boots at the door. It makes a person see the children that will tie her to that house. It makes a person see the garden she’ll tend, the sopping clothes she’ll wring dry and hang on the line, the beans she’ll snap and the canning she’ll do. Having someone love you gives the future its footing.

“They’ll hang him, won’t they?” I say, staring down into the dark lantern. “A man who does those things, the things Juna says… they’ll hang him for it.”

“Not until they find Dale,” John says. “You have an answer for me? You safe here?”

There’s shame in the question. Even though the answer is yes, I’m safe here, Daddy doesn’t do those things Juna said, the question still sticks to me, probably always will. It’s what Juna does. Ever so slightly, she turns folks in the direction of her liking. The voices save me from answering John Holleran.

They are men’s voices, several. They’re not hollering, just talking. Talking among themselves and getting louder and closer. Footsteps hit the front porch and the door swings open. Buell Fulkerson leans into the house. He’s Sheriff Irlene’s oldest and will likely be the next sheriff.

“Found him,” he says. “Found your boy. Your daddy says make a spot for him. He’ll be right along.”

WHEN ANNIE NEARS her house, she tosses Ryce’s shirt in the ditch, drops her bike at the roadside, and walks toward her drive but doesn’t cross over. Two slender lengths of wood six feet tall, three inches wide, and two inches thick, and both appearing to have come from Daddy’s shed because they have been sanded smooth, stand on either side of her. A half dozen limp milk snakes have been strung up on each. They’ve been nailed to the posts. Some are more shriveled than others, meaning some have been dead longer than others.

Most of the snakes are of the reddish-brown variety and are covered with white blotches trimmed in black. Annie might wonder who helped Grandma pound those stakes in the ground, but they both stand at an awkward sort of angle and Grandma does have a way of getting things done herself, so it’s likely she had no help at all. It’s also likely, because there’s still plenty of room on those pieces of wood, she plans to string up more snakes.

Grandma has never talked about stringing up milk snakes, but it’s definitely her work and it’s definitely meant to keep evil from crossing onto the Hollerans’ place. She must have been searching for those snakes since they first discovered Mrs. Baine. Closing her eyes and holding her breath, though she isn’t sure why except maybe she’s the kind of evil those snakes are meant to keep at bay, Annie steps from the road onto the drive. After a half dozen steps, she opens her eyes. Nothing is changed. Annie doesn’t want to be near when Mama sees what Grandma has done or when Daddy discovers what has become of his perfectly fine pieces of wood.

The moment Annie steps inside the house, Caroline grabs her by both hands and begs Annie to tell every single thing about Ellis Baine. Caroline wants to know what he looked like. Was he as handsome as they say? Where has he been living? What did he say? Is it true he came to see Annie? Why would he do that? Why would he come just for Annie?

Before Annie can answer, Grandma walks into the kitchen. Caroline drops Annie’s hands and lowers her eyes as if that’ll stop Grandma from seeing what Caroline was up to. But like Annie always knows a thing before it has come, Grandma knows, and she gives Caroline a look that means she’d best mind her own business. Then Grandma cocks her mouth off to one side and leans in close to look Annie in the eyes.

“Where you been?” she asks. “Did you go off somewhere? Why’s your hair all wet?”

“Been out talking to Daddy and Sheriff Fulkerson,” Annie says, which is partly true but not altogether true. After Annie crossed through the snakes and made her way up to the house, she did see Daddy and the sheriff again. She leaves out the part where she rode her bike to the fields.

“Well, see that you stay put,” Grandma says, poking a melon baller at Annie so she’ll know it’s serious business.

Annie nods, says, “Yes, ma’am,” and Grandma digs her baller into the half watermelon sitting on the kitchen table.

“I strung up snakes,” she says, scooping up a round chuck of melon and dropping it in a glass bowl. “Did you see?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“We’ll string more, the most we can find. You keep an eye out. Under things that are dead. That’s where you’ll find them. And we’ll string more.”

Walking with rounded shoulders and doing her best to hide her chest, Annie climbs the steps that will lead to her bedroom and thinks maybe she’ll find enough snakes to hang some outside her windows. As she passes Mama’s bedroom, Annie looks inside. Mama is sitting alone on the edge of her bed, her feet bare, her dress no longer belted. She’s pulled the tie from her hair, leaving it to hang down her face, and she’s staring out her window. She’ll be seeing the tobacco barn at the top of the hill. Maybe she’s waiting and watching for Aunt Juna.

Hearing Annie in the hallway, Mama turns. Her eyes widen, and her back straightens. She inhales sharply as if at first seeing someone unexpected, and then she realizes it’s just Annie.

“You’re the spitting image…” Mama says but stops short of saying Aunt Juna’s name. “I’ve such a headache. I’m going to rest just a bit. Can you help Grandma?”

Annie steps into the room and pulls back the blue-and-yellow patchwork quilt. From Mama’s bedside table, Annie pulls out the witch-hazel-and-lavender spray Grandma makes certain is kept at everyone’s bedside and gives three squirts to each of Mama’s two pillows. Not believing in the know-how or the goodness of the lavender or the sweet dreams it’ll surely deliver, Mama shakes her head as Annie pumps the small bottle, but smiles all the while. Then Mama slides between the sheets, lays her head back, and rolls on her side.

Taking Mama’s seat on the edge of the mattress, Annie looks out the window where Mama had been looking. Daddy and the sheriff are out there again. They’ve reached the top of the hill and are walking along the rock fence that separates the Baines from the Hollerans. They’ll be talking about the cigarettes they don’t believe Annie ever saw and the odd coincidence that Mrs. Baine would die on Annie’s day and isn’t it strange that a girl so fair as Annie would have those black eyes.

After a few minutes, Mama’s breathing turns heavy and slow. Leaning toward Mama’s nightstand but not lifting her weight from the mattress so as to not disturb Mama, Annie pulls open the small drawer. Inside is Mama’s copy of the Bible, its binding split, an embroidered kerchief Mama’s mama made, and a stack of envelopes tied off with a piece of white string.

When Annie was in third grade, her teacher visited the house on a Tuesday afternoon, and that’s when Mama and Daddy told Annie about Aunt Juna. The teacher, Mrs. Johansson, visited because Annie had been skipping rope and singing about Juna Crowley with eyes black as coal and counting how many Baines would die this day. Annie hadn’t known Juna Crowley was her Aunt Juna. Caroline was too young yet to hear these things, but Annie had to know. Their own Aunt Juna was the one with evil living in her eyes, the one who turned fields to dust. She was the one all the folks of Hayden County feared. But Aunt Juna loved her family all those years ago, Mama had said. She didn’t want to leave, but she did, packed up her bags and left so peace could be made. It wasn’t like people say. She was peculiar, is all. She was good, and she is your aunt, and one day she’ll come back because she loves us all.

After that day, the girls kept on singing about Juna Crowley and twirling their ropes and telling their tales, but Annie never again joined in. The other girls learned too. They learned Juna was Annie’s aunt, and when they grew older, they learned Juna was Annie’s mama and that Annie had her black eyes and evil ways. Lastly they learned Joseph Carl Baine, the man who lies at the crossroad into town, was her daddy. Annie listened with a different ear after that Tuesday afternoon, and every story she heard, every tale she was told, made her worry more about the last thing Mama said the day Mrs. Johansson visited: Aunt Juna loves you, and one day she’ll come home.

Annie slides a finger under the twine tied loosely around the envelopes, looks down at Mama to see that she’s still sleeping, lifts the stack of envelopes, pushes the drawer closed, and walks from the room.

ONE DAY AFTER I kissed John Holleran, Dale wakes, opens his one good eye, and smiles at Juna and me. As I did with Juna, I feed him cornbread dipped in cane syrup. I crumble the bread and press the small, sticky chunks to his swollen lips, make him drink water too and milk. He might never turn pink again, not like he was before, but the gray lifts.

Soon he complains of the hot room, and together, Juna and I lift the shutter and prop it open. His clothes, his skin, his hair, smell of Daddy’s cigars. We hold Dale’s slender arms and wash them clean with soap and water. He cries out when we work too quickly. We open the front door, try to get a cross breeze going to clear away the stale, smoky smell.

Dale’s skin, so cold before, is warm now. Maybe too warm. Before, he would have been happy to have us two do his washing for him, but once he wakes, he is somehow older and eager to be so. That’s likely why he waits to speak his first words until Daddy walks into the room.

“I know better,” Dale says. “Sure am sorry.”

We tell him to hush, both Juna and I. Save your strength. Nothing to be sorry about. The words catch in my throat as I speak them, can’t stop myself from thinking about the fellows who pass through this way and bring news. Don’t talk to those fellows, Daddy has always said. Dale is sorry for talking to a fellow like that. He’s sorry for talking to Joseph Carl.

Late into the night before Dale woke, Juna had whispered about the things a man would do to a boy like Dale if he were so inclined, and I barely slept for thinking about it. I hadn’t been able to believe, hadn’t wanted to believe, Joseph Carl had done those things to Juna and Dale. But he did, Juna said over and over all through the night. We have Dale back because Joseph Carl finally told. Praise the Lord, Dale is home and soon he’ll be well. Joseph Carl finally told. Why don’t you believe?

Visitors come throughout the day, all of them relieved because Dale’s waking means he’ll be well again. First, it’s Sheriff Irlene. She brings strawberry preserves, two jars.

“Didn’t intend on making a bad situation worse,” she says to Juna because Joseph Carl told and we all know he’s guilty now and the sheriff is feeling ashamed for having questioned Juna’s story.

“Are you girls well?” she says to me once Juna has settled in a seat at the kitchen table. “You have all you need for Dale? For yourselves and your daddy?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say.

“Your daddy,” she says, “he seem content to have Joseph Carl behind bars? He planning any sort of trouble?”

