The streetlights have come on for the evening by the time Hannigan reaches Bryant Avenue, a street lined by colorfully shingled Victorian homes whose details—the dentils in the molding, the lattice of the front porches, the elegant entablature—make Hannigan think of snowflakes. He peers into the shadows of each portico to read the numbers hanging above the front door. When he finds number twenty-five, he stops and rests his hands on the still-warm metal of the low iron gate.
Twenty-five is set back farther from the street than most of the houses on Bryant Avenue, beyond a well-tended garden, lush despite the dry weather. The windows at the front of the house are dark, but through one Hannigan can see the glow from a lit room somewhere in the back. He opens the gate, latches it quietly behind him. Instead of climbing the stairs to the front porch, he follows a small path that leads around the side of the house, as he has been instructed to do.
He comes around the house and sees, across a mossy patio, the kitchen, a square room off the back of the building. The door is open, and warm yellow light spills from the kitchen into the night, illuminating a green pocket of shrubbery, moss, stone, and grass. Bugs flit against the screen, through which Hannigan can see the woman from yesterday bent over a counter, her hands moving rapidly before her. For a moment, he stands in the shadows and observes her, the air heavy with the scent of butterfly ginger, the white blossoms around him like so many fragile wings. Her hands are winglike, too, quick and darting as she wraps food with crinkling foil, spreads a cloth over a basket, cuts a length of string. When she has finished, she sets her hands down on the counter, and lowers her head.
Hannigan steps out of the shadows and crosses the patio toward the kitchen door. He taps against the screen; the woman lifts her head and hurries to the door. “Father,” she says, through the mesh. Her face has the same determined expression that it had when she approached him outside the courthouse yesterday. He had never seen her before, but she was somehow deeply familiar to him, in a way that made him feel both uneasy and compelled. She needed to see Willie, she said. She didn’t say why, and he didn’t ask.
“I’ve wrapped up his supper,” she says now, going back to the counter for the basket, which she carries to the door in the crook of her arm. Behind her, Hannigan can see an old woman sitting at the kitchen table, silent and unmoving. “Catfish, potatoes, and pecan pie like he asked for. And green beans, even though he didn’t. I tried my hand at collards, but they weren’t fit to eat. Not for a last meal, anyway.”
“It’s good of you.” He looks at her through the screen, hesitates. Then, “I realize I don’t even know your name,” he says.
“It’s Nell.” She opens the door and steps down onto the patio, and for a moment, she simply stands there, gazing into the middle distance. “I’m not religious,” she says, finally, and Hannigan isn’t sure if this is an apology or a confession. Nell looks at him. “I’m not sure I believe in God.”
Hannigan regards her, says nothing, though he thinks he could say the same. Her eyes are dark and glinting.
“And I don’t know if he’s guilty or not,” she continues, “but either way I don’t think a boy oughta be put to death.”
Nell looks at him searchingly, and he wonders what she’s looking for. For wisdom, maybe, in the vessel of a priest.
“Do you?” she asks.
“That’s not for me to judge. My duty is to offer guidance and love. That’s all.”
“You may be a priest, but that doesn’t mean you don’t hold opinions. Does it bother you, what’s happening tonight?”
Hannigan doesn’t answer right away. His mind skitters, a thousand frantic thoughts at once that make him want to weep. “Yes,” he manages to say.
And then there is only the hush of the garden, the ribbit of a frog.
Nell’s gaze is steady, her expression both dismayed and resigned. She holds the basket out; he takes it from her.
“Well,” she says. “Then there it is.” He doesn’t know if she means the dinner or something else.