6.01

Myra

my name is Myra Robinson but that’s not important. This is all about Lucy and don’t let nobody tell you different. Found or missing, spoiled or pure: Lucy.

My daughter.

Lucy.

Now shut up and listen, cause I’m gonna tell you how it is—how it is and how it was and how it all came to be.

6.02

Wade

summer was as hot as winter was cold.

It always is, in Kansas, but every year it comes as no less of a surprise. In other states fall is a warning and spring a time of happy preparation, but here in the heart of the country we have no such luxuries. It’s cold until it’s hot, and then it’s hot until it’s cold. Both seasons offer their own pleasures and their own miseries, and though most people reckon winter a worse time than summer, I would reckon that those people are not from Kansas.

Here, heat kills as much as cold.

Here, fewer people have access to the mercy of an air conditioner than to some form of heating, be it forced air or woodstove or the animal comfort of several bodies in one bed.

Here, each winter, Kansans come as close to hibernating as do any people, and there is a pleasure in that, or at least a relief. What do most people long for, but to sleep?

But that winter, the winter that Colin and Justin came to us and Lucy was taken away, offered no relief, for Lucy Robinson’s true abductor did much to keep Galatea on the jump simply by remaining absolutely anon­ymous even as he reminded us that somewhere, out there, Lucy Robinson suffered at his hands.

Lucy’s dress.

Lucy’s hair.

Lucy’s screams.

Lucy’s fingers.

Find me.

In the midst of this Layton Buzzard packed up his wife and son and moved away from Galatea. Roman List and his wife Stacy weren’t long in following.

On the white wall of his own house, Roman List spraypainted the words gone away in red letters ten feet high.

On the other side of Highway 9, Bruce Cardinal, a single man, left the house his family had lived in since the turn of the century. There was even talk that old Rochelle Getterling, ninety if she was a day and wid­owed more than half her years, was going to move in with her newly widowed sister somewhere down South.

Before he left Bruce Cardinal took an ax and destroyed the inside of his house. Every stick of furniture, every wall, chopped into kindling. In­spired, perhaps, by Roman List, he too left a note: Not for you.

It was a wonder, people said, that he didn’t just burn it down.

Gone away.

Not for you.

So, when the snow melted, there was a reason for the world to look a little shrunken.

It had.

The warmth, when it came, seemed unwanted, and most people con­tinued with their winter sluggishness. The sun shone for its own reasons, and the farmers went back to work because the sun did, but everyone else still seemed in that daze of cold.

Sometimes, as the days grew warmer and warmer, I longed to feel winter’s daze of cold. But the urge to paint is a hot urge: the smell of paint is a hot smell, its touch is liquid and hot, even after it dries. I painted, and painted and painted.

I painted and Colin wrote and Justin was silent.

Other people had their lives, but we had our art.

Justin, especially, had his art.

6.03

Myra

try to imagine us. Try to imagine the fire. Percy Tomkins who went all the way through school with me, he was in that Iraqi war and he said he never saw nothing to equal it.

The fire was like a tidal wave. It was a solid wall twice as tall as a house and giving way to a cloud of smoke that stretched up past seeing, and it ran, I tell you, it ran through town. I don’t suppose any of those who died knew what hit them, because it was one-a those things where you either got away or you didn’t. There weren’t any close shaves. There wasn’t enough time. No one alive today who was alive then has burn scars or anything like that. If you were close enough to wonder what was going on, then you were close enough to die without finding out.

Nineteen years old, my first apartment. Half a duplex with a back yard and a blighted elm tree all my own, a window air conditioner working overtime to keep it cool inside.

I was baking cookies.

If you ask me now what I was doing baking cookies in the middle of a May afternoon, I couldn’t tell you. Maybe I was making cookies for Stan, I don’t know. What I do know is this: making cookies saved my life, or at least my sight.

The oven was directly opposite the sink, and above the sink was a window that looked in the general direction of the grain elevator. I say general, because the elevator was two miles away and you couldn’t even see it from the window. It wasn’t like I ever thought, The grain elevator’s thataway.

There was a window in the oven door too, and I was bent over, watch­ing my cookies. If you were looking in through the window over the sink you’d have seen my butt, a few cookies and one pregnancy thinner than it is now.

It was my butt that took the glass when the window blew in.

I heard the explosion first. Luckily I wasn’t a girl with fast reflexes—those didn’t come until motherhood—because otherwise I’d-a turned around and caught the glass in my face. As it was, I jumped a little, and then I yelped as I felt that hot air pulse into the room. It seemed to move slowly, almost lazylike, and I could feel it boil around my skin like hot water. I don’t even remember the window busting in. What I remember is the eerie sensation of my clothes and my hair floating up in that hot air. It felt just like a hand, that air, except it managed to touch every part of me at once.

I suppose I should-a been scared, but I wasn’t, not right away. Instead I thought, This is what I’ve been waiting for, and I wasn’t thinking of Stan.

I still don’t know who I was thinking of.

6.04

Webbie

sometimes i wondered what Wallace would think of me in my maid’s uniform. Both of them covered my body: both seemed to retain their own identity, while I vanished beneath them. Wallace was a big man, and when he lay atop me I could feel his skin covering all the spare parts of me. And he knew this too. “Nothing can get at you now,” he whispered in my ear, nuthin kin git atchoo now, “without it goes through me first,” and the way he said me made his body sound more formidable than any ancient city’s walls. I suppose my maid’s uniform offered some kind of protection as well. Once I had put it on, it shrouded me; its magic was so potent that the disguise continued even after I took it off. I was no longer Webbie Greeving, an independent college-educated feisty female; I was Rosemary Krebs’s maid.

But after I had completed her diary, my work in her house seemed to be done. I knew that I had found what I needed to find in that house, and after that my uniform did nothing more than chafe my skin, and so did my father’s epithet. I had never before heard my father use the term nigger, not even to place it in a white man’s mouth; even in sermons when he preached against an “urban mode of communication”—you can’t imagine how my father hated rap music—he wouldn’t use the word, but instead spoke of the folly of attempting to reclaim the terms of prejudice and hate. I knew my father’s anger had as much to do with Rosemary Krebs as with me; he regarded her as he would the she-beast mother of the Antichrist, and the fact that she was childless only added to his suspicion. His hatred of her was so great that the mere mention of her name sent him into flying fits of anger. For forty years he had been Galatia’s high priest, a mantle he had inherited from five previous generations—an uninterrupted chain that was longer, he had pointed out to me, than many a dynasty in Europe. He would never admit it—well, he probably would, actually—but my father saw himself as something of a benevolent despot; by his mind alone were decisions made, by his hand actions taken, and if this situation was undemocratic it was also for the common good, and no one ever complained. Some people left—a lot of people left—but that was to be expected. Rural life wasn’t exactly the wave of the future. But those who remained behind enjoyed the benefits of living in a small conservative Christian community—and, of course, the closest thing to freedom from white people that this country could offer.

Rosemary Krebs changed all that, and she did it against my father’s will, did it without even consulting him. When Rosemary Krebs’s construc­tion crews arrived a few weeks after the fire in Kenosha, my father, flush with the successes of the far-off Civil Rights movement, led the town against her. He wrote letters to the state government, and, when that failed, he held a sit-in on Rosemary Krebs’s land. She ordered her bull­dozers to plow on, bodies or no bodies, and faced with the advancing plows my father and his flock scattered like sheep.

Of all the memories I have of that time, the clearest is of my father continually pacing, the house, the pulpit, the streets of Galatia, and railing against “that wicked woman, that wicked, wicked woman.” I had never met that woman, or seen her from less than a half mile away, but what I didn’t realize was that my father hadn’t either. Rosemary Krebs’s Galatea had destroyed my father’s town, but her refusal to even speak to him wounded his pride even more. She treated him as white folks treated niggers in the reconstructed South—she ignored him—and her strategy worked. Fury blinded my father and robbed him of his effectiveness, though I suppose Rosemary Krebs would have been successful anyway. Nothing she did was illegal—nothing she did in Galatia anyway, and I’m not really sure that anything she did in Kenosha was actually against the law either. She bought a man a drink. She gave him a cigar.

This is the craziest thing I ever heard tell of.

It was more than a year after the construction of Galatea began before she paid a visit to my father. I don’t know why she finally came, nor why she waited so long; maybe it took that much time for her to gain the information she needed. Most of her cheap ugly houses were finished and filled by then; a few people, not rich, but with insurance money or the ability to secure a loan, were building nicer homes. The I.G.A. and TruValue were nearing completion, and Silas Brecken, who used to run Galatia’s general store, was already talking about closing up shop to cut his losses. She came on a Saturday, without calling first; the fact that my father was home that afternoon, though he was usually out on Saturdays, has since led me to wonder if she was having our home watched.

The woman who rang the doorbell was significantly shorter than me. She wore a brown shiny suit, and a three-stranded choker of pearls encir­cled her throat. She couldn’t really look down on me, but I could feel the gesture in her eyes. “Good afternoon,” she said. “Is your father at home this afternoon?”

I nodded my head, staring in wonder at her tiny wrists, her bird legs, the big globe of hair fixed around her head and glowing with an eerie blue light against the bright noon sun.

“Do you think I could speak to him?”

I nodded again, but still didn’t move. The little woman clucked her lips.

“Is something the matter?”

“Why, you ain’t no bigger than a scarecrow!”

I hadn’t meant to be rude, but Rosemary Krebs flushed deeply. She leaned close to me and whispered, “Where I come from little girls are punished for speaking so rudely. Now go and get your father before I tell him what a wicked child you’ve been.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Go!” she hissed, and I ran up the stairs.

A few minutes later, I sneaked down the stairs behind my father. Rosemary Krebs had let herself into the house, and she stood in the living room. Her eyes looked only at the stairs, and then at my father, as if none of the room’s furnishings merited her attention.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Greeving,” I heard her say. “My name is Rose­mary Krebs.”

“I know your name.” My father, white shirtsleeves rolled up to his forearms, regarded the Bible he still held in one hand. “Most people call me Reverend.”

“Forgive me for disturbing you from your studies, Mr. Greeving. I thought perhaps it was time that we met.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t just call me up to the big house.” He took one step farther down the stairs, but that was all. “It’s always something when Massa comes out to the shacks.”

Rosemary Krebs nodded at the Bible in my father’s hands. “I’m sorry to disturb you from your studies, Mr. Greeving. I’ll try to take up as little of your time as possible.” The tiny woman in our living room spoke as if she were reciting lines she had no stake in. The only person, it seemed, who would benefit from believing her was my father.

“You already took up too much-a my time, Mrs. Krebs. Now, if you don’t mind, I have a sermon to prepare.”

But Rosemary Krebs stood her ground. “Your manner is most com­manding, like all the great preachers and leaders of your people, Mr. Greeving. May I ask where you studied?”

My father’s volume lessened only slightly. “Excuse me?”

“Where you received your degree, Mr. Greeving. Excuse me—Rever­end. What seminary you attended.”

I couldn’t see my father’s face, but his shoulders sagged, just a little. He was silent for a moment, and then he turned his head and saw me. His face had fallen too. “Get on out of here,” he said.

“Daddy?”

“Go on, get over to Charity Getterling’s, or go find Coretta Lewis to play with. Me and the white lady got business to discuss.”