“No, ma’am,” I say, and I want to ask her if she’s sure. Is she so sure Joseph Carl did these things that she’ll let him die?

“And you girls?” she says, staring at me and only me. “You’re well here? You’re safe?”

It’s John Holleran who has told her the things Juna said, and as I thought, they’ll stick to me now all my days.

“Safe and sound, ma’am.”

John Holleran comes after supper. I knew he would. I meet him at his truck because it feels like the thing I should do, and I tell him Dale is awake. Juna too is better. She walks straight now, same as always. She had needed rest and water and a little something to eat. I want John to tell me the sheriff had been wrong about Joseph Carl, but instead, he removes his hat, glances over my shoulder to make sure Daddy isn’t watching, and he kisses me. Not like before, not with both hands and his tongue inside my mouth, but a quick soft kiss that catches the outer edge of my lips. I wish I wasn’t, but I’m angry at him for making Sheriff Irlene think terrible things were happening in this house. Like always, John was only trying to do what he thought was right.

“There’ll be a trial,” he says instead of telling me the sheriff was wrong. “He’ll be treated fair.”

It’s the best he can do and the best we can hope for. Daddy wanted Joseph Carl for himself, thought any decent man should be able to see to his own justice.

“He’ll stay in jail until then?”

John nods.

John’s mama comes next. Mary Holleran has quietly slipped in and out of the house several times over the past few days, always leaving food or ground coffee or fresh-picked tomatoes and such from her garden. People wonder now does she really have the know-how because she couldn’t tell where Dale would be found. But Juna couldn’t tell either, or wouldn’t tell.

Mary touches John’s sleeve as she walks into the kitchen. Her long hair, as always, has been twisted and rolled and pinned in a bundle on top of her head. She smiles until she sees Juna sitting at the table. Like so many others who come into our house, Mary walks a path that keeps her clear of Juna. Most folks are leery of those who have the gift. It’s not that they’re scared. Folks have a way of keeping a comfortable distance from things they don’t understand. But Mary understands the know-how, knows it better than most anyone, so it must be the evil Daddy has always thought took up in Juna’s eyes that frightens Mary.

“I want you to keep a sharp eye on that boy,” Mary says before leaving again. “On Dale. Keep a sharp eye.”

I nod. “Thank you for coming,” I say.

Again, she says, “You keep an eye. No one else. You.”

I sleep all that night at Dale’s side, sitting up in the chair next to his bed. The doctor said if he began to fuss about the pain, which he would eventually because God damn it all, that was quite a break, we should give him a teaspoon of Daddy’s whiskey. That’ll do the trick, he said, but Dale never complains. He sleeps through the night, restless and sometimes mumbling, and in the morning, Juna wakes me with a tap to my shoulder.

By herself, Juna has lifted the shutter. A sliver of sunlight, the most the house would see all day, lights up the room and collects in her hair. To look up at her from my seat at Dale’s side, I have to shade my eyes and squint. I forgot while I slept. I forgot the things Juna had done with Ellis Baine and all the others too. I forgot Joseph Carl would likely hang for what he did, and that Ellis Baine and I would never steal away to join Joseph Carl where the wheat grew taller than a man. I forgot Dale disappeared and that he was home again. I forgot I kissed John Holleran.

“Did he wake at all?” Juna asks, shaking me again. “Did he say anything more?”

But then I remember everything. I push aside Juna’s hand still resting on my shoulder, stand, and seeing that Dale is yet asleep, I walk from the room without giving Juna an answer.

I fix Daddy breakfast, same as always, and as he eats, I put out the lamp we kept burning through the night. Usually, I see to it the lamp never goes dry, but Juna must have done it last night, or maybe Daddy himself. Daddy says no to seconds on his coffee and no to seconds on his biscuits. He sits low in his chair, shirt buttoned up to the top button, one boot crossed over the other. He’ll be going to the fields. The other fellows will be helping him, just enough to get back on track. It’s what he’s always needed. A little help. Just a little Goddamn help. Mostly folks stay out of Daddy’s fields because they are cursed, but Dale coming home has softened them, at least for the day.

“Where did you find him, Daddy?” I ask, following him onto the porch.

He tells me I won’t know the spot.

“On up the hill. Farther south than you might have thought. Where the river widens. On up the hill.”

Straightaway, I know exactly where they found Dale. It was Juna and Abraham’s spot, or somewhere near there.

“Blackberries still waiting,” Juna says after Daddy disappears down the road. She is waiting for me in the kitchen, maybe waiting for Daddy to leave. “Won’t Dale like some blackberries?”

Juna isn’t up to it yet, she tells me as she braces herself by pressing one hand to the kitchen table and slowly, gingerly lowering herself into a chair. She tells me where they’ll grow. On the northern side of the hill, that’s where you ought find them. Touch the soil, rub it between your fingers. In the cool soil, where the water doesn’t rest, that’s where they’ll grow.

“Fetch some berries,” she says. “I’ll see to Dale.”

I go. Even knowing I shouldn’t, I leave Dale with Juna. I go because she took Ellis Baine and she took the whole of my future. I go, even knowing I shouldn’t, and I leave Dale to Juna.

AS ANNIE HAS sat here on her bed, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them, the cicadas have gone silent for the night, and the buzzing and clicking of the cricket frogs have filled in behind. The breeze blowing through her window has turned cool with the setting sun, and as the light outside has slipped from white to orange to a dusty gray, the sizzle Annie has been feeling all these many days has swelled up inside her again.

Ryce Fulkerson came pedaling up to the house after supper. While sitting with the rest of the family on the porch, all of them full from the meal celebrating Annie’s day, she had heard him, the whining of his bike’s front tire, long before he appeared, and she excused herself. Too much supper, she had said, or perhaps she was coming down with whatever had sent Mama to bed for most of the afternoon.

For two hours, Ryce has sat on the porch with Daddy and Abraham Pace, each of them taking a turn cranking the ice-cream maker. Every so often, Daddy gives it a whack and bangs it on the ground to loosen the ice when it freezes up on him. Since Ryce arrived, Daddy and Abraham have been drinking whiskey, and the more they drink, the louder Abraham’s voice grows. They’re mostly talking about Ellis Baine. Daddy thinks he made a damn fool of himself when the man stopped by. Abraham says Daddy is only a fool if he doesn’t keep a gun close at hand, because that’s what Abraham damn sure plans to do. And when Abraham goes so far as to shout out Goddamn right I’ll keep myself a gun near at hand, the hinges on the screen door squeal and Miss Watson asks that Abraham please keep his voice down. The third time Abraham lets out such a laugh, he riles that dog of his. She lunges against her chain, lets out a yelp, and starts barking. Abraham and Daddy both shout at her to quiet herself down, but it’s Ryce who finally tends the animal.

Peeking out the window, Annie watches him jump off the porch, not bothering with the three steps, squat with the dog and scratch at Tilly’s ears until she walks in a small circle and drops down on the ground. When Ryce stands and it seems he might look up at Annie’s window, she drops down too and sits there, leaning against the wall, until the top step creaks, which it always does when someone sits on it.

Once it’s quiet again, Miss Watson closes the door, letting it slap the way Mama does when she catches Daddy smoking, and Daddy tells Abraham a man is only as happy as the wife he raises. Mama wouldn’t like it if she heard Daddy saying that, and Daddy would never say it when Mama was near enough to hear.

“Ain’t my wife, yet,” Abraham hollers.

Miss Watson doesn’t do any more shouting from the kitchen.

THE ROAD NARROWS as it nears the Baines’ place, or maybe it only feels that way because the poplars close in on a person, growing right up to the road’s edge. Before starting up the long drive that leads to the house, I stand still, pull my coat tight around my shoulders, and listen for someone coming up behind me. I’d hear the footsteps on the dirt road, rocks getting kicked about, and heavy breathing if John Holleran were running after me, trying to catch me before I ruined myself. But the night is quiet except for my own breath rushing in and out of my nose.

As I had passed by John Holleran’s house, I drifted to the far side of the road so he or his mama or daddy wouldn’t chance upon seeing me. They’ll be keeping an eye out, not for me but for the men who have come from all the newspapers. They are men with freshly sharpened pencils sticking out of their front shirt pockets and notepads clenched under their arms. They’ve come by car and train and a few by bus. Besides hearing about a woman sheriff and Juna with her black eyes-stories that made them scribble in their notepads and dip their heads to hide their smiles or douse the laughter they couldn’t contain-the men have heard stories of the Baine brothers, and so they must know better than to come here after dark.

The walk from the road to the Baines’ house is uphill, so I can’t see the place until I’m close enough to call out that I’m coming. But I don’t call out; I just keep walking. The house is dark. Still I know one of those brothers is waiting. Not waiting for me in particular. Just waiting. Waiting for some trouble, probably from Daddy or Abraham Pace or the men from the newspapers.

I’m a dozen paces away when a chair creaks. Whichever brother is sitting up there, he hears me coming and tips forward to ready himself. He is there on the porch, just ahead, thinking those are footsteps he hears but not yet able to see me. Behind him, the house is dark, the shutters drawn. Another creak and then the sound of a shotgun being pumped. I keep walking, rocks and gravel crunching under my boots.

My insides ache from the cold, damp air I suck in with each breath. Somewhere nearby, a fire burns. This time, it’s a rifle I hear. The second gun is behind me. A bolt flips up, slides forward. I stop. I can picture Daddy when he wrapped Dale’s hands around a rifle, forced his finger into the right spot, showed him how to brace it against his chest because he was too small to hold it to his shoulder.

“I want Ellis,” I say, wishing straightaway I’d said it differently. But that’s why I’ve come. “Just want Ellis.”

