The Joneses’ house is in St. Martinville, just a half mile away from the courthouse where Willie will be executed. Hannigan pulls up outside and shuts the car engine off. The house stands in the moonlight, a clapboard shotgun with peeling white paint and a small front porch, a handful of steps leading down to the yard. He thinks of Nell, hears her words echo in his mind: I suppose what I live for is my boy.
He has been here once before, months ago, at a time when the execution was far enough away that it didn’t seem real, or seemed somehow avoidable, something that might never come to be. Elma Jones had answered the door, that once. Hannigan could see Willie clearly in her features—warm dark eyes, broad nose, thin lips—though unlike Willie she was amply sized: solid, wide, and strong. Frank Jones had been in the back, hammering at something. Elma had called to him, and the old man had emerged slowly, nodding, wiping off his hands. When the three sat down to talk, Hannigan found that everything he’d prepared to say seemed inadequate, fitting for parents in the abstract; but here these people were, in front of him, parents in the flesh whose suffering he could little soothe. So together they had sipped tea, and he’d offered what he could: Prayer. Hope.
Hannigan looks at the house now; the windows are mostly dark, though he can see through one a dim glow. He steels himself and gets out of the car, takes the three steps up to the front porch in a single stride. The porch boards creak under his weight. He lifts a hand, hesitates, knocks.
In the distance, he thinks he can hear the mob he saw assembled outside the courthouse. It could also be the chattering of insects, or the noise of his own swarming mind. A breeze stirs, the movement of air stagnant for months, it seems. Hannigan turns. On the sidewalk behind him, a cellophane wrapper skitters, comes to rest; the leaves on the nearby tree move, just perceptibly, then are still. Hannigan waits, watching, and after a moment he turns and knocks on the door again.
He hears movement within, he is sure. He tips his head toward the door, listening. “Mr. Jones?” he calls softly, his face against the door frame. “Mrs. Jones?” He waits, hopeful, nearly aching. He wants to offer them more than promises and prayer; he wants to give them what is real: assurance that their boy is a fine, fine man.
When it is clear to him that no one is going to open the door, Hannigan takes the steps down to the curb. He turns to look back, and sees a figure standing at the window. Elma Jones. She does not duck out of sight or pull away when she sees that he has seen her. Instead, she gives him a slow nod of her head. After a moment, Hannigan presses his palms together before him and lowers his own head, his offering accepted, his duty done. When he looks up again, she is gone. He stares at the place where she was, half wondering if he’d made the vision up, to fill a personal need.
He gets into the car, but he doesn’t drive away. He doesn’t even turn the key in the ignition. Instead he sits with his hands on the wheel, and when he shuts his eyes he sees Elma Jones again, a shadowy figure behind the window glass. But then in his mind that shadowy figure starts to change—it is Elma Jones, it is Della Biggs, it is Nell, it is his own mother: scallions, songs, a red cotton blouse.
He holds on to that image: a woman in the shadows, his mother. He holds it there in his mind, studies it closely, searching. He can see a hand. He peers closer, willing himself to see, and slowly his mother’s features come into focus—her eyes like gibbous moons, her lips a pale thin line, her hair dark and long and loose—this forgotten face so deeply familiar, yet seen as if for the first time.
He opens his eyes. His hands are still on the wheel, gripping it hard now. He stares absently at the ridges of his own knuckles, and he can still see her, his mother, her face, her hair, can smell and hear her, and as he sits there, he comes to understand that she did not kill herself, after his brother died. She did not kill herself; she left.
Hannigan blinks. He is less shocked or saddened than affirmed by this knowledge, unearthed from a corner of his mind he didn’t know existed. He wonders what else is in there, and if he even wants to know. He looks back at the house, at the window where Elma Jones stood. Then he starts the car; there is less than an hour until midnight, and Willie will be waiting for him.