As I ran past Rosemary Krebs she looked down on me and smiled—not vindictively, but triumphantly, and she seemed somehow much taller than she had five minutes earlier—and, though I didn’t know what else would transpire in my absence, I knew that she would tell my father that I had been rude to her, and sure enough when I returned my father threatened to wash my mouth out with soap if I ever even spoke to that woman again, and then he sent me to bed without supper. It seemed to me then that he was punishing himself as well, because he also didn’t eat. He paced the floor of the Archive all night and all the next day, surrounded by thousands of pieces of paper whose only purpose was to give his town legitimacy, the legitimacy of history. But one piece of paper was missing from that collection, and though its absence seems trivial compared to all the other things that were happening, I still feel my father’s pain, for I suffer the same lack: my father, like me, did not have a diploma. His only claim to the name Reverend was self-made, just as my claim on the name historian was, and, as we both learned the hard way, such claims are just not good enough.

6.05

Myra

in my head it’s all happening at the same time, Kenosha and the fire and Eric Johnson and Stan going off, and then Lucy.

Lucy’s birth.

What can I say. She came quick. Labor lasted two hours, tops.

I remember it two ways. I remember this awful pressure in me, like someone was filling me with boiling water, filling me up past the point of bursting, filling and filling till I prayed I would just explode.

And I remember a light. I remember being in this light, wrapped up in it like in a blanket, this light was soft and warm and held me up and held me together even, just like skin, and while I was in this light time disappeared.

And then the two memories come together.

The light moved inside of me with a rush. It was right then, I know, right then that Lucy Robinson became the person she is today.

And then the pressure forced the light out of me. I swear it was coming out my eyes and mouth and nose, out of my pores, and of course it was coming out of me down there.

So I named her Lucy. We’d been thinking of Mary—Stan and my’s mothers was both named Mary—but Lucy. The light. Lucy.

Her tiny hands was in tiny fists when they handed her to me, and she was screaming and carrying on like birth was some great wrong we’d done to her. I remember wanting to count her fingers and toes, the way you do, I wanted to make sure she was all there because I had a funny feeling she’d left part of herself behind, inside me.

In fact, she’d took out something extra.

I pulled at the little fingers of her right hand, one by one. One two three four five. Her left hand, one two three four five.

There was something in her left hand.

By then Lucy’s mouth had found my nipple and the doctor had done his job and gone to write out the bill and the nurses was busy with this and that. Stan was on his way from the waiting room.

There was a pebble in Lucy’s hand. A tiny black stone no bigger than her baby fingertip.

I took that pebble. I never told nobody about it. Part of me wanted to swallow it, send it back where it come from, but I knew it’d just come out again, and if it didn’t then it’d just cause problems. So I kept it, and when I went home I put it in the little cedar chest where later on I put the first lock of her hair and her first lost tooth and the pink blanket my mother started knitting for her the night she was born.

The very last thing I put in that chest was one patent leather shoe.

When Stan left that chest was the one thing he took with him.

6.06

Justin

there were perhaps a dozen different ways I could walk between the limestone house and Wade’s, but only two or three of these routes also avoided Galatea. I don’t know why I didn’t like to walk through town, but every time I approached it I felt like the little girl in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a fallen aristocrat forced to endure the evil whisperings of simpleminded villagers. No one whispered at me in Galatea; a few people stared, but no one even pointed. People only speculate when they don’t know the truth, and everyone in town knew the truth about Colin and me, and Colin and Divine, and Divine and Wade, and Wade and me. In that respect, I think, they were a step ahead of Colin and Divine and Wade and me.

I preferred to walk home from Wade’s at night. “Stay,” he would whisper, but I would get up and get dressed and leave. Sometimes I passed Divine on my way out of Wade’s. He would stand in a room with the snarl of a poodle whose domain has been invaded. Sometimes I passed Divine when I arrived at home. Then his head would fall, and he would slink out of my way like a cat caught on the prowl. But usually we passed each other somewhere on the plain, he driving, I walking: Divine, like me, didn’t like to pass through town.

Sometimes darkness offers an illusion of vulnerability, sometimes of safety. When I was a child I was terrified of the dark, and when I lived on the streets I avoided daylight like a vampire. Now I take what each day and each night offers. One night a lone bull followed me for a mile, three strands of a barbed wire fence all that separated me from two thousand pounds of restless flesh. One night a barn owl sat on a fencepost and watched me come and go: only its head turned, one hundred eighty degrees, and in the moonlight it appeared completely white and neutral. Rabbits sprang from beneath my feet, startling me with their own fear, dogs barked and rustled chains or came quietly whining for a scratch on the nose, or the thin rank trail of a skunk coiled around me in the air. Sometimes branches broke in one of the small stands of soft-wooded fast-growing trees that punctuated fields, and this is the only time I grew truly frightened. I told myself that it was a dog, or a clumsy deer, and I made myself walk slowly, steadily on. I would not run.

Sometimes a car passed me. If it came from behind I did nothing; if it came from in front I lowered my face against its headlights. Every once in a while a car would slow inquisitively, but usually they sped past me. Here, when it’s dark, most people are sleeping, and those that aren’t are on their way to bed, and not much deters them from their destination. But one night headlights caught me from behind; a moment later engine noises and crunching gravel reached my ears. The vehicle itself took a long time to reach me, and I realized without turning that it was slowing down, coming slower and slower, and at some point I realized that it had slowed to my pace, and it was following me. My shadow was so elongated that it seemed to stretch right to the horizon, but that was the only thing I could see.

I turned. The lights were high and square: a truck. It stopped. A mo­ment later the engine shut off, and then, with a flash, four lights mounted on the grille shot a wide bolt of light down the road, spilling into the fields, silvering the ripening wheat that swayed in a breeze. I heard the doors squeak open but I could see nothing beyond the wall of light. I heard foot­steps, more than one set. Eventually three shapes walked in front of the light, all of them rendered eerily thin, long-limbed and big-headed, like space aliens, and I knew even before they spoke who they were.

“Well, what-a we got here?” Darrell Jenkens’s voice drawled.

“Looks like we got us a stray cat,” Howard Goertzen’s voice answered him.

“A tomcat out on the prowl,” Grady Oconnor’s voice said.

“A tabby cat’s more like it,” Darrell Jenkens said. “A pussy cat. Here, pussy, pussy, pussy. What’sa matter pussy, cat got your tongue?” The laughter of three beer-thickened voices bounced off each other like balls in a lottery machine, spilling misfortune and misanthropy out into the night.

“Looks like a pig killer is what it looks like to me,” Howard Goertzen said then.

“Looks like a hitchhiker is what it looks like,” Darrell Jenkens said.

“Pig killer.”

“Aw, Howard, don’t let’s get started on this pig-killing business again,” Darrell Jenkens’s voice cut in, annoyed.

“Darrell! You said my name! You weren’t supposed to say my name.”

“Well, idiot, who’s calling who stupid?”

“But Char—”

“Howard!” Haird!

There was a fleshy thud then, and then a moment of silence, and then Darrell Jenkens’s voice said, “And besides, it was the other one who killed your Charlene.”

“One’s just the same as the oth—” Howard Goertzen began, but Dar­rell Jenkens cut him off with another “Howard.” A moment later Grady Oconnor’s voice resumed the conversation. “Don’t it know,” he said in slow measured tones, “that hitchhiking’s illegal in the state of Kansas?”

For the first time I wondered if I should be afraid. I had never been called an it before.

“Perhaps we oughta be making a citizen’s arrest. On behalf of the good people of Galatea,” Darrell Jenkens said.

“For the good-a the people,” Grady Oconnor answered him.

Howard Goertzen’s sulking was inaudible, but it felt like a hot breeze on a summer day that leaves your skin covered in a film of sweat.

“Well then,” Darrell Jenkens said, “that sounds like an idea then. No need to wake up Lawman Brown for a trifling matter like this. This ain’t nothing a grown man can’t deal with himself.”

6.07

Myra

my lucy. four years old, skin like ivory, hair like ebony, just like in that song. She had seven white dresses, one for each day of the week, each one prettier than the last. Come Sunday she looked like a little bride. She sat in church next to me and Stan, her patent leather slip-ons surfing above the floor, white gloves, white socks, a flow­ered hat on her head, fancier than Easter.

When the collection bowl came around she wouldn’t drop Stan’s five-dollar bill in, she insisted that we put it in one of those envelopes that say “Gift of” on them.

Only one woman in town used those envelopes. They were only there because she insisted on them. Everybody else felt they were just a way of making it look like you were giving a lot of money when in reality you were slipping in a pittance. Better to just drop in singles and swirl them around a little—and besides, Nettie Ferguson counted the offering each week for Pastor Little, so it was no secret how much Rosemary Krebs put in her envelope.

Then again, maybe that was the point.

Her envelope was always all the way on the bottom of the collection bowl because she sat all the way up in the front pew. From where we sat she was just a pair of shoulders and a cone of hair, both steel gray and just as rigid. Lucy kept her eyes on Rosemary Krebs’s hair throughout the sermon. God may have worked miracles in the past but Rosemary Krebs took her to the mall each weekend, and from an early age Lucy valued the tangible over the insubstantial, especially if it had lace at the collar.

Seven white dresses, fancier than Easter.

Oh, I don’t blame her. That’s one of my beliefs: never blame the child when the fault is her elders’.

Stan and I used to nudge her, Go say hi-lo to Mrs. Krebs, Maybe Mrs. Krebs would like it if you brought her some of these cookies I just baked, Why don’t you read the Sears catalog over to Mrs. Krebs’s house. By the time I thought someone was overdoing it, either me and Stan, or Rose­mary Krebs, or Lucy, it was too late.

She called it mentoring. Lucy revealed a lot of potential, she said, she had no children, there were certain supplemental advantages she could offer Lucy that perhaps Stan and I might find it difficult to procure, and like that.

By then I just wanted to tell her to stay the fuck away from my daugh­ter, but Stan, hey, Stan paid the bills, and he knew just how much we owed at the First National Bank of Rosemary Krebs.

Life ain’t easy being the number two plumber in a town the size of Galatea, only so many clogged sinks and backed-up toilets to go around.

He advocated caution.

When he said that I knew he’d been talking to her—the only thing Stan ever “advocated” was another round of drinks at Sloppy Joe’s—and all I said was that if I got even a hint of something funny going on up at that fake plantation house I’d rip that beehive off her head and shove it up where the sun don’t shine. But in the meantime Lucy was smiling and Lord knows we could use the extra money we saved on dresses and toys.

Beer ain’t cheap at a case a day.

Old Henry was dead by then, I was working for Bea and she wasn’t in the best of health, she took up a lot of my time. Stan was hardly working, and, drunk, he wasn’t exactly the best babysitter. What could I say?

Well, I suppose I could’ve said no, but the point was that I didn’t.

6.08

Justin

the smell of shit began to grow stronger, and I realized soon enough that it came from outside the El Camino. A few corrugated tin buildings appeared, a small silo covered in asphalt shingles, a rickety rambling farmhouse with a porch swing half hanging by one chain. Howard Goertzen parked the El Camino next to a series of rank fenced-in lots. It was his father’s pig farm. As we climbed from the El Camino I cast a single look at Grady Oconnor. I don’t know if it com­municated anything—I certainly hadn’t meant to invest it with mean­ing—but he held a hand out to help me down, and then, when I was on the ground, he turned away.

They led me into one of the tin buildings. Inside the shit smelled stale and fresh at the same time, and sweet as well, the air fetid and hot. A cold light snapped on, glinting off the mud-stained black-and-white backs of a hundred pigs. They rustled in the sudden light. A single narrow lane led between the pens, and we walked down it until we were in the middle of the barn. Darrell Jenkens leaned against the slats of a fence, while Howard Goertzen and Grady Oconnor stood, a few feet apart from him and each other. Grady Oconnor looked at his feet, and Darrell Jenkens and Howard Goertzen nursed beers.

“True what they say, Howard,” Darrell Jenkens said eventually. Haird.