The chair creaks again. I keep walking, never stop because if I do, I might never get going again and I’ll end up back in my house, Daddy sleeping next to the lamp, Juna sleeping a quiet, dreamless sleep even though Dale’s dead. I walk up the stairs, not looking to see which brother sits in that chair, push open the door, and step into the kitchen.

Cousins and nephews and uncles must have come from outside the county. A half dozen men or more sleep in chairs and on the floor. Their snores rise and fall, one right over the top of the next. A small black stove sits in the far corner, the fire inside burning strong and steady, will have been since sunset. Smoky cedar fills the room, and the fire’s yellow glow flickers and bounces off the sleeping bodies, throwing long, rounded shadows on the walls.

Next to the stove, a boy sits on the floor, knees drawn up to his chest. So many nights, that had been Dale’s job-to keep the fire from going out. Daddy never liked to bother with starting a fire from scratch, but Dale wasn’t much good at knowing which pieces of wood were dry or which were too big or which would smoke. The boy tips his head in the direction of the only other room. Everyone knows my desire, even this boy.

Not wanting to hear the sound of another shell falling into its chamber, I say his name as I open the door. I walk in, not thinking about John Holleran back at his house. Since the day we buried Dale and I pushed his hands from me, John has stayed away. I hear him outside the house some days, asking Daddy what needs doing. Daddy is a shameless man, so he gives John plenty of work. I never come out to say hello, and when I hear his truck coming up the road, which I always do, I go inside and pull the door closed. I walk into Ellis Baine’s bedroom, not thinking about what a good man John Holleran is or the fine husband he’ll one day make for someone. I don’t think about the baby growing inside Juna, and I close the door behind me.

A small window lets in just enough light. Fully clothed in long trousers and a heavy shirt, Ellis is lying on the narrow bed, legs crossed, boots on his feet. A shotgun rests on his chest. He draws in a deep breath, but I don’t hear him let it out.

I start with my jacket, pull it off, and leave it to drop at my feet. Next I unlace my boots with fingers still stiff from the cold. My knuckles and the tips of my fingers ache. I can feel Ellis watching, but that’s why I’ve come here. I’ve come so he’ll see me, at least this once.

Toe to heel, I pry off each boot and sit them side by side on the floor. Under my coat, I wear only a dressing gown. A draft runs through the room, and the thin fabric flutters against my stomach and the front of each leg. If the light is reaching me, Ellis will see the shape of me now.

Juna is beautiful in the face and striking with her black eyes, but her body is hard because she works every day picking berries or chopping wood or topping tobacco. I’m the softer of us two. Daddy’s always said it. A man wants a woman with a soft place he can rest his head. He wants a woman who will stroke his hair and tell him he’s a good man who does good things and does things good. He wants a woman who will be warm when she lies next to him at night but who will stay out of his way when the sun rises. I’m all of those things, but Ellis will never know because at dawn Joseph Carl will hang.

Long before I slipped past Daddy and Juna, I decided where I’d be going and what I’d be doing. Since I first started thinking about wanting a man, I have wanted Ellis Baine. He knows things. He knows how to burn the fields for his tobacco and will stand over his land, sniffing the soil, rubbing it between his fingers, knowing just when the rain will come and leave the ground soft enough to set the tender plants. He doesn’t meet with the other fellows to talk about what is best. He always knows. He knows because he stands in the middle of his fields and feels something strong inside. That’s what I want-someone who feels something, anything, strong. Feels it so strong it fills him up and keeps him from eating proper or caring about hair grown too long. I want to feel things like that, to have things swell up inside me like they swell up inside Ellis Baine.

Slowly, I tug the twine holding my gown closed at the neckline. It will fall open, and this thing will happen. The bow unravels. The neckline of my gown falls open wide enough that I can tip one shoulder and then the other and it drops to my feet. He can see all of me now-the hidden dark places, the curves that dip and lift. My chest rises and falls more quickly than before. The light from the window and the shadows shift with every breath. Ellis’s head rolls forward and then back-a nod. I hadn’t seen the men, sitting there on the floor, leaning against the wall. Two more nephews, cousins, or uncles, both of them seeing all of me.

They stand. One of them makes a noise as if clearing his throat. They are slow about it. They pull on their boots, lace them up, take the time to tuck their shirts, and when finally they pass me by, their sleeves brush against my bare shoulders. One carries a jacket draped over his arm, heavy wool, sour like the doctor’s had been because it’s never able to dry through and through. They move slowly, knowing they’re allowed to look.

And they do. They look. They don’t bother with my face or hair or shoulders. Their eyes settle on me, on whichever spot is to their liking. One stands to the side of me, one to the back. Those eyes stay on me until the bed creaks beneath Ellis, and then the men move on. A burst of warm air fills the room when they open the door. It closes again, and Ellis exhales that deep breath.

“Why you here?” he says.

“I need to explain?”

He smiles. Not that I can see it on his face, but I can feel it. I’m sure I can feel it. I wait for him to call me to his bed. That would be his way. He’s one to call a person to him, never one to cross the distance himself. But he doesn’t. He swings his feet over the edge of the mattress. His boots hit the floor with a thud. The thin planks rattle beneath my bare feet. He groans as he stands, like maybe it’ll be some effort to have me. He takes a step in my direction and stops.

Outside the door, chairs topple; more heavy boots hit the floor. Someone bangs on the door to the small bedroom. It shakes in its frame. Footsteps pound across the room; voices shout. Maybe one sounds like John Holleran.

I bend to grab the thin cotton gown pooled at my feet, but before I can gather it and thread my arms through its sleeves, Ellis reaches for me and lifts me. He grabs me by my shoulders, slides his hands down my arms, and tugs the gown from me. Outside the room, there is more shouting, more banging on the door. Ellis stands before me, holds one wrist at my side, and lifts his other hand to my breast. He rests it there, not moving it. The door behind me opens, and in two steps, John Holleran is in the room.

I pull back, wanting to cover myself, but Ellis won’t let go. He pinches my wrist to hold me in place, lifts his hand from my breast, turns that hand over, and strokes my bare skin with the back of his fingers. Maybe John was going to raise his shotgun, maybe he was going to throw a fist, but the sight of Ellis Baine touching me that way-or, worse still, me standing in that room alone with the man-stops him. My clothes don’t lie torn and shredded on the floor. My boots sit neatly, side by side near the bed. He knows I’ve come here because I wanted to, and it breaks him somehow.

“Will wait outside to see you home,” John says.

He leaves as quickly as he came. Someone closes the door. When the voices and all the knocking about quiet in the next room, Ellis takes his hand from my chest, unwraps his fingers from my wrist, and as he waves at my clothes still lying on the ground, he turns away.

When I am dressed and have buttoned up my jacket, Ellis walks from the room. He says nothing, but I follow. We pass through the kitchen full of men, most of them scattered across the floor, their heads resting on rolled-up jackets or blankets, a few sitting at the table, where they lean on their elbows. Ellis pushes open the door and walks through ahead of me. At the stone block leading off the porch, he stands aside so I can pass by.

A full moon lights up the path ahead just enough that I can make out John Holleran leaning against the back of a truck. Outside the house, I take deep breaths of the cold, fresh air. John never lifts his head to see it is me walking his way, and he doesn’t stand until I have passed.

“See to it she don’t come back,” Ellis calls out from the porch. “What’s left is yours.”

FOR TWO WEEKS, Daddy has slept downstairs. The first night, he slept in a kitchen chair, his feet propped on the radiator, while Abraham continued sleeping it off on the sofa. Daddy had shook his head as he and Mama hauled Abraham out of his truck and helped him into the house. Annie had walked Grandma inside, and once in the kitchen, Grandma hugged Annie, held her face with two hands even though her palms were tore up from the fall, and made Annie promise to never do such a foolish thing again. Mama and Daddy laid Abraham out on the sofa and took off his hat and boots. When they were done, Daddy dropped down on the chair where he would sleep.

In the morning, with Abraham still snoring behind them, Daddy and Mama kissed, but over the next few days, Daddy twice caught Mama staring up at the Baines’ place. At first, Daddy stopped talking much. Annie thought he was still angry with her for making Grandma fall, but then Daddy saw Mama looking out the window a third time, and he stopped kissing her in the morning and has slept downstairs ever since.

Mrs. Baine was buried next to her husband in the cemetery across from the church. Though no Holleran attended the service, Abraham and Miss Watson went and said three of the Baine brothers were there, Ellis Baine included. The ladies served jam cake and coffee in the church basement when it was over, and while the other two boys, men now, left town, Ellis stayed. He has spent every day clearing the land that has gone to seed, yanking up the woody tomato plants, hammering nails and patching holes. Daddy has made more trips than usual to the tobacco barn. He had to keep an eye on the lavender he said. Nights have turned damp, more damp than he’d expected, and it wouldn’t do to let mold get a foothold.

“You ain’t moving my day, are you?” Grandma said, afraid her lavender wouldn’t be ready for the fourth Sunday in June, which is the date she had been telling all the ladies at church.

“No, Mama,” Daddy had said. “I ain’t changing nothing.”

The nights have been no damper than every other year. Daddy just needed an excuse to keep watch over Ellis Baine.

And while the nights have been damp, as damp as usual, the days have brought sun and so the lavender has continued to ripen and turn a deeper shade of purple. Grandma sews her sachets every night, always making sure not to favor her right hand, which took the worst of her fall. She’s been doing her best, particularly in the first few days after her accident, not to walk with a limp or rub her sore hip. Whenever Mama and Daddy ask how she’s feeling, she acts like she doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Why, I already forgot about that fall.

As fast as Grandma sews the sachets, Annie stuffs them. It’s a good job for her because it doesn’t take much thinking. She still stays up late most nights, watching for Aunt Juna, though she hasn’t snuck out of the house again. Each night, as she watches for the faint orange glow, she imagines Ellis Baine doing the same. That was him up there, looking for Aunt Juna, same as Annie, though whatever his reasons, they’ll be entirely different.

