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pair of scissors. “I have to search real sharp to find those driedup roses,” she said wiping her damp face with her arm. She wore elbow-length white gloves that had gone through at the tips of her fingers, not a bad use for worn-out evening gloves.
    “I expect you’re visitin’?” she said.
    I nodded.
    “That’s Stanton Hall you was looking at. You should see it in the spring, when the jonquils are in bloom—just like sunshine spilled out on the ground.” She pointed with the scissors at the mansion, shuffled along a few steps, and reached deep into the rose hedge. She wore a man’s laceless brogans and old stockings, held up by garters, which showed when she raised her arms. The woman might have been a servant in that house, or maybe she was the owner. “Natchez was abloom with them houses back before the War—Dunleith, Magnolia Hall, D’Evereux, Avoca. I guess you heard of Avoca, where that goat lady got killed.”
    “Yes.”
    The woman made a clicking sound with her mouth, pushing out her right cheek as she did so. “Everybody has.” She eyed a bush and reached in to clip a dead rose, catching her glove on a thorn. “You know all about it, I suppose.”
    “More than I care to.” My reply was sharper than it should have been.
    “Well, kiss my foot!” The woman’s expletive was not due to my rudeness. She ignored me as she inspected a tiny spot ofblood spreading across the white fabric of her glove where a thorn had pushed through into her flesh. She mopped her face with her arm again, trying to recall what we had been talking about. Before she could do so, I waved my fingers at her and started on my way. But she remembered what she had been saying and called after me. “All I can say, missus, is there’s lots in the goat lady’s story besides the truth.”

Chapter Two
    M Y FATHER, WHO HAD DIED at the age of twenty-five, when I was three, was a dreamy presence in my life. His sepia photograph, in a silver frame engraved with the initials W.T.B., had stood on the mantelpiece until I was five and Mother married Henry Varian. Then the photograph was moved to my bedroom, where, in later years, it shared space with pictures of my favorite male moving-picture stars. Father seemed to be in the same category as the actors: a person to be admired from afar, someone who was not quite real. In his photograph, Father was young and handsome, a dark-eyed man with curly dark hair, his smile a little lopsided. He seemed tall, although the photograph showed him only from the shoulders up. He probably had been tall, however, because I am five eight. Mother was just over five feet, as was her mother, so my height probably came from Father’s side of the family. After awhile, thepicture became like the lamp or the black Van Briggle vase, a stationary object in my room, one that did not intrude into my consciousness but which left an empty space if it were moved. The photograph went into a drawer when I married, but I missed it, not because it showed my father, but because it was a familiar and comforting presence. So I put it on my dressing table, where it has sat to this day.
    It undoubtedly would shock people in Natchez that, over the years, Father was not much in my thoughts. Mother rarely mentioned him. Perhaps his death had been so painful that she could not talk about him. She probably did not want me to feel the loss of him, and in those days, people believed if you didn’t talk about a thing, you would forget it. Mother and Henry had always had a good marriage, and Henry had been a wonderful parent to me, which was another reason I did not miss Father. Henry always seemed to be my real father, and perhaps I believed it would be disloyal to him to ask about Wink Bondurant.
    After he and Mother had been married two years, Henry adopted me. “You’ll be Nora Varian,” Mother told me.
    “No, I’m not. I’m Nora Bondurant.” Mother probably thought my objection to taking Henry’s name had something to do