“Bout what?” Howard Goertzen said.

“Bout a hog’ll eat just about anything?”

“Just about,” Howard Goertzen said. “The only thing I know that’ll eat what a hog won’t is a billy goat.”

“You got any billy goats?”

“Nope.”

“Then I guess hogs’ll have to do.”

“Guess so.”

There was a bit of silence, and then Howard Goertzen let out a chuckle he’d been suppressing since we walked into the barn.

“Hey Grady,” he said.

Grady Oconnor looked up. “Yeah?”

“What’d you and the pussy talk about back there?”

Grady looked at me, back at Howard Goertzen. “Nothing,” he said. “He don’t talk.”

“Yeah, that’s right, I forgot. He don’t talk. He don’t say nothing.”

“He don’t even shake his head,” Grady Oconnor said.

“Come again?” Howard Goertzen said.

“You ask him a question, yes or no, he don’t even shake his head.”

“That so?” He turned to me. “That so, pussy?” I just looked at him. “Well, shit, Grady, I guess you’re right. He don’t even shake his head.”

“I’ll be damned,” Darrell Jenkens said.

Howard Goertzen let out a guffaw then, and said, “I wonder if he’d talk if I did this.” He was beside me suddenly, his beer can dropped on the cement floor. He lifted me in his meaty arms and dropped me on top of a fencepost. It rammed into my tailbone, and I sat there, quivering slightly, until I hooked a foot through a slat and regained my balance.

“Nope,” Darrell Jenkens said. “He didn’t talk. Moved his leg there, but he didn’t talk.”

“Sure didn’t,” Howard Goertzen said. Grady Oconnor lit another cig­arette.

“How about this?” Howard Goertzen said, and he poked me in the chest. I fell back, my torso depending over the pigpen, but my foot through the slat kept me from falling in. Beneath me, the pigs rustled a little.

“Nope,” Darrell Jenkens said.

“And this?” Howard Goertzen said. He pushed me this time, and I grabbed at the fence and pulled myself back up.

“He grabbed the fence,” Darrell Jenkens said. “That’s something.”

“It’s something,” Howard Goertzen said. “But he didn’t talk. You know what I think?”

“What do you think, Howard?” Haird.

“I think that a man that don’t talk ain’t really a man. Ain’t no better than a pig.” He kicked the fence hard then, and the pigs closest to it jumped and jostled away from it.

“Oughta be in with the pigs,” Grady Oconnor said, without looking up from his feet.

“Only seems fair,” Howard Goertzen said. “We eat them, why shouldn’t they eat us.” He looked me right in the eye. “You kill them,” he said, still, apparently, conflating me with Colin. “They kill you. Fair’s fair.”

The pigs were tightly packed, and had almost to climb over each other to move. I felt a coarse hide rub against my ankle. Howard Goertzen kicked the fence again, pushed me at almost the same time. I fell off the post, my knees hooked over the top rail of the fence, my foot still caught in the slats. My arms swung wildly for a moment before catching on to the top rail, but I didn’t pull myself back up. I hung there, and the ammonia fumes were so strong that my eyes watered, and I coughed when I breathed.

“What was that?” Darrell Jenkens said. “He say something?”

“That was just a cough,” Howard Jenkens. “He ain’t said nothing.”

“He don’t say nothing,” Grady Oconnor said. “He don’t even shake his head.” He looked up then, and, slowly but purposefully, he walked over to me and Howard Goertzen and he grabbed my shirtfront and pulled me up and forward. He pulled so hard that I pitched toward him, and my foot, still caught in the slats, tripped me, and he stepped out of my way and let me fall to the floor. I stayed there. My face faced Grady Oconnor’s and Howard Goertzen’s boots; Darrell Jenkens was somewhere behind me. Grady Oconnor wore pointy-toed black cowboy boots, and Howard wore heavy Sears-issue light-brown workboots, the suede kind that had become so popular among Chelsea clones in recent years. No one seemed to notice my little smile.

“That’s enough, Howard,” Grady Oconnor was saying somewhere above me. He said the word with two syllables. He said Howard.

Above me, Howard Goertzen’s voice assumed a nasty edge it hadn’t possessed when he was speaking to me. “Aw, Grady, I’m just getting started,” he said, and as he spoke it finally occurred to me that he hated Grady Oconnor, really hated him, as in, hated him because of something, and that something was probably the fact that he was black.

When Grady Oconnor answered him, I realized that the feeling was mutual. “The boy’s gonna get his hand bit off, Howard, and you gonna get our asses throwed in jail.”

“Ain’t no crime against hassling a faggot,” Darrell Jenkens said now. I heard him heave himself off the fence, heard the sound of his approach­ing footsteps. One of his boots kicked my shoulder as he stepped over me, a rounded toe, like Howard Goertzen’s, though when his foot had made its way past me I saw that his boots were black, not brown. I wasn’t sure if the kick was intentional or not; a cold liquid that my nose told me was beer splashed on my shoulder just after the boot hit my shoulder. Darrell Jenkens stopped when he was on the other side of me; he turned. He prodded my ribs with one of his boots until I rolled over onto my back. “Lookit that,” he slurred. “He ain’t no better than a dog. He’s worse than a dog even. Least a dog knows when to bite.”

Above me, stalactites of dust hung from the rafters that ran across the width of the building. They swayed back and forth, just barely, as if some­where above me there was the slightest hint of a breeze. There was no breeze on the floor.

Grady Oconnor seemed at a loss. He looked down at me with eyes that pleaded for me to speak, or fight back, or at least get up.

Darrell Jenkens’s boot knocked against the side of my head. He stag­gered a little, when one of his feet was off the floor. As the boot landed heavily on the floor, I saw the faint imprint of yellow letters written on the front, right above the sole. Steel Toe.

“What’s going on, Grady?” Darrell Jenkens said. “You acting like you’re sweet on him or something.”

Howard Goertzen laughed, and, as his body shook, the fence he was leaning against creaked. Beyond him, the hogs rustled in their pen. “You sweet on this faggot, Grady? I’ll be goddamned, you think you know some­body, and then you find out he’s sweet on a faggot.”

“I ain’t sweet on him,” Grady Oconnor said, but he looked at me when he spoke, and his eyes pleaded with mine to do something.

Above the rafters the corrugated tin roof cathedraled up and away from me. The barn’s lights hung at a point between the rafters and the roof, and everything above them was invisible. Below the lights, the tin was shiny, almost white, but above them it seemed to cant off into dark­ness. What was it Myra had said at Rosemary Krebs’s dance? Everything in this town is loaded with double meanings. Everything means some­thing. But Myra hadn’t gone far enough. It wasn’t just that everything meant something; it all meant too much.

“If you ain’t sweet on him then why you making goo-goo eyes at him?” Howard Goertzen’s voice.

“I ain’t sweet on him,” Grady Oconnor said. There was a hint of dis­gust in the way he said sweet, and I knew that whatever chance I had of escaping violence was just about to pass.

“Prove it,” Howard Goertzen said. He laughed again, just a little, and the fence squeaked under him, just a little, and the hogs rustled behind him, just a little.

“I ain’t got to prove nothing to you,” Grady Oconnor said. “You don’t know I’m straight up by now, that’s your problem.”

“I ain’t got a problem,” Howard Goertzen said. “You got a problem, Darrell?” Darl.

“I ain’t got a problem, Howard.” Haird.

“Well,” Howard Goertzen said, “seems to me the only person with a problem is the one lying on the floor of my Daddy’s barn.”

The black above the lights had an empty open beckoning quality about it, as if, if I could fly, I could fly into it and it would take me. It would let me in.

“Like, this would be a problem,” Darrell Jenkens said, and when he said the word this his boot swayed forward and by the time he said the word problem his boot was slamming into the side of my stomach, and I folded up and around it reflexively, folding so tightly that I trapped his leg in my folded body. The sound of my ribs cracking could be heard up and down the length of the barn, or at least I imagined it could, and after the sound was gone I heard Howard Goertzen’s quiet laugh.

“Damn, Dar­rell,” he said. “I bet that hurt.”

6.09

Myra

afterwards they had to pick glass from the kitchen window out of my butt with something that looked like a big tweezers or a little forceps. It took eight hours and two doctors, and after the first hour the first doctor hooked me up to a Valium drip to stop me squirming around, and everything got kind of hazy after that. The only thing I really remember—at least it feels like a memory, though it feels kinda like a dream too, but then it all feels like a dream—I remember asking the second doctor if I was going to have like, unsightly scars, you know, on my backside, and the second doctor clinked the tweezer-forceps thing down on one-a those steel trays and laid one of his hands in its cold rubber glove on my burning ass and told me Not if I can help it, and then he laughed a little and said At any rate it’s nothing anyone’ll notice after you’ve had your first baby.

Well. Here is something I can tell you for sure. Don’t wait to realize your past is important until after it’s already past. Because I’ll tell you: once it’s gone it’s gone, and if you didn’t take no precautions against forgetting it then you will. No matter how precious you thought it was at the time. Bits and pieces, that’s all you’ll have left, slivers as tiny as the glass that doctor pulled out of my skin. Bits and pieces that when you put them together don’t necessarily make up what it was had been taken apart. That’s as good as I can put it. Write it down. Maybe I say that because of knowing Colin and Justin. But I say it. Write it down now.

6.10

Webbie

on the first Friday after I had finished assembling Rosemary Krebs’s story, I picked up the key to the Archive. For me, it was all in the key and the lock: in all the years I had been alive my father had never left the Archive unlocked, but since I was five I could have, at any time, taken that key from its corkboard peg in the kitchen and opened that door. But it took me nearly thirty years to do it. The key was small and cool in my hand; it didn’t burn me as I’d half thought it would, though I clutched it so tightly on my way up the stairs that it bit into my palm. It slipped into the lock easily, turned almost noiselessly. The door was quiet too; only the lights hummed a little, and their fluo­rescent glare, combined with the dusty smell of the room, reminded me of a barn loft, a place where old discarded objects acquire some kind of value based on their mystery, objects that, under examination, always turn out to be junk. I hoped that junk was all I’d find there.

Time slipped away from me once I began searching. Within a few minutes I wasn’t looking for evidence of any shameful moment in Galatia’s history, but was instead enthralled by a small but bustling community. In those hours in the Archive I felt my father’s love for his town, and his fierce hatred of Rosemary Krebs for spoiling it: for the first time I realized that there had been something to spoil, although both the dates on these pic­tures and my own memory told me that what I was looking at had been gone long before Rosemary Krebs’s tractors broke ground west of Highway 9.

When I found them, it was a shock. I didn’t even realize I was in the Johnson family file. There had been an Alessander first; he had moved here and married Constance Getterling; they had two daughters, Blithe, who moved away, and Belinda, who married one of the Deacon boys, and a son, Samuwell, whose wife, Cherry Estevez, had come with her family to work in the fields. Samuwell and Cherry were the parents of Sawyer and Marsha. Sawyer had married Cora, of course, and fathered another Sawyer, and took off. Marsha had never married; she’d been engaged to Hally Taylor, whose death in a drunk-driving accident I could dimly recall. Everyone had assumed that Hally was Eric’s father, but the dates on the notarized copies of Hally’s death certificate and Eric’s birth certificate were nearly eleven months apart. I wasn’t surprised: that same everyone had also maintained that grief had made Marsha crazy and her craziness was what made Eric come out of her the way he had. At any rate, Marsha never really got it together after Hally’s death, and Eric more or less ran wild from the time he could run, and now I found myself looking at what remained of his thumbs, wrapped up in a white embroidered handkerchief with the monogram R.K. on it, which in turn had been ensconced in a sealed Ziploc baggie with my father’s handwriting on it.