And while Grandma sews and Annie stuffs, Caroline stitches up the small holes, but only when she isn’t off with Jacob Riddle. A half dozen times, Daddy has allowed Jacob to take Caroline for a walk down the road and back, but only after Mama reminded Daddy that a good many years separate them too. Jacob has been to supper and talked about life with his aunt in Louisville and how being a deputy isn’t as good as being a pitcher but he’ll make a solid living for himself and his family. That made Caroline smile and the thought of a family turned her cheeks red, which made Daddy tap his fork on the table until she stopped that smiling.

Besides making the sachets she’ll hand out to all the ladies who come the fourth Sunday in June, Grandma has been scrubbing the linen tablecloths that have been in storage all year. She hangs them on the line, and when they dry and are still spotted or stained, she tells Annie they will try again tomorrow. Once they are finally declared presentable, Annie is put to work doing the pressing and folding. Daddy hoses down tables and chairs that have been stacked in the attic all winter, Mama bakes cornbread muffins to freeze ahead of time, and Caroline makes faces as she molds handfuls of ground beef into patties Daddy will throw on the grill. Twice during all the cleaning and preparing, Caroline has smeared Annie’s head with mayonnaise and worked it into the ends of her hair, and she trimmed a good inch with Mama’s help. Mama says it looks real nice. Annie can’t much see a difference.

“I’m going to meet Miss Watson,” Mama says on a Monday morning, the last Monday before the fourth Sunday.

Annie is working the tip of an iron around the edge of a linen napkin, being careful to cover over the small bluish stain in the napkin’s center so Grandma won’t send it back to the laundry. Besides having been burned by the iron a good many times, Annie’s fingers are raw, the skin having cracked on the tips of a few, from spending so much time in warm, soapy water. Caroline is dabbing at her thumb with a cotton ball doused in lavender oil-nursing a pinprick from all that sewing she’s been doing.

“You girls should come along,” Mama says, tugging on her white gloves as she walks through the living room.

Mama must be meeting Miss Watson at the dress shop for her final alterations. No other reason Mama would wear her white gloves. She smiles and rocks her hips from side to side so her pale-blue skirt puffs up and twirls. She has rolled and pinned her hair and is wearing the same hat she wore this past Easter.

“You look real nice, Mama,” Caroline says, sticking her sore finger in her mouth.

Annie folds the napkin over, presses the seam with the hot iron, folds again, presses again, and adds it to the pile, taking care the stain doesn’t show. She has barely left the house since sneaking out to find Aunt Juna, not only because she feels like punishing herself is the thing to do but also because she promised Grandma. That’s one good reason not to go to town. Fear of seeing Ryce Fulkerson is another good reason. Mama is always saying time has a way of healing, and while there has been some scabbing over, it hasn’t been nearly enough.

“Caroline’s right, Mama,” Annie says, the memory of Ryce standing over her, his cool skin brushing against her arm revisiting her as if it happened yesterday. “You look real nice. But I think maybe I shouldn’t go.”

Behind Mama, Daddy walks down the stairs in his stocking feet, passes her by without kissing her cheek or swatting her hind end the way he usually would.

“I’d like some company,” Mama says, watching the back of Daddy as he crosses through the kitchen on his way outside. If she was meaning to talk to him, he makes no sign of having heard.

As if she thinks no one is watching, Mama’s smile fades and a sadness settles in her eyes, the same sadness she takes on when she stares out the living room window at the Baines’ place. She thinks no one is watching then too. Mama must be fighting off a memory same as Annie. The screen door slams closed behind Daddy, and it reminds Mama she isn’t alone and her lips snap back into a smile.

“I’ll drop you girls at the café,” she says. “You can have a cinnamon roll while you wait. Do you good to get out of the house. I think we’ve kept you cooped up long enough.”

“That’d be real nice, Mama,” Caroline says, already halfway up the stairs. “I’ll just change and be right down.”

“What’ll Grandma say?” Annie says, glancing at Grandma’s closed bedroom door.

Instead of an answer, Mama gives Annie a wink and touches the stack of napkins still warm from the ironing Annie gave them. Mama runs a finger over a small blue stain Annie hadn’t noticed and presses a finger to her lips.

“We won’t be gone long at all. Need to be back by lunchtime because Abraham will be stopping by with more chairs. Thought to have him some food ready.”

Since the night Mama and Daddy lugged Abraham into the living room, he hasn’t been back for whiskey or cards, but he stops by every day to talk with Daddy or to borrow a shovel or rake of some kind. He’ll have a glass of tea, visit with Mama while she peels carrots or snaps the ends off a bowlful of pole beans, and always he lingers long enough to see Annie.

“You seen anything more of her?” he’ll ask when no one else is nearby to hear.

Each time, Annie shakes her head, and Abraham’s shoulders slump and his wide-open eyes narrow to their normal size.

Annie watches out the window every night, looking for some sign of Aunt Juna-an orange-tipped cigarette floating out there in the dark, a shadow slipping into the tobacco barn or over the rock fence. Many mornings, Mama has said Annie didn’t look well and pressed a hand to her forehead. Annie didn’t look well because while everyone else was asleep, she was watching and waiting for Aunt Juna.

“You sure?” Abraham said just yesterday, and he took Annie by the shoulders, his large hands covering her over and drawing her close, going so far as to hurt her.

Even though Abraham wasn’t drinking whiskey with Daddy, he was drinking it somewhere. The sharp smell made Annie tuck her chin and turn her head.

“But you did see her?” he had said. “You seen her up there, and you know she’s coming back. You said the empty rocker rocked, and that means she’s coming back.”

The way Abraham leaned into Annie and studied her eyes and breathed his whiskey breath in her face made her wish she didn’t have the know-how. She wished she didn’t know things were coming before they had come, or that the histories, all of their histories, didn’t sizzle underfoot and in the air. Abraham believed stronger than anyone else ever had, stronger even than Grandma, and that made Annie more afraid she was right.

IT’S BEEN FIVE minutes, maybe ten, since folks learned Joseph Carl is already dead. Someone gathers Juna and me. A hand cups the small of my back and must do the same to Juna because we move forward together at the same pace and in the same direction. I think it must be Daddy, but the hand is strong and firm and certain. It’s not Daddy.

Our smoky breath comes more quickly, filling the air around us. The hand forces me ahead, faster with each step. It guides us beyond the gallows. Folks, their heads tilted up so they can shout at Sheriff Irlene and the others, stumble aside and allow us to pass. I look up to see who has come for Juna and me, and I trip over one of the many people. The hand grabs the back of my collar and gives a yank, saves me from falling. It’s John Holleran, staring straight ahead. I ask him what is happening. Where’s Daddy? Where are you taking us? He doesn’t answer.

John walks with us until we reach the sheriff’s office. He shoves at the men who shout questions and slaps away the pencils and paper they wave in our faces. Someone asks would we be still a moment for a picture and John knocks a camera to the ground. It shatters at our feet. The door to the small office opens, we stumble through, and it closes behind.

Abigail Watson is the first person I see once inside. She sits in the same chair where Juna had sat the night Sheriff Irlene first arrested Joseph Carl. A silver tray rests on her lap. Joseph Carl’s final meal, except he never ate it and the tray is still full. It’s Mrs. Brashear’s cornbread smothered with beans and a sliced melon. Abigail’s grandparents must have dropped her here and then gone on to the hanging. I stare at the tray and wonder where Mrs. Brashear managed to find melon. What a shame Joseph Carl never got to enjoy it.

By the time I have pulled off my jacket, scarf, and gloves, John Holleran is gone. I swing around, looking for him, call out his name. I look to Abigail, and she points one slender finger at the door. She’s wearing white gloves as she might for Easter or on Christmas Eve. She means to tell me John is gone. When she lowers her hand and places them both back in her lap, I glance around the rest of the room.

While John is gone, Daddy is still here. From the looks of the room, he’s been railing, throwing things, and likely cursing. His hat has been knocked to the floor, his hair sticks to his forehead where he’s sweated, and his chest is pumping like he just finished an uphill climb. He’s upended a lantern, its slender chimney broken in two large pieces. A chair lies on its side, a stack of papers is scattered across the floor as if blown from the desk by a gust of wind, and a three-legged stool now has only two legs. At the sight of me, he reaches for my hand and drags me across the floor.

“No, Daddy,” I say.

He reaches for Juna too, but she is ahead of us and already stands outside the back room. The door is open, and I see the soles of two boots. I pull against Daddy, lean away with all my weight. Juna glances back and then walks inside, where Joseph Carl is laid out on a table, laid out there so Daddy and Juna and I can see for certain he’s dead.

Daddy says we have to see for ourselves and that we have to touch Joseph Carl or he’ll haunt us all the rest of our days. Juna nods as Daddy says this and walks farther on into the room. I don’t move, so Daddy grabs me again, this time with both hands, drags me through the open door, and I wish John Holleran were here.

John won’t come to the house ever again, not even to see Daddy or to ask after what chores need doing. He’ll always remember the sight of me and Ellis Baine’s fingers brushing against the tip of my breast. It’ll make him close his eyes tight, shake his head. He’ll surely have imagined the day he’d see me in that way, standing bare before him. He’ll have dreamed of that moment, thought he’d be my husband and I’d be his wife. He’s never much believed in his mama’s know-how, not like other folks, but it always made him happy to hear her say he and I were marked for a future together. He would wink at me, smile, tell his mama all in good time. But now, the sight of me and the memory of me offering myself to Ellis Baine is the thing that has made John Holleran hate for the first time in his life.

