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He stopped. “Now,” he said, his voice gone to a whisper meant not for a secret, but for the anger in him. “Now you’re in it, and you don’t even know. You. And your momma. You don’t even know it, but you are, and so is Dorcas, and Miss Dinah, who’s probably going to spend the rest of this night playing watchdog with that shotgun, waiting for somebody to show and look to drag me away.”

“He ain’t coming for you,” I said quick, and Unc flinched at the words, like they’d scared and surprised him both. Like he’d figured I had nothing to say.

But I had words, words hidden inside the blood and metal and dark red of my mouth, inside that blast of pain he’d given to me, a piece of the hell he thought I was owed. I’d had no idea they were there, lined up and ready to go, but here they were, and the next ones, too: “And I know who it is.”

I leaned over, spit red on the leaves between us, my tongue thick in my mouth.

Unc was wrong. I had plenty of clues.

Thigpen’s words, to begin with: Leland’s sinking in seven kinds of shit, and he thinks he knows how to swim.

I leaned over, picked up the stick. For a moment I thought to throw it far and deep into the black past all this false light, throw it somewhere he’d never find. Then maybe he’d see how he had no choice in this matter whatsoever: that I was here, and that it’d be my arm he’d have to hang on to, and that whatever end this all came to I was part and parcel to it. For better and worse.

He was what I had. And I was what he had.

I leaned the stick against his chest.

He stood there, mouth open, like every word he’d had ready for me had suddenly dried up, turned to dead leaves underfoot, my blood and spit on them all some kind of pact sealed between us.

I moved around him and onto the porch, for the door standing open, inside it more black.

But mounted on the gray board beside the door was a switch, one of those industrial kind, a red plastic handle on it you pulled down and clapped into place to turn it on or off. The switch for all these lights, and I wondered for a second how Benjamin Gaillard had gotten electric all the way out here.

I reached to the switch, pulled hard on it, clapped it back.

Here was the night again, only now it was pitch black for the way my eyes’d adjusted to the floods. I stood there, waited, waited, and then the shadows surfaced again and I could see.

“Unc,” I said. “Let’s go.”

He didn’t move, a gray man in gray light, piecemeal shadows moving above and beside him.

Then he turned, and I could see the stick in his hand. He leaned over, laid it against the porch floor, stood.

We were silent a long while, and I heard again the empty song of wind down on us from above.

Then he held up his hand to me.

I took it, our hands the same color gray in this moonlight, and helped him up.

I talked.

I just sat in the dark in a big chair, the armrests under my hands, the material pulled and torn, the stuffing and wood right there at my fingertips. Some old hunk of furniture from the Gaillards’ shanty, parked here by Benjamin for drinking and hunting and sometimes, I figured, even nights like this, when talk was all that mattered.

Unc’d led me in, had gone to the far end of the room, where a cot was laid out. I couldn’t see this at first, saw only black, my eyes needing time to adjust even more to this newer, deeper dark. The window across from me was papered over, I finally could make out, the moonlight through it just the barest hint of gray.

The woodstove sat against the wall on my left, the iron door of it dull red for the fire must’ve been burning in there since sometime early in the evening. Now and again Unc’d tell me to chunk up the stove, him able to tell precisely when the cold’d start seeping in, and I’d go to the stack of wood next to the stove, pick up a piece, then with my other hand pick up the small hooked stick that lay on the floor before the stove, with it lift the latch on the door. Here came firelight, strong and harsh, and