My father had written Eric Johnson’s thumbs on the bag.

The stained handkerchief was spread open, the shriveled parcels of bone and thready skin were still in my hand, when I heard the back door slam. I could have put them back, I suppose, closed the file, locked up the Archive before my father made it up in the chair lift, but I couldn’t have beaten him to the kitchen with the key. And the key and these bones were tantamount to the same thing, I understood that much immediately: if I had claimed the one I would have claimed the other. In my father’s eyes there could have been no difference.

So I sat there. I listened to my father stamp around the ground floor for a few moments, and then I heard the long slow whine of the chair lift as it carried him upstairs. He thumped down the hall, he appeared in the doorway. He looked at me briefly, noted what I held, and then he went to a cabinet I hadn’t yet opened and he pulled from it a decanter and a glass. He carried these with some difficulty to his oak desk, sat on the leather chair behind it. The air in the Archive was so dry that as soon as my father unstoppered the bottle I could smell the alcohol.

“Whiskey?” I said then. “This room is full of surprises.”

“Scotch,” my father clarified. “Single malt.” The high white collar of his shirt pushed at his cheeks, giving him a single thin jowl that ringed his face like Lincoln’s beard. He sipped at the Scotch and grimaced, and for a moment a second line of flesh framed his face like a cowl.

I held out my hand, the hand that contained Rosemary Krebs’s hand­kerchief and Eric Johnson’s thumbs. “Is Eric Johnson alive?”

“I have no idea.”

“You have no idea? Then what are these?”

My father sipped and grimaced; the cowl slipped forward and then slipped back. “Those are his thumbs,” my father said, and I was about to prod him further when he went on. “In one of those drawers I have locks of your and your mother’s hair that are just as substantial as those sticks you hold in your hand. Nevertheless, I know that your mother is dead and you are alive, not by evidence of those locks, but because I buried your mother in the ground and I am confronted by your face each day of my life.” He sipped again, but didn’t grimace this time. “Not all evidence is conclusive, daughter. Even the Bible would not be sufficient proof of the existence of God if we didn’t see His presence in our lives. Now put those down. They, and you, have made your point.”

I looked at the thumbs one last time, then wrapped them up in the handkerchief. “I’m keeping them.”

“As you will. Certainly I cannot stop you.” My father shrugged his right side, as if to emphasize his physical infirmity. “You are going to take them to Lawman Brown, I suppose.”

I nodded.

“You should know before you speak to him that it was he who gave them to me.”

I blinked. “You expect me to believe that.”

My father drank. “I do.”

“Then why didn’t you do something?”

“Do . . . ?”’

“Take them down to Sheriff Peterson in Bigger Hill, the Highway Patrol, anywhere.”

My father made an arc through the air with his halt-finished drink. The arc seemed to circumscribe Galatia, Galatea, Bigger Hill, Kansas, the world.

“They might have found Eric Johnson,” I went on. “They might have found who lynched him.”

“What would have been the point in finding the boy? To bring him back here, so that he could continue to hate, and be hated, and attack another white girl, or perhaps a black one? Finding him, I think, would have been a service neither to him nor to Galatia. And as to the men who lynched him, no outside investigator is needed. Mobs may hide their faces with masks, but they tend not to be so fastidious with their voices, and their trucks, and their shoes. Fifty-five men and boys tied Eric Johnson to that tree. Forty-seven white men and eight black men. If you’d kept on with your searches rather than allowing your attention and your imag­ination to be captured by a powerful but ultimately impotent symbol, you would have found their names written on a sheet of paper. Although,” my father said, and sipped again, “the majority of those names have be­come nothing more than symbols as well. Only two of Eric Johnson’s lynchers still live among us. All the rest have gone.”

In fact there was only one, but we wouldn’t know that for a few more minutes.

I could guess one of the names. “Lawman Brown?”

He nodded.

“And how can you—you, a champion of African-Americans—live with that?”

“The crime is his, not mine. And as long as he and I both know that, he is much more useful as sheriff than in jail.”

“I can’t believe I’m having this conversation. You sound more like a big-city politician than a small-town preacher.”

“You have always been too easily swayed by appearances, daughter. Galatia is a city. It is as modern as New York or Chicago or Los Angeles, and if you are displeased by this state of affairs then you can blame your . . . employer. I would have been content to remain an anachronism, the spiritual leader of an ever-shrinking flock, but she dragged Galatia into the twentieth century. She gave us what we never had before: a race problem. She gave us fiscal crises. She gave us brokered deals, urban de­velopment projects, capital funds drives. I preferred church socials myself, nothing more serious than spiked punch to deal with, and the food was always better, but some things would appear to be irretrievably lost. If I may be so vulgar,” he said, and paused, and refilled his glass, and drank from it, “we have as much chance of regaining those halcyon days as Eric Johnson, living or dead, has of regaining his thumbs. But, as Mrs. Krebs is fond of saying, you can’t stop progress.”

“And where,” I said, when my father had finished speaking. “Where does the welfare of Lucy Robinson figure into all of this?”

For the first time that evening my father seemed surprised. “What does she have to do with this?”

Despite my father’s earlier admonishment, I could only brandish the parcel in my hand. “Do you think it’s just a coincidence that she was the one who was chosen?”

My father looked at me for a long time, and then his eyes dropped to my hand, and then they raised themselves again and met mine. “No,” he said in a level voice, “I don’t. I think that whoever would have accom­panied young Justin Time”—he said the name without even a hint of irony—“would have been, as you put it, chosen.”

As my father had spoken I’d felt a change in the room. I wasn’t sure if it was in him or in me, or in the atmosphere of the Archive itself, so long sealed, now, for the first time, breathing freely, but as I looked at it the figure behind the desk seemed to retreat from me, and I felt myself sliding backward also. I could see in front of me all of the things I’d done over the past few months, all my discoveries undiscovered and waiting for me to uncover them, and I realized that they made no difference, no difference at all.

“You said black men. Black men helped lynch Eric Johnson.”

“Eight.”

“Did you—?”

My father held up his hand, and the gesture actually relieved me. I don’t think I could have borne the idea of my father in a Klan robe.

He put his hand down. “I would like to tell you that those men did what they did because Eric Johnson had stolen from them, or bullied their children, or even because of what happened to the girl. But I am afraid that their reason is the same as that of their white counterparts: they helped lynch Eric Johnson because of the color of his skin, and the blame for that sentiment I also lay at Rosemary Krebs’s feet.”

The explanation was too easy. I knew it, and he did too: after a mo­ment his eyes dropped to his desk. He reached for his glass, saw that it was empty, and put his hand in his lap.

“You’re her crony,” I said. “You’re her lackey. You’re her flunky.” House nigger, he had called me when I told him I was going to work for her, but he was merely a fool.

My father allowed himself to smile. “Use the word. You know you want to.”

I only stared at him.

He shrugged. When he spoke his voice was unperturbed. “We keep each other honest.”

“Honest? By whose reckoning? It looks to me that you both lie like dogs.”

“Dogs do not lie. Dogs do not speak.”

“Don’t obfuscate.”

My father shrugged again. “You may choose to see it as lying, or obfuscating. I prefer to think of myself as her shadow.”

I nearly laughed aloud. “That might be the most shocking thing that’s come out of your mouth all evening.”

“I didn’t say I chose the role. All I can do is play it for the good of Galatia.”

“And what is the good of Galatia?”

“To continue on as we have, without further intervention from the outside world.”

“And again I ask you,” I stammered, “where does Lucy Robinson figure into all of this?”

This time my father didn’t flinch. “She is not my responsibility, daughter. She is not one of mine.”

We were saved by the telephone. My father answered it cordially, but almost immediately his tone and his face wrinkled in distaste, and he held the phone out to me. “It’s for you,” he said. “Apparently something has happened, yet again, to your little friend.”

I held my hand over the receiver. “Who—”

“Howard Goertzen,” my father said, and, though that hadn’t been the question I’d been asking him, I suddenly knew the name of one of the other men who had helped lynch Eric Johnson.

6.11

Myra

the first time I heard about Angela I didn’t give it too much currency. Lucy was five then, I think, she was playing with her birthday present from Rosemary Krebs: a dollhouse so big we had to keep it outside. Turrets, balconies, drawbridges, barred windows, real stucco on the walls, its own moat that you filled up with a garden hose. It was a castle, not a dollhouse, a palace for a princess. It was so big Lucy could fit inside it. One whole wall was a door, and Lucy used to slip inside and sit there all day in one of her white dresses.

She made Stan buy her a little chair so she wouldn’t soil—she used the word soil—her white dress in the dirt, which prompted Stan to say that every gift Rosemary Krebs bought Lucy ended up costing us money. Still, he bought Lucy the cutest little white chair with blue flowers painted on it, and when he gave it to her, he said, “Here you go, Princess. Here’s your throne.”

Perched on her chair and sealed inside her dollhouse, Lucy told us, “This is a magic fairy castle. When I’m inside it I’m invisible.”

This is how a five-year-old says Don’t bug me.

Stan and I nodded, when she was inside the dollhouse we pretended we couldn’t see her. Lucy, Lucy, we called, where are you, Lucy? and then we’d wander away.

But indulging her had some funny effects. For one thing, it made it easier for us to ignore her, which isn’t something that comes naturally to a parent. For another, Lucy started believing the stories she was telling.

I told Stan, put the dollhouse in the shade of the two catalpas that grow in the back yard so it wouldn’t get too hot for Lucy. I told him, I can see the headline: sleeping beauty is dead—galatea’s princess dies of heat stroke. It just wouldn’t do.

Trees are on the short side around here, so that’s also where the clothesline is.

What I mean is, I wasn’t spying. I was hanging clothes up to dry.

“My name is Angela,” I heard from inside the castle. “I live in the most beautiful house in the world. From the outside it looks just like any other house, but on the inside there are lots and lots and lots of rooms, and in every room there is a secret surprise, and all of the surprises are for me.”

She went on talking but by then I was out of hearing range. I was hanging sheets, and they do tend to move you down the line.

At the time I wasn’t bothered.

What child doesn’t tell herself stories?

Who hasn’t toyed with the idea of changing their name?

Angela.

For a little while in high school I tried to get people to call me Maria—Muh-rye-a—instead of Myra, but it never caught on.

I remember there was a breeze blowing, so hot and so dry that it seemed to pass over your skin like a cotton ball run the wrong way up stubbly legs, and I was remembering that other hot wind, and my day­dream of a lover who touched me everywhere at once.

I remember that the little prickly itch I’d had in my butt ever since the fire was particularly bad that day.

Little snatches of Lucy’s words came to me on the breeze. “. . . little chest . . . magic mirror . . . silver tiara.”

I remember wondering where a five-year-old learned the word tiara.

6.12

Justin

darrell jenkens had thrown up and fallen down.

Howard Goertzen and Grady Oconnor seemed to have done nothing during the entire time it took him to throw up and fall down, and I realized they must be very, very drunk.

Now the fence creaked under the weight of Howard Goertzen’s shift­ing body, the hogs rustled, and Howard Goertzen said quietly, “Uh, Dar­rell, you okay?”

Darrell Jenkens breathed heavily. In a moment, I thought, he’ll start to snore.

“Hey Grady,” Howard Goertzen said.

“Yup?” Grady Oconnor said.

“Grady, Darrell fell down.”

“Looks like it,” Grady Oconnor said.

Howard Goertzen started to laugh, accompanied by the squeaking fence and rustling hogs, “Hey Grady.”

“Yup?”

“Grady, Darrell fell down! He fell down!”

“You just said that, Howard.”