Lying there on that table, Joseph Carl looks smaller than he ever did in life. But the same happened to Dale. So quickly, he faded and withered, and now the same has become of Joseph Carl. He wears a blue flannel shirt buttoned up under his chin and at both wrists. His hair, though unwashed, is smooth as if someone drew a comb through it and flattened it down after with the palm of her hand. He wears a leather belt and dark trousers. After it was over, sometime in the middle of the night, Joseph Carl’s mama came and did this for him. She dressed him and tended his hair and probably wiped his face and dug the dirt from under his nails. I know now. This is why John Holleran had come to Ellis’s house. He wasn’t trailing after me. He had come to tell Ellis that Joseph Carl was gone, but instead he found me.

Daddy pushes me toward the body, shoves me so I stumble up next to Joseph Carl. Juna already stands there, and at her side stands Abigail. I didn’t see her set her tray aside and walk into the room. Daddy had to drag me, but Abigail must have come on her own. Her grandmother has pulled Abigail’s hair back for this occasion and tied it off with a bow and dressed the child in her best cotton dress. She’s sprouted since last summer, and now the dress is short in the arms and the hem rides a few inches too high, showing her brown boots. Dale was Abigail’s only friend. Now she’ll spend all her days with Abraham. Juna wraps one arm around Abigail’s shoulders, and her other hand hovers just above Joseph Carl’s brow. She looks as if to press her hand to his forehead in search of a fever like I used to do for Dale when he was feeling poorly.

“I wanted to see,” she says, drawing her hand over Joseph Carl’s head, smoothing his hair the same as his mama must have done. “I wanted to see a man hanged.”

She trails that same hand down along Joseph Carl’s cheek, runs a finger over the crease between his lips like I’ve seen her do to Abraham Pace. It makes Abraham groan to have that done to him. He must miss it since he doesn’t come around anymore. Taking Abigail by the hand, Juna makes the girl touch Joseph Carl on the cheek. She doesn’t want his spirit haunting the child. At first, Juna guides Abigail’s hand, but then Abigail slides another step closer and, with both hands, cradles Joseph Carl’s face. Juna smiles, lifts her eyes, and looks at me.

I let myself, made myself, believe Joseph Carl had done it. He told Sheriff Irlene where Dale could be found, and so he had to have been there, had to have seen and done those things to Dale. It was the only way I could bear the trial and the thought of what would come to pass. But I could only prop up that belief for a short while. Seeing Juna stroke this dead man’s cheek and trail her fingers over his thin, pale lips, I know the chill that works its way from my toes into my knees and on up into my stomach is the knowing that Joseph Carl didn’t do the things to Dale that led to him dying, but someone else did.

Juna has made these things happen and made people believe. Even me. This is the reason Daddy won’t look her in the eye or give her a chance to work her way into his thoughts. Juna is smarter than we are, has a way of working things out long before they’ve come to pass. I always thought, hoped, Daddy was cowardly and superstitious for all his fears of Juna. I think now Daddy is the wisest among us.

Maybe what Juna says next frightens me because those eyes of hers are black. Maybe if a person with ordinary brown eyes had said it, my breathing wouldn’t have picked up. It’s the way she speaks softly, as if to a child, as if to the baby who grows inside. It’s the way her lids close and open again slowly and with thought, her not wanting even to disturb Joseph Carl with the sound of her blinking eyes.

But Juna is the one who says it. Juna, with her black eyes who tilts her head in such an odd fashion. Juna says it, and I know she’s the reason Dale is dead. I don’t know why or what she did, but she is a woman who would see her own brother die and an innocent man hang, and I begin to fear for Ellis Baine and John Holleran and even my own daddy.

“Do you suppose,” Juna says, smiling as she cups Joseph Carl’s chin with her hands, “they might hang another?”

WRAPPING HER TWO hands around the deck of cards so Mama won’t see it, Annie walks back to the car, leaving Ellis Baine alone to fill the hole. Mama slips into the front seat and is staring straight ahead at the folks in the café when Annie opens the back door and climbs in. Mama waits until Annie has pulled her door closed and Caroline has rolled up her window before saying anything.

“What was that?” Mama says.

“Being kind,” Annie says.

Mama swings around in such a fashion that Annie pulls back like she might get slapped even though Mama has never, not once in her life, slapped either of her girls.

“Do not talk smart to me.”

“Wasn’t doing nothing, Mama,” Annie says. She rests both hands in her lap much the way Caroline is all the time doing, except Annie isn’t thinking of fine manners. She’s hiding the cards in her lap.

Grandma said there would be days Annie’s insides would near to spill over. She said yearning and wondering and yearning again would fill her up so full she might want to scream out. But don’t scream, Grandma had said. Take it all in until it reaches the very top of you, and you’ll make room for more.

“I thought I’d help him,” Annie says, not able to still the quiver in her voice. “Asked could I help cover his brother over. He said it was kind. Said I was kind like my mama, kind like you.”

Mama stares at Annie, stares her straight in the eyes. Annie’s black eyes don’t ever give Mama pause. After a long moment, she reaches out as if to touch Annie on the cheek, but she can’t reach, so she drops her hand and pats Annie’s knee instead. Then she turns to Caroline and says, “Let’s get on home.”

As they pass Ellis Baine, he props his shovel at his side. Mama gives him the same polite bow of her head she might give the preacher. They drive home the rest of the way in silence, and whatever is keeping Mama closemouthed, it’s keeping her thoughts otherwise occupied and she doesn’t think to wonder why Caroline, who usually chats nonstop no matter how long the trip, has not said a single word.

It started the day Mrs. Baine was found dead. Something settled on Mama’s shoulders, and it’s been weighing her down ever since. The arrival of Ellis Baine made that load all the heavier. Normally Daddy would be the one to hug Mama, kiss her, stroke her face. He’d insist she let him fix whatever troubled her. Mama would do the same for Daddy. She’d do the same by letting Daddy do the fixing. It makes him happy to be the fixer of things. But Daddy isn’t inclined to fix whatever this is, and without Daddy to help, it is getting the better of Mama. When she pulls into the drive and the sheriff’s car is parked outside their front door, the weight on Mama grows so heavy she can’t, won’t, get out of the car.

“Annie,” Mama says, staring at the back door leading into the kitchen.

She’s going to ask Annie to go inside. Mama’s afraid of what’s in there, and she’s going to send Annie instead. Not Caroline. She knows Caroline would never, could never, do it. But Mama is mistaken. Annie can’t go either. She’s no stronger than Caroline. Mama is mistaken.

The back door opens before Annie can tell Mama no. Grandma walks onto the porch and begins pacing back and forth. Her hair has pulled loose, and strands of it hang down alongside her face. Her apron, normally tied carefully at her waist, is draped over her shoulder, and when it slips off, Grandma takes no notice.

Mama crosses her arms over the steering wheel and buries her face there. Caroline glances back at Annie, having forgotten for the moment that she’s angry.

“I’m sorry, Annie,” Mama says, her head still buried in her arms. “I thought Ellis was here again. Thought he’d come back, but we just left him, didn’t we?” She lets out a laugh that might turn into a cry. “Don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Grandma looks angry, Mama,” Caroline says.

“Don’t you worry about that,” Mama says and throws open her door.

“Is she with you?” Grandma shouts, stepping down to the second stair and shielding her eyes with one hand to get a better look in the car. She limps as she does it, which means she’s angry enough to forget about pretending. “Annie,” she shouts out again. “Is Annie with you?”

“Yes,” Mama says. The panic in Grandma’s voice grabs hold of Mama. She pulls open Annie’s door and yanks her from the car. “Annie’s here. She’s fine.”

“Inside,” Grandma says. The cut on Grandma’s face has healed over, but as she waves an arm at Annie, Mama, and Caroline, she can’t hide the blue bruising on it that only seems to have worsened since the fall. “Inside, the all of you.”

Grandma’s lavender is simmering again, and they all sit around the table-Daddy, the sheriff, and Miss Watson. Grandma is calming them all, which means something has happened. Abraham Pace stands behind Miss Watson, one hand on her shoulder, looking small for the first time in his life.

“She looked just like her,” Miss Watson says, pointing a finger at Annie as she crosses into the kitchen. “I’d have thought it was Annie staring in my windows if I didn’t know better. Was it, Annie? Was it you?”

Annie shakes her head and takes a step backward. Mama wraps an arm around Annie’s shoulder and draws her in tight.

“What’s happened?” Mama says, shifting herself around so she stands between Miss Watson and Annie.

Black smudges frame Miss Watson’s eyes as if she’s been rubbing at them or wiping at them and she’s smeared her eye makeup. Her chest shudders every time she inhales, and her hair has yet to see a comb or brush this morning.

“Then it was Juna I saw,” Miss Watson says, looking up at Abraham. “Even after all these years, I still knew her. Would know her anywhere. She looked just like Annie. Exactly like her.”

“You need to hush that talk,” Abraham says, smoothing a hand over her hair and locking eyes with Daddy.

It’s nearly out for everyone to hear. Miss Watson saying Aunt Juna looks like Annie, exactly like Annie, is as near to the surface as the secret has ever been in this house.

“Says someone was poking around her place last night.” Grandma leans in so she can whisper to Mama. “Says she got a close-up look. Says Juna looked right in her window.”

“You can’t leave me no more, Abey,” Miss Watson says. “Promise you won’t leave me no more.”

Abraham looks around the room, his eyes passing over every one of them. He’s apologizing in that silent way families have of apologizing to one another.

“I won’t leave you. And we’ll be married before you know it. Ain’t that right, Mary?” he says to Grandma, who is watching out the kitchen window and not much listening to Abraham. “Ain’t that right, Sarah? They’re going to see to a perfect day, aren’t you? A perfect day and we’ll be married. Juna ain’t going to ruin that. Ain’t no one going to ruin that.”

