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timeworn tombstones on a knoll behind the house, surrounded by their lost babies and surviving children, the wives and husbands of their children, their grandchildren, and assorted others—a sprawling, granite town of dead Maloneys. On Halloweens my brothers and cousins and I huddled among them, telling one another ghost stories that seemed all too real. Uncle Bert jumped out of the shadows one Halloween, wearing his preacher’s robe and a Nixon mask.
    Most of us, me included, wet our pants.
    So a person was better off keeping romantic information to herself around other Maloneys, because the dead ones had stern, unsmiling expectations and the live ones might scare the tea out of you when you least expected it.
    What took place the next spring later became known among my relatives as The Day We First Saw It Coming. It had to do with me, Roanie, the McClendon sisters, Easter, and evil.

T he McClendon sisters lived in a cluster of shabby little houses and trailers in the woods north of town, on a dead-end dirt lane named Steckem Road. I had access to a spectrum of lurid, half-baked gossip, so I’d done my share of snickering over Steckem Road’s whispered nickname.
Stick ’Em in Road
.
    I knew it involved men and women and their private parts, plus I had a vague idea about what was being stuck where. I also knew, from remarks I overheard at home, that if any of my brothers ever so much as set foot on Steckem Road, Mama and Daddy would skin them alive.
    Mama would have skinned her brother Pete if she could. It was a well-known fact, even among us kids, that our Uncle Pete Delaney spent half his time with the McClendon sisters on Steckem Road. I had heard enough about his notorious habits to know he was the shame of the Delaneys. That might explain why his boys, Harold and Arlan, were so mean. Embarrassment makes some people use hatefulness as a protection.
    There were four sisters—Daisy, Edna Fae, Lula, and Sally. Daisy was the oldest, about thirty-five when I was seven, though her bleached yellow hair and the hard lines around her mouth made her look older. She had a husband, but nobody had seen him in years. She had two nearlygrown sons who’d already run away from home and two scraggly, half-grown girls whom my Uncle William Delaney, the county judge, and my Aunt Bess Maloney, the county social worker, had sent to live elsewhere for reasons nobody explained to me.
    Daisy spent most of her time with Big Roan Sullivan. In some strange way I think she loved him.
    Edna Fae and Lula had had a whole pack of husbands, and the latest models looked like stray dogs waiting for a better offer. “You could throw a handful of marbles at Edna Fae’s and Lula’s tribe of children and not hit two that have the same daddy.” That’s what Grandpa said.
    Sally McClendon was sixteen, the youngest of the sisters. She’d already dropped out of high school, and her main hobby was stealing makeup and perfume from my Aunt Jean’s Dime to Dollar Store, and I couldn’t fathom why she didn’t just buy the stuff, it was so cheap. But worst of all, Sally had a baby. A son. I couldn’t understand where she’d gotten him, with no husband around. I had heard that Sally was Uncle Pete’s favorite McClendon sister.
    My Aunt Dockey Maloney said the McClendons were
evil
.
    “Evil exists to teach us the difference between right and wrong.” That’s what Aunt Dockey told us, and she, being Uncle Bert’s wife, and him the minister of Mt. Gilead Methodist, was as good as a preacher herself, so she ought to know.
    “God presents us with choices,” Aunt Dockey lectured at Sunday school and family get-togethers and any other time she had an audience. “He says, ‘Now here’s this path and here’s that path. Here’s a sin and here’s a virtue. And if we choose according to His commandments, we never go wrong.’ ”
    Aunt Dockey made righteousness sound like comparison-shopping at a mall. So I understood why our town needed the McClendon