“I mean, he fell down in his own puke.” His laughter was punctuated by hiccups now, and with each hic the fence squealed beneath his weight and the hogs had come to a kind of slow boil. As I rolled my eyes toward Howard Goertzen I saw him drop his beer can. It was a deliberate act, I saw, not an accident.

“Hey”—hic—“Grady?”

“What is it now, Howard?”

“I dropped my”—hic—“my beer, Grady.”

“Hey Howard?”

Something in Grady Oconnor’s voice pulled my eyes to him. I realized that he had said Haird.

Grady Oconnor was holding a shovel in his hands.

“Yeah Grady?” Howard said. He hiccuped loudly, and seemed mes­merized by the thin stream of beer pulsing from his dropped can.

Darrell Jenkens started snoring.

“Darrell’s”—hic—“snoring, Grady.”

“Howard.” Haird.

I wondered where Grady Oconnor had got the shovel, and then I wondered if that really mattered.

“Yeah Grady?” Between his laughter and beer-slurred hiccuping voice, Grady Oconnor’s name came out sounding like a slightly diphthonged Gray.

“Howard,” Grady Oconnor said, moving toward Howard Goertzen, the shovel in both his hands, “Howard, just once in your mother­fucking honky cracker fish-white life, Howard, I want you to shut the fuck up.”

Haird. Haird, Haird, Haird.

Grady Oconnor jammed the handle of the shovel into Howard Goer­tzen’s stomach. Laughter, punctuated by a hiccup, segued abruptly into an oomph, and then Howard Goertzen joined Darrell Jenkens and me in the vomit club, and through it all the fence produced a long protesting squeak and the hogs jumped and jostled and squealed.

Grady Oconnor rammed Howard Goertzen’s stomach again, and this time the only sound came from the fence and the hogs. The fence didn’t squeak, though: the top rail cracked and then, with a splintering noise, it broke under the weight of Howard Goertzen’s ass. I saw Howard Goert­zen’s purple face as he fell backward into the hog pen, his mouth open­ing and closing but no sound coming out. He seemed to be chewing on air, and then his face disappeared as he fell the rest of the way into the pen.

The hogs were jumping about wildly now, the fence vibrating here and there where they bounced off it, and through their squeals I heard what sounded like tearing.

No sound came from Howard Goertzen, or from Grady Oconnor. Dar­rell Jenkens’s snores had grown slightly louder.

The hogs’ squealing took on a different tone now. It wasn’t panicked as much as it was greedy. Some of the hogs seemed to have grown head and shoulders above the others, but then I realized they must be standing on Howard Goertzen.

After a long pause, Grady Oconnor walked over to the corrugated tin wall of the building and leaned the shovel slowly, quietly, against the wall. It stood there, next to another shovel, and a rake.

As Grady Oconnor walked back toward me where I still lay on the floor I heard, for the first time, another sound, and as it filled in another layer of space next to the sound of Grady Oconnor’s footsteps and Darrell Jenkens’s snores and the tearing of the hogs, I realized it had been there all along.

Grady Oconnor didn’t meet my eyes when he bent over to pick me up. He struggled under my weight, heaved me onto his shoulder, nearly fell over. He didn’t say anything, but his breath came hot and loud and fast.

Outside it was raining. The sound, I realized, had been the rain beat­ing on the tin ceiling of the building.

“Sweet Jesus,” Grady Oconnor said as he laid me in the back of his own truck. “Sweet Jesus.”

He didn’t seem to be talking to me.

6.13

Myra

i had to fight my way through the crowd. People was pressed together like they was in a basement watching a cockfight. The kitten Shelly Stadler held in her arms was yowling fit to wake the dead, but Lucy was louder. When I finally pushed my way to her I saw that she was standing in her own little space, her eyes closed and her hands balled in fists just like they’d been when she was born. Her white dress was dirty and one of her patent leather shoes was missing. Her mouth was open and one long scream was coming out of it. Every once in a while she stopped, heaved, gasped, and then she started up again. When I got to her I swept her up in my arms. Her mouth closed like a trapdoor, and she just kind of hung in my arms, shivering.

I felt everyone staring at me, waiting for me to ask the question.

What happened.

I waited until Lucy calmed down a little. I stroked her hair and her back and her arms.

“Lucy,” I said, “what’s the matter?”

She didn’t answer me for a long time. I just kept stroking her hair and back and arms.

Finally she spoke.

“He touched me.”

My blood ran cold. I didn’t ask where. I didn’t ask how. But I remem­ber thinking that the little girl I held in my arms couldn’t be my daughter.

“Who touched you, honey?”

Again she didn’t answer for a long time. Again I just kept stroking her hair and back and arms. As if I could turn her back into Lucy.

I felt her shift in my arms. Her head turned, then her whole body. She spoke in a clear loud voice.

She spoke to the crowd.

“The white nigger,” she said.

6.14

Cora

six o’clock in the a.m. Grady Oconnor knocking at my door. He had to knock twice and knock loud before I heard him through the drumble of raindrops and sleep swirling around my head. I wasn’t even halfway through my first cup of coffee yet, which means that like hearing was a foreign concept to me, let alone something as compli­cated as opening the door, and Rosa’d gone back upstairs to get a shower in. I have to tell you that when I did finally hear somebody knocking at that hour my heart jumped right up into my throat and I raised the blind slowly and then I had to look at Grady Oconnor double because I thought, she did it again. She knew to close the blinds the night before.

Grady kinda sidewaysed in, and I was locking the door behind him before I realized I was doing it, cha-thunk, and the first thing I noticed was that Grady was carrying his cap in his hands and his clothes was dry but his hair was damp, which, at that hour, on half a cup of coffee, and with it raining outside, I couldn’t make sense out of. Grady’s head hung so low he could-a kicked it with his own feet, and I saw that he had on his newest and cleanest pair-a pants and a long-sleeved shirt with pearly snaps disappearing into the valley his shiny belt made in his belly. He wasn’t dressed for the fields is what I’m saying. That was for sure.

“Why, Grady Oconnor,” I said, “you look like you on your way to church.”

“No ma’am,” he said, and there was enough in the way he said them two words to make me catch my breath all over again.

When my chest had stopped fluttering I said, “Why don’t you come on in, sit down. You a little early for breakfast but maybe I can fry you a egg?”

“I’m not hungry, ma’am.”

“First off, you drop this ma’am business. And then you best tell me what’s up.”

Grady’s hands like to rip his cap in half they was pulling on it so bad. “Kendall Hendricks got me going all the way down to Wichita today, to pick up parts for that new combine-a his. I done told him he shouldn’t-a bought no International Harvester machine, they unreliable and you can’t get no parts for them anywhere in a hundred miles.” He put his cap down suddenly, pushed it away from him. “Thinking of making a day trip of it,” he said. “Got me a buddy lives down to Wichita.” He said, very slow, “Won’t be back till at least tomorrow. Probably maybe Sun­day. Probably.’’

While he spoke I poured him a cup of coffee. His hands shook so much that the cup rattled on the saucer like it was set on top of the washing machine. I couldn’t do nothing bout his hands, so I put a couple-a napkins between his cup and saucer, and then, when it was quiet in the café, I said, “You got anything needs taken care of while you gone, Grady?”

He looked up at me then, with eyes that were shiny bright and scared. “Cora,” he said, “you got to tell that man to get outta town. Just go. Never mind about no Rosemary Krebs or Lawman Brown or Lucy Rob­inson. Just tell him to get-go.” He continued staring at me for a good long moment after he’d spoken, and then he jerked his head away and went back to staring at his coffee.

I took a drink of my own coffee. Sometimes Rosa put a little mocha syrup in the bottom of the cup, just a little, and she don’t stir it in, so it settles down there and waits for me. What that means is that I don’t taste it until I’m getting to the end of the cup of coffee, by which time she’s usually in the shower. It suddenly flashed on me: Grady just come from the shower. That’s why his hair was wet and his clothes was dry when he come in from the rain. That’s what was so strange. Grady Ocon­nor always showered in the evening cause his momma Starling worked as a nurse’s aide in the hospital down to Bigger Hill and she had to be in at 7 a.m., and then his daddy George always had a shower right after, before he went out to the fields, and there was barely enough hot water for two quick showers in that house and nowhere near enough for three, and I just knew in that way everybody knows everything about everyone else in a small town that Grady Oconnor always took his shower before he went to bed, and all the sudden I was scared again.

Now I tasted Rosa’s mocha, a thick sweet chocolaty trail on my tongue, with thinner acidy streams of coffee on either side, and when, finally, the last of the sweetness had left my tongue, I said, “What happened, Grady?” and then I finished the cup of coffee Rosa’d made for me.

“Nothing’s happened,” he sort-a whispered. “Not yet. But something’s gonna. Something’s gonna snap, something’s just gonna go bang.” He didn’t say bang loud the way you might expect. He said it quiet: bang.

“Grady—”

“I was working with DuWayne Hicks last week, helping him move some cattle. You know how DuWayne’s daddy Jim got that dog, that shepherd-lab mix with the floppy ears and kinda sloped hindquarters? Well, that dog was acting a little ornery yesterday, singled out a calf and started nipping at it, nothing serious, nothing that a good swift kick in the you-know-where wouldn’t-a fixed. But DuWayne, he just shot it. Didn’t say nothing to me, didn’t even shout at the dog first. He just shot it and left it in the ditch and when we got back to the house he told his daddy that the dog run out under the wheels of that man’s funny jeep-type truck with the big grille in front.”

“What you getting at, Gra—”

“With a shotgun, Cora. He shot that dog with a shotgun, at close range.”

There were brown speckles at the bottom of my coffee cup, dark brown speckles of coffee grounds and light brown almost glittering speckles of caramelized mocha. Almost glittering, but not quite.

Grady was looking into the cup in his hands, and then he pushed back his chair and stood up. “I should get going. Long trip to Wichita.”

“Sunday,” I said back to him.

“Late,” he said.

“Don’t forget your umbrella.”

“Ma’am?”

“Your clothes was dry when I let you in. Your clothes was dry but your hair was wet, so I figured you must have left a umbrella outside.”

“Oh,” Grady said. “Yes, ma’am.”

I didn’t bother to correct him, and I didn’t stop him either when he pulled a dollar bill from his pocket and left it on the counter, and I didn’t stop him when he walked to the door, unlocked it himself, and walked on outside. As soon as he was gone I run a sinkful of hot soapy water to wash them two coffee cups, and when I was done with that I took the bus tub full of salt and pepper and Tabasco shakers and set them on the tables for the breakfast crowd.

6.15

Myra

my name is Angela.”

I was tucking Lucy into bed.

“I live in the most beautiful house in the world with my mother, who is a fairy princess. My father is an ogre who only comes out of the forest at night. He has seven arms and seven legs and seven eyes, and he is so ugly that my mother had to turn him into a candle. She lit him, and he burned up, and now we don’t ever see him no more.”

She slept with a smile on her face, and her left hand curled into a fist.

6.16

Divine

i found him. It was about five in the morning, that time of the day when the moon and the sun are both in the sky. I was only just creeping outta bed, still stiff and sore and sneaking through the house, and I was thinking that Justin must be making little moony faces up in his garret when I got outside and saw him lying just inside the hedge.

When I first laid eyes on him I thought he was sleeping. “Well well well,” I said out loud, “seems like Miss Thing does let her hair down every once in a while.” But then I got up close and I saw a big bruise on his cheek. His eye was just starting to swell and turn black, and I figured they couldn’t-a been beating on him more than two hours ago.