“Did you find cigarettes?” Annie asks, pulling away from Mama and stepping up to Miss Watson. “And did she have eyes like mine, as black as mine?”

Miss Watson’s eyes stretch wide. Even small as they are, they stretch open until they look almost like normal eyes. She nods, slow at first and then faster.

“Why is she here, Annie?” Miss Watson says. “What have you done to bring her here?”

“Don’t you ask such a thing of this child,” Grandma says, pushing between Mama and Annie to stand at Annie’s side.

“Please,” Mama says. “Let’s not stir up trouble. It was probably a neighbor, Abigail. Or kids, kids pulling a prank.”

“I’d rather stir up trouble,” Grandma says, “than see something befall this child.”

“Mother,” Daddy says, “you’ve no call to say that.”

“No call to say what?” It’s Caroline. She’s standing at the end of the table, staring at Miss Watson.

“Your Uncle Dale died because I didn’t speak my mind back then,” Grandma says. “Or rather I did speak my mind, but no one cared to listen. I knew that girl was bound to bring heartache, and I’ll not have it happen again.”

Mama takes a backward step.

“I’m sorry, Sarah,” Grandma says. “I don’t mean no harm, but I’ll not let you make light of what this girl’s telling us.”

“That’ll be quite enough,” Sheriff Fulkerson says, rubbing his forehead and lifting a hand to Annie so she’ll not answer Miss Watson’s questions. “Let’s not have this get the better of us.”

The men who came from Lexington told Sheriff Fulkerson he was a damn fool for wasting their time. They drove all that way to see what killed a woman old as Mrs. Baine? Old age killed her, they said. No trauma to the head or any other part of her. No bullet hole. No knife wound. No bruises around her neck. Sheriff Fulkerson asked if those men knew of Juna Crowley. They smiled when they said they did and then silenced themselves as if waiting for the sheriff to try to explain how Juna Crowley and the girl who looked just like her had one damn thing to do with this dead old woman. The men would have called Sheriff Fulkerson a damn fool all over again if he had tried to explain. Instead, he said none of those things, and the men from Lexington had patted him on the back and said that folks who grow old have a way of eventually dying.

“John, how about you and I take a drive,” the sheriff says. “Let’s us have a look around Abigail’s place.”

Pushing back from the table, Daddy pulls on his hat. “That all right with you, Abe? Caroline’ll see to Abigail. Take her upstairs, let her clean herself up.”

Abraham nods and pulls out Miss Watson’s chair as she stands. Caroline walks toward the living room and waits there for Miss Watson to join her. As she waits, Caroline keeps her eyes on the floor, won’t look at Annie. She’s remembered about the café and Lizzy Morris and Annie saying she saw Jacob Riddle in that well, and she’s back to being angry.

“Well,” Abraham says, his voice normal again and looking his usual size now that Miss Watson has left the room. “Look at here.”

He lifts one of Annie’s hands, the hand that holds the deck of cards Ellis Baine gave her.

“Here’s that deck I was looking for the other night.”

He takes the cards, tosses them in the air, and catches them one-handed. When Miss Watson was in the room, Abraham had shrunk in on himself, but with her gone, he’s looking happy, expectant, excited even. He’s all of those things because he believes it now for sure. First Annie saw her and now Miss Watson saw her. Aunt Juna is home.

“Thought I lost these,” he says as he tucks the deck in his shirt pocket, leans forward, and shouts after Miss Watson. “See there, Abigail,” he says. “Our luck is turning already. Found them cards we was missing. My lucky deck of cards.”

THE ROOM IS dark except for the glow of a single kerosene lantern that sits near the bed. Juna lies on her back, the round bulge in her stomach straining her skin until it’s taut like a stretched hide. She coughs-a deep cough that rattles in her chest. It’s the cold air that burns her lungs. Outside, the wind rushes down the hill and past our small house, whistling through the cracks in the walls and the ceiling and around the one small window. Every night, rushing and whistling and it never stops.

The wet cloth on Juna’s forehead has turned stiff with the cold. I douse it in water kept warm by the fire, wring it, blot it to her face. At the end of the bed, near Juna’s feet, I fuss with a wooden stool until it’s positioned just so. As I move through the lantern’s smoky light, I throw long, dark shadows. Placing one hand under Juna’s right knee, I lift it and, with the other hand, push on her shin until her leg is bent. I do the same with her other leg, help her to sit up, and show her how to hook her arms under each knee. It’s what the women told me I should do. None of them would come but instead taught me what to do and how to do it and wished me well.

“God damn this cold,” Juna says.

I press Juna’s knees up and out. Strands of her long yellow hair have pulled loose from the cotton kerchief she wears. Even in the dim light, her cheeks and forehead shine and have the same pink glow she’d have after a day walking the fields under a full sun.

“Push now. Don’t stop until I say.”

When we knew the day was getting close, I pasted strips of cloth in the room’s one small window. I cut feed bags in long, thin strips and soaked them in flour and water I mixed up on the porch. It’s meant to keep out the cold, cut the draft, but even as I lower myself onto the stool, cold air settles in around my ankles and brushes past my cheeks.

“You’ve got to push harder,” I say, and silently, I count to ten. “Keep on. Keep on pushing.”

The room is like a box, sealed up tight so no one can see inside. But really it’s not so tight. Streams of icy air stir up the flame in the lantern, scattering its yellow glow. It moves across Juna’s face, lighting up a sliver here and a sliver there. First her left eye. It catches the light, reflects it back. Then the side of her face, the hollow in her neck, the strands of hair clinging to her forehead.

“I’m too cold,” Juna says, dropping her hold on one knee so she can wipe the hair from her eyes. “God damn this cold.”

“That don’t matter,” I say. “This baby is coming.”

It’s too early, far too early. That’s what the women said when I told them I thought the time was near. They shook their heads, counted on their fingers, discussed the last full moon and when we’d expect another. Too early, they said. So early it might be a blessing. Just over five months, they counted. Five months since Joseph Carl planted the child. Too little time. If it is to come, it’ll never draw a breath. Too tiny. Not yet ready for this world. It might be a blessing.

Behind me, the bedroom door opens. The rest of the house isn’t sealed up, and cold rushes into the room. The small lantern dims. Juna falls back on her elbows. Her face disappears in the weakened light and appears again after the door closes. Footsteps cross the wooden floorboards.

“Not fitting for you to be here,” I say, knowing it’s Daddy without looking.

He doesn’t answer, but a few more steps cross the wooden planks that run the length of the room and then fall silent. The cigar crackles as he sucks on its end and smoke settles in over Juna and me. A single chair is pushed up against the wall, yet he doesn’t sit. Instead, he stands, arms crossed, feet spread wide. It’s what he does, what he always does. Next to the other men, he’s not so large and not so smart and not so good with his crop. He’ll stand like he thinks a man should.

“I’m seeing something,” I say.

I can smell him. In the small room, closed up tight with floury strips of cloth, his odor takes no time reaching me. Even over the cigar smoke filling the air, I smell him. I close my eyes as if that will stop me from breathing him in. It’s sweat, sour and moldy; damp socks rinsed and pulled on again before they’ve dried; strong coffee warmed over two, three, four mornings until the pot is empty.

“It’ll be harder now,” I say, lifting my head until my eyes lock on Juna’s.

It’s what the women told me. When you see the head, they warned, she’ll want to stop. Make her push harder. Make her push until it’s out.

“Harder you push, quicker she’ll be here.”

“She?” Juna says. “You said she. Can you see?”

With that one word-“she”-the baby is real. She has tiny fingers with paper-thin nails, pink skin, and clear eyes.

“Haven’t gotten to that end yet,” I say. “But won’t Abraham be proud? You’ll be his special girls, the two of you.”

The smell of Daddy is stronger. I taste him in the air. Juna begins to pant, and I know with every short breath, she’ll be tasting him too. I think she’ll look at him in that way she does, that she’ll tilt her head just so, raise a brow, make him afraid so he’ll leave. But she does nothing, says nothing.

“Push,” I say again.

The women told me to make Juna push or she’d starve the baby of her air.

“Push, Juna. She needs you to push.”

There it is again-she. Every week and then every day, Juna grew larger as the baby grew. She plumped up to look more like me, softer, rounder. Her upper arms grew so large we cut the seams in each sleeve of her cotton blouses, and her cheeks and hips rounded out in a way that will probably stick with her long after the baby is born.

The shadow on the west wall shifts. Two heavy boots rearrange themselves.

“Push, Juna,” I say. “You have to push.”

The women told me all that could go wrong. If it’s coming feet first, you’ll be without hope. If the girl won’t push, can’t push, you’ll be without hope. It’s a wicked time of year, they had said, to be giving birth. She was meant to come in the spring. It should take nine months, maybe ten, the ladies had said.

Folks say Abraham has been planning for a spring wedding, just before the tobacco goes in the ground. He has forgotten what I cannot. He has forgotten the other men Juna laid with and that the baby is no more Abraham’s than a half a dozen other men’s. Abraham has seen Juna over the past months, a few times in town, and so he’s seen how Juna has grown soft and round. Each time we’ve seen him, he has walked with a straighter back, his head held high again, always leading with his chin.

And while Juna is loved more and more every day, I have been forgotten. John Holleran no longer comes to the house. He doesn’t want me anymore, and Ellis Baine never did. Daddy always said I would be pleasing to a man, my softness something a man would want at the end of the day. He always said a man would want to rest his head on my chest, not Juna’s, and that he’d want me to stroke his forehead, tell him what a good man he was. Daddy always said I was pleasing, but now no man will have me.

Juna cries out. First one shoulder appears and then another. It’s quick now. They said it would be, God willing, if all went as it should. And here she is. A little girl. Not so small as we feared she would be. She’s long and lean, her skin so thin I think I can see her insides.