Then: “What the hell—”

The voice came from behind me, and I turned and saw Colin. How can I describe it? For a moment I was as happy as I’d ever been since Ratboy, because I believed he’d followed me, but the next minute he was charging across the yard in just a pair of running shorts, barefoot and wincing on the sharp wet rocks, and even as he shoved by me so hard that he knocked me to the ground I knew he’d just been waiting for me to leave so he could get up.

Then he was next to Justin. He kneeled down beside him, he took his head in his hands, stroked his hair, he cried, goddammit, he cried, even though Justin was waking up and it was clear that he wasn’t hurt too bad. When Colin finally looked at me it was only to yell, “Don’t just stand there, you idiot! Go get the car!”

6.17

Myra

about all i could do after my feet got frostbit was sit. So I sat. Almost all I did was sit. Oh, I got up every once in a while, like when that box with what Lawman Brown thought was robin’s eggs showed up, but mostly all I did was sit.

Blue nail polish. I told her it didn’t match her dress but did she listen? Some things I will not take responsibility for.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t walk. I could walk. I could wobble and tipple-topple my way along, but I simply could not bear the sensation walking gave me, the tingle that started just below my knees and turned into this sort of eerie nothingness just above my feet. It was like my feet wasn’t there, and when I walked I felt like I wasn’t touching the earth, and it was that I couldn’t take. Some people wanted to fly and they invented airplanes and space rockets and science fiction, but me, I was always happy enough to stand in one place and look just as far as the horizon let me see. Me, I was always a flat-earther. I believed that if you went far enough then you would indeed drop off the edge of the world, and after my feet went it felt like I was falling off that edge every time I stood up and took a step in any direction.

So I sat. I sat and rocked. Usually I thought about my Lucy, but sometimes, sometimes I thought about Rosemary Krebs, and, like I did with Lucy, I imagined her at a distant age, oh, seventeen I guess, I guess I made her Lucy’s age, smoothed away the lines on her face and painted her hair black and injected a little bit of flesh into her titties and hips, and there she was, Rosemary Krebs, or whatever her last name was then, seventeen years old and as tiny as a nymphet, dressed always in a white dress like she later on bought for Lucy, and for some reason when I thought of this little girl Rosemary the one thing I thought of was her pregnant. Yes, I gave Rosemary Krebs a baby, and, I guess, a lover, I gave her hot sweating blushing cheeks and bloodstained sheets and a thousand sighs and gasps and tears, and then, every time, I took her baby away from her. I was her mother, the mother what said, I don’t think so, little miss, and I sent that baby out into the world like a letter without a destinated or a return address, Moses in a basket of rushes, floating down the river.

It made it easier, that way. I could almost forgive her, that way, for taking Lucy away from me. Cause she did: even the Lucy I held in my head, the shiny little girl who memorized “Swanee River” when she was just five years old, that little girl was Rosemary Krebs’s more than she was mine. Rosemary Krebs took her from me with dresses and candy and big promises. She stood her on the highest hill between here and Kenosha and said, Everything you see will be yours. She nurtured the greedy soul that lived inside Lucy just like it lives inside everyone, you, me, and every eleven, twelve, thirteen-year-old girl with no daddy and a mother with nothing more to offer than a drinking problem and a little savings account that’ll maybe see her through two years at a community college, which as someone once told me is just about enough education to teach you what you don’t know and don’t have and never will. Rosemary Krebs nurtured that greedy soul in Lucy until it took her over, grew up in her and ate her up, and all I could think of sometimes as I rocked and rocked was one of those freaky tomatoes or pumpkins or cucumbers you see at the State Fair down to Hutchinson, mutant vegetables grown up as big as a house, and what you always see is their grower standing by them with a blue ribbon and a proud smile of ownership, but what you never hear of is anyone actually eating these vegetables, making a thousand gallons of spaghetti sauce, or a pumpkin pie the size of a wagon wheel, or just a plain old salad, tossed in a swimming pool and served with a couple-a rowboat oars.

6.18

Colin

divine sulked in a corner of the waiting room. I felt a pang of regret for the way I’d barked at him earlier, but before I could say anything Webbie and Wade burst through the doors.

“Just bruises,” I said. “One cracked rib.”

“Who did it?” Webbie said.

I shrugged.

“Was it—”

“No,” I said.

“How do you know?” Wade said. There was concern in his voice. There was also aggression.

“I know,” I said. And then I added, “After six years, I know.”

“Is he awake?” Webbie said quickly. “I want to see him.”

“See what? See his bruises? Let him rest.”

“I just want him to know we’re here,” she said. “In case he needs anything.”

“Needs what?” I said. “He’s in a hospital.”

“Now look here, Colin—” Wade began, but Webbie cut him off.

“Don’t,” she said. “Just don’t.” She put a hand on Wade’s shoulder and pulled him toward the door. He held back for a moment, looking at me intently, challenging me. I was about to take up his challenge when I noticed there was paint on him, not just on the clothes he’d thrown on but on his skin, and I remembered I had seen the same paint on Justin this morning, on his skin as well, as well as on his clothes, and I turned from Wade and walked quickly to Divine and put my hand on his shoulder.

Wade spoke again.

“Do you even know what you’re doing here?” he said.

I turned. I left my hand on Divine’s shoulder, and turned to Wade. He was standing in the doorway of the waiting room. Webbie stood just behind him. There was about Wade the air of a man who wanted to play a trump card, or make a revelation, or hurt me.

He definitely wanted to hurt me.

Divine’s shoulder was warm under mine, and loose. I kneaded it, back and forth.

“Do I know what I’m doing here?”

“In Galatea,” Wade said.

“In Galatia.”

“Do you know how you found this place?”

“I found this place because Yonah told me about it. He told me it was interesting.”

“Yonah didn’t send you here because Galatea is interesting.”

“Galatea isn’t interesting?”

“Galatia,” Divine said softly. I noticed that his shoulder was tight now, and warmer than it had been. Hot.

“Yonah sent you here to find out what I was doing.”

“What are you doing?”

“Yonah sent you here to find out if I was painting.”

I smiled. “Are you painting?”

“If Yonah sent you here,” Wade said, his voice rising with frustration, “it means that he probably didn’t even like you.”

“Ah,” I said. “Yonah didn’t like me.”

Wade blinked. “Yonah didn’t like you?”

“Yonah didn’t like me.”

“Wade,” Webbie said.

“You’re hurting my shoulder,” Divine said.

I let go of Divine’s shoulder.

“Yonah liked Justin,” I said.

Divine put my hand back on his shoulder.

“Yonah liked Justin,” Wade said.

I began to knead Divine’s shoulder again.

“Yonah thought you would like Justin.”

“I like Justin.”

I smiled again. “Yonah was right.”

Webbie pushed Wade out of the doorway and re-entered the room. She looked from me to Wade, and then she looked, briefly, at Divine, and then she looked back at me.

“Are you two finished now? Are you quite finished?”

It was this point that Divine started laughing.

“Webbie’s upset,” he said.

Webbie started to say something but Divine cut her off.

“Webbie’s jealous.”

“Webbie’s jealous?” Wade said.

Divine squeezed the wrist of the hand that was squeezing his shoulder. His fingernails dug into my skin.

“Cause no one ain’t fighting over her. That’s why Webbie jealous. Cause she all alone.”

There was silence after Divine spoke, an awful, an unbearable silence, and I said again, “Yonah liked Justin.” I said, “He liked him, he said, because he had nothing to fear from him.”

6.19

Myra

there was a lot of momentum and confusion after Lucy spoke. You’d expect there would be. The air was thick with dust, and people was pushing and shoving at each other as if Eric Johnson might turn out to be one of them.

But in my arms Lucy didn’t move. Her body was rigid, her stare fixed. I let my eyes follow hers.

Lucy was looking at Stan.

People were calling out for guns and knives and ropes and tripping over each other in their haste to get on with things, but Stan stood as still as Lucy, and stared back into her eyes.

He touched me.

The white nigger.

Stan blinked, and saw me looking at him, and he blinked again, and then, like the others, he was gone.

6.20

Thelma Goertzen

there was a shot in the morning air and then the rooster crowed and then there was another shot. There was sausage on the stove but I turned it off and ran outside and there was another shot. There was mud and puddles in the yard and another shot and the rooster crowed again and the hogs was still in the night barn and scream­ing and then there was another shot. There was Lyle in the night barn and five dead hogs in the pen and another shot and six and a vibration that like to knock me down and the hogs screaming and the dust and the semiautomatic .22 rifle with the twenty-round clip and the two spare clips in Lyle’s pocket and another shot and seven and the vibration and there was blood coming out of Lyle’s ears and the yard and the mud and the puddles and the phone in the kitchen and Nettie Ferguson and Lawman Brown and another shot and the puddles and the mud and the yard and another shot and too many dead hogs to count and piles of something brown and chunky on the cement floor beer cans another shot the brown was vomit and the beer cans was only two and the dead hogs too many to count and the screams and another shot and the vibration and the blood coming from Lyle’s ears and Howard nowhere around and then but then and then there was Howard’s boots in the hog pen and the dead hogs and another shot and the screams and another shot and the screams and another shot and the vibration that did knock me off my feet and the blood on Lyle’s blue-shaved cheek and shirt collar and another shot and Howard’s boots in the hog pen and another shot and there was some­thing holding Howard’s boots together. There was another shot. There was Howard’s boots and there was Howard’s boots and there was Howard’s boots still laced up to the ankle and there was something holding them together and there was another shot and the vibration and the silent fall of a clip to the ground and the silent snap of another clip into place and another shot and Howard’s boots and Lyle’s blood and something warm on my neck and the sight and smoke and jerk of another shot and another shot and another shot and the dead hogs and the live hogs and Lyle’s blood and Howard’s boots and another shot and the vomit and the beer cans and another shot and then there was no live hogs and no sound and Lyle never even turned to look at me and Howard’s boots and Lyle’s gun and Lyle’s mouth and Lyle’s gun and then there was another shot.

6.21

Myra

the day after Lucy was born a nurse come into my room and said she wanted to apologize to me. She said they’d just changed the lightbulb in Labor and Delivery, they was right in the middle of the operation when I come in. She said I was already at eleven and a half and there wasn’t no time to put the cover back on the light.

One of them industrial strength fluorescent coils, she said the light was.

She said the way I stared at that light it must-a burned holes right in my eyes.

6.22

Wade

the sight of the waiting room, with its glass-enclosed posters of meadows, strong fathers, smiling mothers, safe infants, all given brutal prominence by pulsing and humming fluorescent lights, had almost undone me. Thank God Webbie was there, or I think Colin and I would have brawled. Afterward, though, after we left, I felt strange and excited, elated almost, but then I was just as suddenly tired, ex­hausted, as the adrenaline rush seeped out of my body. For the first time in months I didn’t paint, but went instead, as soon as I got home, back to bed, and I stayed there all day.

But the next day I painted. There was nothing else to do: I couldn’t exactly call Justin to see how he was, or pay a visit to him. I couldn’t call Webbie either. At one point during the drive home she called Colin “that fucking cueball cracker faggot from New York City,” and we shared a laugh, and then she asked me, quietly, why I wasn’t looking for Lucy Robinson, but I don’t think she liked my answer, and after that wc drove on in silence. So: my studio.

My hand shook so badly that I began wondering if I could find a way to incorporate this stutter stroke onto the canvas, but before I could re­solve the dilemma I heard a creak on the floorboard behind me. I turned; it was Justin.