“I was right,” I say, standing from the stool and cradling the small body in my two hands. “A girl. Tiny as can be. A girl.”

Juna lies back and closes her eyes as I wrap the baby. I wrap her one way and then the other and draw the end up around her feet. Keep her warm, the women told me. Clean her face and nose. She cries out like they said she would, like they said she should. I hold her to my chest, but she’s still tethered to Juna. We wait for the cord to stop pulsing, and then Daddy steps up and with his pocketknife saws at it until it falls away.

“Give her to Daddy,” Juna says, her eyes still closed.

I look from Juna to Daddy and back again. He stretches out his hands, but instead of passing her off, I cradle her in one arm and, with my free hand, rub Juna’s soft stomach and tell her to give another push. She does nothing, but still it comes.

“That’s it. There we go.”

The room is quiet; even the wind has calmed. Juna lets her legs fall flat, rests her arms at her sides.

“Give her to Daddy.”

ANNIE’S FIRST THOUGHT had been to return the cards to Ellis and tell him she didn’t know who they belonged to. She would make a big show of telling him all the folks she questioned-Mama, Daddy, Grandma, Caroline, even the sheriff. But Abraham took the cards so Annie has nothing to return and no way to explain what became of them unless she tells the truth.

All her life, Annie has kept an eye out for the Baines. If it rattles, choose a different path. If it looks like a Baine, do the same. She’ll walk no closer than the fence. She’ll tell him she lost the cards and she doesn’t know where they came from. They’re just plain old cards. Faded and tattered and all bent up. Could have come from anywhere. From the drugstore, most likely. Or maybe the market where they sell playing cards near the batteries.

He won’t see her coming until she’s reached the barn, especially if she hunches down as she walks uphill through the lavender. The fields will be perfect for Sunday. Daddy has a way of picking the most perfect day. He’ll get up early that morning, Annie and Caroline too, and they’ll cut all the bundles to be sold. Fresh-cut, Grandma says. That’s the secret. That’s the thing that keeps folks coming back.

Daddy and Annie will reach deep into the bushes, grab a handful of the stems-Annie, not Caroline, because Annie’s hands are much larger-hack the bunch at its base with a rounded knife and snap a band around the whole of it. They’ll layer the bundles in a flatbed wagon Daddy will drag from row to row, and Caroline will tie off each bouquet with an eight-inch purple ribbon.

The lavender oil from last year’s crop is already distilled, bottled, and stored in the lower kitchen cabinets, where it’ll stay cool and safe from light. There will be more baking to do as the week comes to a close, and this year, there will be a special cake-a wedding cake. Harvest on the morning of the fourth Sunday in June, or a Sunday thereabouts-when that flatbed wagon is piled high with lavender bundles, the purple blossoms dripping off one side, the satin ribbons dripping off the other-is the one time Daddy might say he likes lavender farming better than tobacco farming.

But the real work will begin after the fourth Sunday. They’ll harvest the rest of the fields. They’ll cut and bundle, and Daddy will drive it to Louisville. They’ll next start to distill the oil and then prepare for next year’s crop and hope for a mild winter. Eventually, they’ll set up the trays to start new seedlings, and Daddy will stay awake all night to make sure the warmers don’t fail. The coming of the lavender will begin again.

As Annie passes through the rows, trying not to let her skirt brush against the stems and stir up the odor any more than has already been stirred by the heat of the day, the truth starts pushing its way up and out. She feels an obligation to Ellis Baine for being so kind as to deny her being the daughter of Joseph Carl. It might bring some peace to all of them, to both families, if she were to offer up this truth. At the top of the hill, Grandpa’s tobacco barn stands to her left. The rock fence is straight ahead, and Ellis Baine is still leaning there against the well, waiting. Annie steps up to the fence that stretches to the road on one end and farther than she knows on the other, presses her hands flat on top, hoists herself over, and walks a few steps toward Ellis Baine.

“Abraham Pace,” she says, knowing the moment she says it, she has made a mistake. This won’t bring peace of any kind. But she’s done it and she’s put something in motion, and now she can’t stop.

“Abraham Pace,” she says in a louder voice, so Ellis will be certain to hear. “He saw me holding them and took them from me. Said he was sure glad I found them. Said they missed them when they sat down to play cards.”

Ellis nods. She had expected her answer to matter to him, that it would mean something important, but he leans there, picking the bark off a twig, not making any show of being upset or carrying on in any way.

“Why do you care about an old deck of cards?” Annie says. “What’s them belonging to Abraham Pace mean?”

Besides driving stakes for Mrs. Baine’s tomatoes, Daddy has done other things for her over the years. Mama never liked him going up there, said a person never knew what might happen, but Daddy always said it was the least they could do. He said it like her being alone in that house without her boys to help her keep it up was largely Mama and Daddy’s fault. It’s the least I could do, he always said when he would come home from hammering a sheet of plywood on her roof or replacing a few rotted boards on her porch.

“That boy down there hollering for you,” Ellis says, ignoring Annie’s question about the cards and Abraham Pace. “You see that boy in this well?”

“No.”

“Betting he wishes you did.”

Might as well mow it all down, Daddy said the last time he went to Mrs. Baine’s place. He was there to fix a broken-out window and couldn’t hardly get a new window to fit because the house had so settled it was no longer anywhere close to square. But in the few short weeks Ellis Baine has been back, he’s stripped away the clutter. He’s toted off rusted, twisted scraps of metal and the bones of discarded furniture, all of it tossed out on the porch or along the side of the house. Ellis has mowed down the grass and turned under the weeds. Grandma says he’s cleaning up the place so it can begin again with new folks.

“You got a family?” Annie asks.

“Couple nieces. Bundle of nephews.”

“None of your own?”

He shakes his head.

“Never married?”

“Nope.”

“Is that because of my mama?” Annie asks. “Did you love her?”

“Should have,” Ellis says, digging a thumbnail under a stubborn piece of bark. “If I hadn’t been such a damn fool, probably would have. Plenty of fellows are fools when they’re young.”

“She loved you.”

He shakes his head.

“Then why does it make her so sad to see you?”

“Not sadness.”

“Then what?”

“It’s regret, I suppose.”

“What’s she regretting?”

He points his nearly bald stick at Annie. “Not telling you that. None of your damn business.” And while he’s pointing and cursing, he’s smiling too. Almost smiling. “Truth?” he asks.

Annie nods.

“As much as I’m a damn fool for not loving a woman like your mama, she’s probably figuring to be a damn fool for ever thinking she was in love with a man like me.”

Annie says nothing, mostly because she doesn’t understand what Ellis has said. So instead of trying to talk, she works on remembering his exact words so she can keep on thinking about it later and maybe piece it together.

“You ought get back home now,” Ellis says.

Annie thought Ellis Baine had pulled out all the tomatoes, but walking toward the well, toward Ellis Baine, who has gone back to picking the last of the bark from that twig, she sees a few yet grow. He picked good ones to save. They’re waxy and green, smaller and newer than the tangled plants that had been here before, but soon enough, they’ll grow too top-heavy to stand on their own.

“You still got those stakes you took out?” she asks.

Ellis pushes off the well, cocks his brows at Annie because now he knows she’s been watching him in the days since he came back, and walks toward the house.

“String too,” Annie shouts after him. “String of some kind.”

She’s snapping off some of the top buds so the plants will stop growing up and start growing out when she hears Daddy.

“Annie?”

She looks to one side and then the other.

“Annie, what are you doing?”

She stands and turns. He’s there, just this side of the fence.

“What are you doing over here?”

But before Annie can answer, before she can tell about the cards belonging to Abraham Pace and the stakes Daddy drove for Mrs. Baine and tying up the last of the tomatoes so they fare better than the rest, Ellis Baine walks out from behind his house, a bundle of white twine slung over his shoulder and three of Daddy’s stakes in his left hand. He stops when he sees Daddy, stands looking at him for a time, and then walks closer.

“What’s he done?” Daddy says.

“Nothing, Daddy.”

Daddy grabs Annie’s arm and yanks her toward him. She cries out from it hurting so bad. She stumbles and trips, falling at Daddy’s feet.

“What’s he done to you?” he shouts down into her face.

Ellis Baine lunges in Annie’s direction, but as quick as he makes that move, he backs off. Like he did in the Hollerans’ kitchen, he holds his hands out to the side.

“Just staking tomatoes,” he says, backing away. “I’ll go. No need to haul the girl around like that.”

Daddy yanks Annie back to her feet, and she can’t help but cry out again.

“You get home.”

Daddy pushes Annie behind him, and Abraham is there. He grabs on where Daddy let go. Big as his hands are, he doesn’t pinch her the way Daddy did.

By the time Annie gets herself righted and has peeled Abraham’s hand off her arm, Ellis Baine has reached his porch. They stand watching him, all three of them, until Ellis disappears inside.

“Don’t you ever come here again,” Daddy says without looking back at Annie.

“Take it easy, John,” Abraham says.

“You understand me?”

Still Daddy won’t look at Annie.

“Asked you a question,” he says.

There’s something in the way Daddy is talking to Annie, something in the tone of his voice, the way he looked at her, squatted down at the tomatoes, that shames Annie. He’s never shamed her before, never been afraid of her black eyes or treated her like she has bygones to be sorry for. But just now, Daddy is disgusted by her, and that’s a thing she never thought he would be.

“I know you think Mama loves him,” Annie says.

Daddy swings around. He doesn’t mean to, surely doesn’t mean to, but he reaches out with one hand and strikes Annie across the face. It’s like a whip cracking down on her cheek. The sting of it shoots up into her eye and down into her lower jaw. Abraham grabs at her again, yanks her backward, putting himself between her and Daddy, and presses one of his hands in the center of Daddy’s chest.