He wore a tank top and shorts. It was what he wore most summer days, but today his bare skin was dappled with blue and purple and black bruises that were almost obscenely pretty. I wanted to embrace him but the bruises held me in check. I stammered a hello, and I almost imagined that he answered. But he only turned around, and I followed his slightly limping form to what used to be Divine’s room. He waited while I un­locked the door, and then he shucked his shirt and shorts and walked—already barefoot, I noticed then, his feet unbruised but nevertheless painted black by three miles of rain-dampened roads—to the middle of the room, and lowered himself carefully to the floor. His limbs were as clear and distinct as pencil lines; drawing them seemed almost beside the point. Still, he sat there, obviously waiting, and, for the first time, he didn’t close his eyes.

6.23

Myra

the doctor that come up from Bigger Hill wasn’t a regular pediatrician. He asked me to leave the room while he looked at Lucy, but I wouldn’t.

I pulled Lucy’s one shoe and her tights and panties off myself.

She just lay there while the doctor lifted up her dress and opened her legs and turned her from one side to the other.

He held one of those little penlights.

Both his hands were busy, so he held it in his mouth.

For the first time I looked at the line between my daughter’s legs like I looked at my own: as something that men would take a interest in. I suppose I’d thought she was too young to be a woman yet, too young to be a girl even. I’d thought she was only a child, but now I realize: boys learn how to be boys, but girls are born that way.

I was still holding Lucy’s shoe in my hand, and I used my shirttail to rub the dirt off it.

The doctor was quick and a little rough, which later on I decided was probably better than nice but slow.

When he was finished he took the light outta his mouth. He licked a line of drool from his lips and said that there didn’t appear to have been any recent penetration.

He asked me if there was any need to examine her from the other side. It took me a moment to figure out what he meant—it took me a moment to get past the word recent—and then I just shook my head no.

With my permission he gave Lucy something to help her sleep.

He never once asked me where my husband was.

My husband who was tying Eric Johnson to a tree.

6.24

Webbie

i saw him coming down the road. He walked slowly, with a bit of a limp, and at first I thought he was naked. But he was only carrying his shirt, and his khaki shorts were as dirty as his skin was tanned. A crescent of a bruise still ringed his eye, a small lump bub­bled at the base of his rib cage, and, though it pained me to see these marks on him, I think that if they hadn’t been there I would have run away from him, because, as he approached, he seemed the most inviolable person I had ever encountered, not so much a person as a walking skin, a single solid uninterrupted expanse with no way in or out. It was the mouth, of course, the mouth that was always closed.

But I didn’t run away; instead, I linked my arm through his and fell in step with him. “I think I’ve been looking for you,” I said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to show you something.” I felt the muscles of his arm shiver just a little, but he didn’t resist. That didn’t mean anything: he never resisted. “You’re tan,” I said then, trying to relax him. I touched his shoulder. “It looks good on you.” We walked slowly; I steered us toward town, toward Galatia—the real Galatia, my father’s Galatia. “I used to sunbathe when I was a kid. I had to do it away from home because the Reverend thought a bathing suit was inappropriate attire for a young lady, but I used to end up black as a plum.” I paused. Every time I paused I waited for him to say something. I knew he wouldn’t but it just seemed absurd, the two of us walking along, only one of us talking. We had had such wonderful conversations together.

Then my pause had gone on too long, and I didn’t know how to restart the conversation. Conversation: I allowed myself to chuckle, but said nothing, and we walked into Galatia in silence. The warmth and weight of Justin’s arm on mine made me conscious not just of him but of the town around me. Its typical torpor had deepened into something else, something subdued, repressed really. There were no cars on the road, absolutely none, no one tending a lawn or hanging out the washing; though summer vacation had started almost a month ago, I didn’t see any children or even hear the sounds of their play; the Founders’ Day picnic was only a few weeks away, but there had been no preparation so far, no decorations, no flyers requesting donations of food or drink. There were four or five newly empty houses, and their vacancies seemed to have tipped the balance against Galatia. Real estate signs, whimsical to the point of absurdity, swayed in the hot afternoon breeze. The words on the signs read for sale but their creaks and rattles said, Gone.

In the park it was suddenly cooler, and I heard myself breathe an aaah. The thick air of dissolution and abandonment didn’t quite penetrate here: the grass beneath the willows was as thick and green as it ever was, the occasional patches of bare soil damp and sticky on the soles of my shoes. Justin slipped his arm from mine and wandered a few feet away from me. His face wore a dazed expression, but there was a small smile on his lips as he walked beneath the dangling lines of the willows. He stretched his arms out and the strands slipped over them lightly as he walked. His feet made squelching noises in the mud. His shirt slipped from the waistband of his shorts and fell to the ground behind him, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“Justin,” I said, and he turned suddenly. His eyes were fixed on mine, his arms still stretched out. His mouth was still closed. I started to point out his shirt but the sight of his mouth stopped me. And then, I don’t know why, but some perversity moved me to say, “I used to hate this park. I only came here when the Reverend sent me, when I was going to be punished. He used to make me pick my own switches from these trees. But—” I stopped suddenly, lowered my eyes from Justin’s fixed stare. I continued speaking, looking at his feet. “But when I came back to take care of him, that all changed. I realized that he couldn’t switch me no more. Anymore. Now I love it here. I come here all the time. I find it all the more beautiful, for being a reclaimed, a reprieved place.”

I looked up at him again. His arms had lowered slightly, not as if from fatigue, but from age, in the same way that an old barn begins to sag. “Oh, Justin,” I said, “Justin, he’s alive. Eric Johnson is alive. Do you know who Eric Johnson is, Justin? You know, I know you do. Myra told you. He’s alive, Justin, he didn’t die on that tree. He fell off, Justin. He—” I dug into my pocket. “Justin,” I said, “these are his thumbs.”

I heard my words in my ears, and almost laughed at their absurdity. These are his thumbs.

A ray of sunlight mercilessly made its way through the willow’s foliage. It found the bag in my outstretched hand, glinting off it, rendering its contents invisible. It looked like a bag of drugs.

As I’d spoken Justin’s arms had fallen, slowly, then more rapidly. As I’d finished they’d tapped slightly, inaudibly, against his sides. His head fell a little, his back bowed. The lump beneath his rib cage bubbled like something ready to burst. Without looking at me again, he turned and began to walk away.

“Justin,” I called. “Justin, please, I’m sorry.”

The mud pulled at his feet, but he continued walking. The water table was so high that puddles formed in his footprints, and it looked as though he were walking on water.

“Justin, please, I don’t know why I told you. Please. I won’t bring it up again.”

He was in the sunlight now. I saw for the first time another bruise, on his thigh. It didn’t seem like the mark of an attacker, but a lover. I remembered Wallace then, and my arm, which had been extended, fell to my side.

“Justin,” I tried one last time. “I just needed someone to talk to. Not to answer me,” I said, though by this time he was out of earshot. “Just to talk to.”

I watched him until he turned a corner. After he was gone his aban­doned shirt caught my eye, and I put my parcel back in my pocket and retrieved the shirt from the mud. I looked at it blankly for a moment, and then I carried it to the well to wash the mud from it.

The tank water was dark and laced with moss, but it smelled clean and fresh, and I dropped the shirt into it. A glint distracted me. I thought it was a goldfish at first, but then I realized it was just a little thing, a stoppered vial, and I fished it out. The shirt unrolled itself and settled to the bottom of the tank. The vial was partially filled with pink liquid.

When I was in graduate school the last boy I’d dated had been called Karl Louis. He was white, not black, a scholar rather than a sprinter, with a soft pale belly covered in coarse hair and big book-grasping page-turning hands that handled my body in the same straightforward manner. He would stroke my hair, he would pull my clothes off, he would fondle me, face first, then neck, then breasts, stomach, and vagina: one thing always led to another with Karl, and when his hands had arrived at their desti­nation he would part my thighs and enter me. There was no place for the detour of contraception in this plan, no condom or diaphragm, and the pill made me ill; inevitably, I suppose, I missed a period, and then another. Perhaps if it had happened while Karl was still at school things would have turned out differently. But he had, like me, just passed his orals, and he was taking a two-year appointment in Edinburgh where he also planned to complete his Ph.D. on an obscure Scottish poet. I should remember the poet’s name, but I do not.

The design hadn’t really changed in a decade: someone in Galatia was pregnant. I chuckled; I forgot about Justin’s shirt. I walked home with the vial in my hand, and it was only when I reached into my pocket for my keys and my hand brushed against the slick plastic package that contained Eric Johnson’s thumbs that I realized who was going to have a baby.

6.25

Myra

the men tried to fight the fire with buckets and sandbags and long lines of garden hoses from houses just outside of town, but the women and children seemed to know that the war was over as soon as it started.

Kenosha was gone.

We watched it burn, a long thin line of mothers, daughters, sisters, nieces standing just beyond the western curve of town.

There wasn’t much of a wind, but what wind was blowing blew due east.

For the first time in my life I understood the expression “up in smoke.” People’s lives—their houses and cars and clothes and furniture and geraniums and life savings, and half a dozen souls—floated up into the air in flakes of gray ash and a cloud so thin that it almost didn’t seem dangerous.

A half dozen dogs ran in and out of people’s legs, barking and crying and carrying on. Something about that fire drove those dogs crazy, and one by one they took off over the fields. To the best of my knowledge they was never seen again.

Except for one.

One dog, it looked like a yellow lab although its fur had been burnt almost black, this one dog kept on skirting around the edge of town. It stayed halfway between the people and the burning buildings.

Some children, I remember, kept calling the dog. “Here, Boner, here, Boner,” they pleaded, and at the time all I thought was, What an awful name for a dog.

The dog whined and growled, turned its head from the fire to the children and back again. It lay down, stood up. Froth dripped from its mouth like it had rabies.

“Here, Boner,” the kids called, “c’mon, boy.”

Even a few hundred feet away the heat of the fire felt worse than the worst sunburn you ever had.

The dog vomited, then ate what come up. It looked at the children, barked at them, not in warning, it seemed, but in invitation.

And then it ran into the fire.

The children screamed, and one little girl even darted after it. A woman lunged forward, grabbed the girl by her pony tail, pulled the both of them to the ground.

When that woman grabbed her daughter I had a hot flash all over my body, a flash of that hot air, the air that held me all over like a lover—and like a mother, I realized—and it’s that woman’s hand I feel now, and the hair in her grasp, when I think of Lucy.

I remember Stan found me later on and he kind of looked me up and down and he said, You okay? and I said, I’m okay, considering. He said, Considering that we lost everything? and I was remembering that mother’s hold on her daughter’s hair when I said, We didn’t have nothing to lose. Not really, I said. Not yet.

6.26

Wade

asleep, justin’s stillness disappeared. He twitched, he shivered, he rolled from side to side, consumed by nightmares that seemed to thunder through his entire body. But if I touched him, the part of him that I touched would stop moving: my hand on his arm would still that arm, my hand on his head would still his head. But the rest of him remained in motion. He was like a snake, run over by a car, its crushed head stuck to the asphalt but its tail twitching furiously. It was as though the pieces of his body were no longer connected—as if, in his dreams, he was dismembering himself. Sometimes I wanted to know what haunted his sleep but usually I did not, for fear that it would in­vade mine.

My dreams were already full of invaders. My dreams were full of me, and a man named Yonah Schimmel. My dreams were full of people who did not exist anymore.

The concept of time has never meant much to me under the best of circumstances, and these could hardly be labeled the best of circum­stances. Why not slip back into the past or forward into the future, why not slip sideways into a past that never existed? Why not? Because I could not.

Memory is like a river; remembering is like swimming. For some peo­ple it is like floating. For Myra Robinson it was like floating, a neverending buoyancy that replaced the need for firmer, sterner ground. For others—for Justin—it was like drowning, a sinking so deep that the water became all, and, in becoming all, became nothing. But for most of us, for me and Divine and Webbie Greeving, it was simply like swimming, a harder or easier task depending upon one’s condition, one’s conditioning. For me, swimming had always been laborious, and I would never venture out except in the calmest water. Suffice it to say that that water, that river, the river in which lurked my memories of Yonah Schimmel, was not at all calm, and, though I wanted to swim further, I could only make my way to the point at which I felt the current’s pull, its offer of floating, of drowning. I wanted to feel it but I didn’t want to give in to it: I didn’t want to drown or to float; I didn’t even want to swim. I suppose you could say that I only wanted to wade.

It’s not that I want to hide things from you, or even from myself. There is, in fact, nothing to hide. Or, put another way, there is nothing to tell. Once, a quarter century ago, I spent the better part of two years sleeping next to someone who slept as Justin slept, with uneasy dreams played out upon his twitching limbs, limbs that I stilled with my own nervous hands.

In one version of our meeting, Yonah said that I entered his gallery: I went in looking for a lover, he said, and I came out with a dealer. In fact I did not come out.

In another version of our meeting Yonah had me crawling around on all fours at a pornographic theater, wide open at front and back for what­ever would enter me, desperate, he said, crying out to be filled. But in that version Yonah did not mention nor did he even seem to realize that he was the one who filled me.

In my favorite version of our meeting, Yonah said that he was walking by my studio one summer night and he noticed me painting through the open windows, and he stepped back and saw me painting under artificial lights and he . . .

At that point in the telling he was distracted, and so I never learned what he did and I never learned how we met. At any rate I never once painted at night.

The first time that Justin spent the night beside me I sat up and watched him sleep. I sat up and I watched him and I used my hands to still his twitching parts as I had once used them to still Yonah’s, and at some point I found myself using my finger to trace imaginary drawings on his body, but I never once painted at night.

It was always the meeting that mattered to Yonah, never what came after, never what came at the end. I never heard Yonah tell stories of our parting, of that disastrous morning after I tried to fuck him. To the best of my knowledge he never told any.

I have made those stories up myself. Over the years I have made up many different stories from the same events, and, like Colin Nieman, I have recorded more than a few versions of these stories. But, as things stand now, one version rises above the rest.

Gone away.

Not for you.

6.27

Myra

my name is Angela. I live in the most beautiful house in the world with my mother, a fairy princess who gave me a magic pony named Blue. Blue’s hooves are the color of turquoise and his eyes are the color of the hottest part of a flame; his body is the color of the ocean and his mane and tail are the color of the sky. When I ride him I use neither saddle nor bridle, trusting to the steadiness of his girth be­tween my legs and his neck between my arms, and to my mother, who would never give me a present that would hurt me. One morning I woke up and the sun was shining through the windows in all four walls of my room, and I thought, What a beautiful day for a ride! and I put on my Wednesday white dress and I went to Blue’s bedroom. Blue was already awake and awaiting me, and I hopped up on him and we jumped out the window and were off. Blue ran and ran and ran, and his mane flipped about my eyes like clouds. I heard his hooves far below me, clattering with the sound of a speeding train, plop-plopping like frogs’ bodies into a pond, tinkling like breaking glass, and we rode on and on, past forests and rivers and mountains, until Blue started running so fast I could see nothing but his mane in my eyes, and then I closed my eyes and just concentrated on the movement of my pony’s body working beneath mine, and when I opened my eyes it was dark, so dark, and then I was frightened. But Blue had been a gift from my mother, and he told me not to be afraid. I felt his body turn beneath mine, and he told me that he would get me home, and when he stopped speaking I realized his hooves were making no sound at all, and I looked down and saw only stars far below us, but Blue told me it was only a lake, reflecting the bottom of the sky. Then I grew cold in the dark, but Blue’s mane wrapped about me like the warmest blanket, and he ran and ran and ran through the night until suddenly we were in a forest of tree trunks so tall and so black that even their shadows were solid and had to be dodged, but Blue’s mane was warm around my body and even twisting and turning to avoid the trees and their shadows his gait was smooth as pond water on a windless day, and I found that I was excited and no longer afraid. In front of me I saw a glow, and I thought perhaps it was Blue’s eyes, lighting our way, but I peeked ahead and saw that it was the lights of our house, and then we were out of the forest and jumping back through the window of Blue’s bedroom and landing in his soft straw bed. I rubbed Blue all over with a coarse cloth, wiping the sweat from his ears and flanks and sorting the burrs from his tail, and then I gave him a kiss between his glowing eyes and rushed back to bed. The sun was streaming full through the windows, and I had only just slipped under the blankets when the door opened and my mother came in, and smiled, and kissed me, and ran her fingers through my hair. When they came away I saw that they were threaded with a single blue strand, and we both looked at it, and laughed, and even as my mother braided the strand into a necklace for me she asked me Was I going to stay in bed all day?

6.28

Webbie

rosemary krebs had told me that the key she gave me only worked on the back door of her house, but it worked on the front door as well. I had merely never tried it; but when I went to her house to return the handkerchief that Eric Johnson’s thumbs had been wrapped in, I went to the front door, because I had also gone there to quit. I had meant to knock, but then, on impulse, I took my key from my pocket and tried it in the door, and, of course, it worked.

She was waiting for me on the other side of the door. She looked me up and down in my street clothes, and then she said, “You’re fired.”

I dumped my uniform at her feet. “I already quit,” I said. I held out the handkerchief Eric Johnson’s thumbs had been wrapped in. It was empty now, and stained, and slightly stiff. “I think this belongs to you.”

Rosemary Krebs did not look at the handkerchief. “One day, Miss Greeving, you will realize that the true privilege of possession is being able to refuse what is rightfully yours.”

She stepped back then, and I started to step in, but she closed the door in my face.

6.29

Myra

when he come home that night his clothes was soaked through with sweat and he stunk like a man with a night’s sleep on him after a long day fucking some other woman. I’d say that my stom­ach was in my mouth, but it couldn’t have gotten past my heart, which was in my throat.

I sat at the table with Lucy’s shiny shoe in front of me.

Stan come in and closed the door behind him. His chest was moving up and down. Then he spoke.

“She lost a shoe too?”

“She lost a shoe.”

“It don’t matter, I guess. Mrs. Krebs’ll buy her another pair.”

“She don’t need to.”

“Well, I guess we can buy our own daughter shoes.”

I shook my head. “This is her lost shoe.”

Stan didn’t say nothing.

“She’s wearing her other shoe.”

Stan still didn’t say nothing.

“She wanted to wear it to bed. A clean white dress, and her one black shoe.”

Stan spoke. “I don’t understand,” he said.

“She wanted to wear her shoe to bed.”

“But she lost—”

“This is her lost shoe.”

“I don’t under—”

“This is the lost shoe. I found it in the dirty clothes hamper.”

“Myra,” Stan said, “what are you trying to say?”

“I’m just saying,” I said. “Nobody didn’t find it in the street. Nobody found it in Galatia. It was in the dirty clothes hamper, all wrapped up in a towel.”

“You—”

“I was washing her dress.”

“You was washing her dress.”

“And I found her shoe.”

There was a long pause. Then:

“I still don’t understand.”

“No, Stan,” I said, “no, Stan, I expect you don’t. I expect the whereabouts of your daughter’s supposedly missing shoe mean nothing to you, or the smell of beer on your daughter’s dress, or the fact that you got a stink on you, a stink on you, Stan, and I gotta tell you that you make me sick.”

“Myra—”

“I can’t even bring myself to say it, Stan. I can’t make my mouth form the words.”

“Myra, I don’t understand.”

“Don’t tell me you don’t understand. You don’t want to understand.”

“No, I don’t—”

“You don’t want me to understand. Well I think I understand plenty.” I stood up. I clutched Lucy’s shoe in my hand. “And I think you under­stand a lot more than I do.” For the first time I let myself look him in the eye. “Cause if you didn’t understand I suppose you’d break my jaw. I suppose that’s what any decent man would do in your position.”

“Is that what you want, Myra? A beating? You want me to break your jaw?”

“Yeah, Stan, that’s what I want. I want you to beat the truth out of me.”

I stood there, holding Lucy’s shoe. Stan stood, still sweating, still put­ting out stink. Finally I spoke.

“I’m going to bed.’’

Stan showered before coming in, and he put on a T-shirt and a pair of undershorts before climbing in beside me.

Proof, if you ask me, what more proof do you need.

I turned my back to him. I held Lucy’s shoe to my chest.

Angela.

I was beginning to see the need for an Angela.

In the middle of the night the phone rang. I remember hearing it and thinking, This is what I’ve been waiting for. Stan took the call in the other room, and after he hung up he got dressed and then he went out again.

That’s when they finished what they’d started.

That’s when they killed the boy.

6.30

Colin

i was lost. I was trapped inside the retaining wall of a lost city, a Troy, a Pompeii, a Babylon—and then a shout pierced the night. Again. It was unintelligible. It was, perhaps, not even a word, but it came from above me, and to me, in any language, it could only have been my name. I leaped from bed, surprised to see my naked body beneath my head; behind me, Divine’s sleepy voice murmured, “Baby?” The door of the cupola was locked and solid, and all I could do was pound against it. “Justin!” I yelled, but the door yielded only silence. I stopped hitting the door with my hand then, and instead laid my head against it, and it was only when I felt the cold coarse grain of the door’s wood against the top of my head that I saw the muddy footprints on the stairs, huge footprints, the size and shape of paddles or propellers, one track of foot­prints only, and that track led down the stairs, and I started pounding on the door again, but the door returned nothing to me except the sound of my own voice.

6.31

Myra

the next morning when I went into Lucy’s room and said Lucy honey it’s time to wake up she stretched out her arms and legs like she was some sweet little princess, she smiled bright and she said My name is Angela. Well I kind of lost it. I drug her out of bed by her hair and I ripped that one shoe and that wrinkled white dress off her and I threw her into the bathroom and washed out her mouth with soap and I said to her If I ever hear of Angela again! Then I burned all seven white dresses in the backyard, and that one shoe, and I said From now on Lucy’s clothes’ll have to do. And Lucy’s name. For Lucy.

Afterwards I put the shoe from the dirty clothes hamper into the cedar chest with the stone she was born holding and her first lock of hair and her first lost tooth and the pink blanket my mother started knitting the night she was born.

That’s what Stan took with him when he took off next year.

One stone.

One tooth.

One blanket.

And one black shoe.

He left the hair behind, scattered around the bottom of the chest. Like a lot of brunettes Lucy was born blonde and it was only later that her hair went dark, and I suppose Stan thought it was just loose packing material.

And Lucy. He left Lucy behind too. Sawyer Johnson took off at the same time Stan did, leaving Cora alone with their baby, just like Stan did with me and Lucy. One time when I was out walking with Lucy I walked past Cora Johnson walking with her son, and neither of us stopped and said hi-lo or waved or even looked at each other.

Proof, I tell you. What more proof do you need?

The way I see it only two people could’ve put that shoe in the hamper: Lucy or Stan. You tell me which is worse.

And I’ll tell you this: Lucy never once asked where did Stan go. And neither did I.

Cause nobody asks questions like that in Galatea. Cause all those questions, Where did and Who said and What about always lead back to the one big question Why, and nobody around here even pretends to know the answer to that one. Or to want to know.

Sometimes it’s okay, not knowing if you’re right. At least you don’t know you’re wrong. Colin said it’s in the space between those two sen­tences that every writer tells his story, and I said Okay, yeah, I get it. But what I think now is: that’s not true. What I think now is: there’s no point in telling lies, unless you actually believe what you’re saying, and I tell you what: I believe it all.