The most frightening thing happens next. For the first time, Daddy doesn’t know what to do. He always knows what to do. He knows how to tighten the faucet so it doesn’t drip all night long and drive Grandma into a rage. He knows how to take a screwdriver to the top hinge so the bathroom door won’t stick and just when to head inside to avoid the rain. But bending to pick up the hat that flew off his head, dropping to his knees instead of standing, Daddy doesn’t know what to do next.

“She didn’t love him,” Annie says, stepping from behind Abraham and not covering over the sting on her cheek with the palm of her hand even though she wants to. It would be like reminding Daddy he drank too much whiskey and wasn’t there at the well when they found Mrs. Baine.

“Regret,” Annie says. “That’s what he said. Ellis Baine said it’s not love Mama’s feeling; it’s regret. What’s she regretting, Daddy?”

“Ah, Jesus, Annie,” Daddy says. “Jesus, I’m sorry.”

Annie stands in front of Daddy, not saying anything more. He’s kneeling on the ground, sitting back on his thighs. He’s catching his breath, that’s what Grandma would say. Sometimes a person needs to catch his breath. Annie takes Daddy’s hat from his hand and is brushing the dirt from its brim when a movement of some kind makes her lift her eyes. It’s Ellis Baine, and he’s coming this way again.

He’s walking different than before. He’s taking long steps, his heavy boots giving the soft turned-over ground a beating. He’s looking straight ahead, not quite at Annie, not quite at Daddy, but instead at Abraham Pace. And Ellis Baine is carrying something in one hand. It hangs at his side, down along one leg. He’s carrying a shotgun.

DADDY GAVE HER to me that night. After I dropped the wood. After the rattle of it falling to the floor quieted and the room was silent, he stretched out his two hands, the baby girl cradled there, and handed her to me. Then he told me to get on. Get on out to the other room. Get on out.

He wrapped Juna in the tarps he spread every spring over the tobacco beds, dragged her up and over the rise behind the house, kept on as far as he could, covered her over with rocks, and said he’d bury her in the spring. No other choice. The ground was froze solid. We both knew she wouldn’t be there come spring. Something would take her, but we couldn’t, neither of us, say that.

We burned the mattress, the dry ticking bursting into a flame that let me get my first good look at that baby’s face. The fire warmed us, crackled, sparkled, showed me her dark eyes. She was fair-haired, at least for the time being, and as big as any baby should be. She wasn’t Joseph Carl’s. I knew she wasn’t; even when the women worried the baby was coming too early, I knew she wasn’t. I knew she was another man’s child, a man who had come before Joseph Carl.

Daddy shoveled dirt over the last of the flame, dousing the embers. He sent us inside and left us. When he came back, he had milk, most likely from the Brashears, most likely from a goat. We didn’t know, neither of us, what to give a child. I used one of the bottles Mrs. Ripberger had left along with all the tiny clothes. I had boiled them because that’s what the ladies told me to do. I touched the rubbery tip to the baby’s mouth, and she took to it. Just that much made me smile. Never thought so little could make me smile so big.

Daddy said we could never tell. Sure as he saw Joseph Carl hang, those Baines would see me hang. Out of spite, they’d do it, Daddy said. They’d come back, every one of those Baine brothers, to see me hang. Joseph Carl didn’t have no business dying, and neither did I. This made me wonder how long Daddy had known Joseph Carl should have never been hanged. Probably he’d known all along, and that’s why he would die before that ground ever thawed.

Two days later, Daddy went to Abraham Pace and told him Juna was gone. Told him she gave birth to that baby of Joseph Carl’s and walked right out the door. Next, Daddy went for John Holleran. I don’t know what Daddy told John or what he promised him or what he confessed to him, but John came. He never asked after Juna. Never asked where she’d gone or why she’d gone. That’s the thing that makes me wonder if John has always known.

We were married two weeks later. Same as John, folks didn’t ask much after Juna. The fellows slapped John on the back, told him it was high time he strapped himself in. The ladies stood at arm’s length from me and tipped forward to get a closer look at the baby. If she was sleeping, they’d ask me straight out. Does she have those black eyes? Dark brown, I told them. As dark as brown can be. Annie is as sweet as a baby can be.

John and I lived with Daddy those early days. We slept in the room Juna and I once shared. For the first three months, John slept on the floor. Cold as that floor was, he slept there. I never wore the slip I’d been wearing that night with Ellis Baine, never mentioned the thing John had seen. I wanted him to know I’d never been with a man, not Ellis, not any other. I wanted John to know he’d be my first and he’d be my last. I wanted him to know his mama had been right about our future together. But I couldn’t say those things without bringing to mind the thing John most likely saw every time he closed his eyes.

It was nearly spring and we had buried Daddy when John finally came to our bed. I didn’t have to tell him he was the first, and I would say it brought him some peace to find it out for himself.

“That’s a cold hard floor,” he said when it was done.

IN AN HOUR or so, folks will begin to arrive. As Annie and Mama walk out the door, Grandma fusses at them for running off, but Mama says they’ll be back in plenty of time and motions for Annie to climb into Daddy’s truck. Mama never drives Daddy’s truck, but today she will.

At first, Annie thinks they’re headed to town because they drive down the hill same as always. But then Mama takes a hard right and starts back into the hills again. She’s wearing her new dress. It’s pale green, and Lessie Collins in town stitched it up so the top is molded to Mama’s body. It shows her every curve and valley such that Daddy couldn’t help rubbing that stubbly chin of his against her neck.

Daddy is sleeping in his own bed again for the first time in two weeks. After Daddy carried Annie home from the Baines’ place-taking care she never saw what had become of Ellis Baine-Daddy, the sheriff, and Abraham talked for a good long time while Miss Watson sat in the back of the sheriff’s car. Once Abraham and the sheriff left, Daddy and Annie waited at the kitchen table until Mama came back from town. When her car pulled up outside, Daddy told Annie again that when he finally drew his last breath in this life, he’d still not have forgiven himself for raising a hand to her but would she please take Caroline and Grandma upstairs and give him and Mama some privacy.

At first, Grandma wouldn’t let Annie eavesdrop from the top of the stairs, but after sitting on the beds and hearing nothing but quiet in the house, Grandma said it wouldn’t do no harm and told Annie to go have a listen.

There wasn’t much to hear from the top of the stairs either. Mostly just Mama crying, not hard crying, but the kind of crying that stuck in the back of her throat and choked off every third or fourth word. Daddy said Abraham had no choice but to fire his gun. Likely Ellis Baine wouldn’t have pulled the trigger, but likely wasn’t good enough. That was Annie up there, and likely wasn’t good enough.

Mama doesn’t stop the truck outside what’s left of her childhood home. Annie never knew her granddaddy on her mama’s side, the man who built this house where the sun rarely shines. That’s what Mama always talks about when she talks about her childhood. No sunshine, she says. Can you imagine? Lord, our socks and shoes never dried. Grandma says Granddaddy’s history sizzles underfoot, but Annie doesn’t ever feel him.

Annie knows now why they drove the truck. She presses a hand to the dashboard as Mama drives up the hill behind her old house. At the top, she stops, yanks off the leather gloves she slipped on so as to not ruin her nails, throws open her door, and climbs out. Annie does the same. Giving Annie a wave to join her, Mama walks to the front of the truck.

There’s sun here. Mama shields her eyes, looks off to the left and to the right. Small mounds of dirt, light brown and each with a hole at its center, litter the ground. Each hole is a spot where the cicadas broke through. Back home, the mounds have mostly been trampled over. The cicadas are singing still, though they’ve dwindled in number. Soon enough, the summer will be a quieter place. There will be more of the critters next summer, but not of this same kind. These cicadas won’t come again for seventeen more years.

“There,” Mama says when she sees it, whatever she’s looking for. Taking long, quick, sure-footed steps because she exchanged her white heels for a pair of boots before setting off, she starts walking.

It’s the fourth Sunday in June. Abraham was supposed to be married by nightfall. Miss Watson never found her something new and something blue, though her dress had been twice altered. But that wedding won’t happen. Instead, Abraham will move south of Lexington, where his daddy got his start. Sheriff Fulkerson thought it might be best for everyone if Abraham put some distance between himself and Miss Watson. The man deserved a fresh start. Like Daddy, Sheriff Fulkerson knew he had no choice but to do what was done. When next Abraham stepped into Grandma’s kitchen, clutching his hat and looking small again for only the second time in his life, Mama wrapped him up in a hug as best she could seeing as how big he was and how small she was. He might well be Annie’s daddy, her real daddy, but mostly he’s still just Abraham.

Annie and Mama walk toward a cluster of trees. Must be water running nearby for such a cluster to grow so thick. Mama stops before she steps into the shade of those trees, and with one hand still shielding her eyes, she points with the other.

“You been wondering what’s become of your Aunt Juna,” Mama says. “She’s there. Somewhere in there.”

“Ma’am?”

“It’s the best I can tell you, Annie. Don’t know who was up there that night, who left those cigarettes you found, though I do believe you found them, but it wasn’t your Aunt Juna.”

“You been writing those letters every Christmas?” Annie asks.

Mama nods. That’s why Aunt Juna knew Caroline and Annie were precious as little girls and then lovely as young women.

“I thought one day you’d learn about Juna being your mama and that it would comfort you to know she loved you. Thought it would comfort you to think she was still out there, somewhere. But you’re my daughter. No more to say about it. She was your Aunt Juna, that’s all. I was the one to first hold you when you came into this world. You’re mine and your daddy’s. That’s who you are.”

Annie steps closer, but like Mama, she doesn’t step into the shade. She might come here again, if there’s a sizzle in the air or something claws at her, but otherwise, she thinks not.

“We’d better get on,” Annie says. “Grandma’ll be wondering.”