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generations, the Alday men arrived right on time, seated themselves around the table, and bowed their heads for the traditional noontide blessing in a portrait, as someone later observed, that Norman Rockwell could have painted without the loss of a single stroke.
    After the blessing, the talk turned to the farm, as it always did. Ned, neatly dressed in flannel work clothes, shunning, as all the Alday men shunned, the baggy denim overalls more common to the area, had been working with Jerry, the two of them plowing a distant field, though at a slower pace than they liked, since the ground still contained muddy patches from the late rains. It had been particularly arduous that morning, and Jerry’s boots were encrusted with the dark soil he’d been slogging through since first light. As for Jimmy and Shuggie, they had already mapped out their activities for the afternoon. Jimmy would be plowing the fields behind Jerry’s trailer on River Road, while Shuggie intended to join his Uncle Aubrey, borrow some equipment from a neighbor, and work a different field to the west.
    By one in the afternoon, the men had finished their meal and were on their way out of the house. As she cleared the table, Ernestine watched as each one of them went through the screen door, made his way down the short flight of steps, then vanished, as it would later seem to her, into the blinding light of the midday sun.
    While the Aldays were routinely moving through a typically uneventful working day, Carl was in crisis mode. The immediate trouble was the car. It had begun to act up. And although he and Wayne agreed that it was probably caused by some malfunction in the carburetor, neither knew what to do about it, except to keep the motor running continually. Thus, even when they stopped to get something to eat or go to the bathroom, the engine churned greedily, incessantly guzzling gas hour after hour.
    By late afternoon, they were nearly out of gas again, and with no way of refueling, since they were also running out of money. “We were always out of money,” Coleman would say a few days later. “We were spending a lot, mostly on booze and gas. We usually had booze, but we were always running out of gas.”
    Curiously enough, gas was harder to come by than a car. To break in and hot-wire a car took only a matter of seconds. To siphon gas took a great deal longer. Some rudimentary technology was required, along with a few cumbersome devices. To score well with gas, it was necessary to find a tank in some remote field or behind an isolated house. Thus, unable to shut the motor off, the broken carburetor greedily pumping gasoline into its churning engine, their wallets empty of everything but gas receipts, they began cruising the back roads in search of just such a tank.
    By mid-afternoon Ned and Jerry were having machine trouble too. After the midday meal, they had headed back to a parcel of land they’d leased from Otis Miller. These were good fields, but they’d been made difficult by the wet, muddy ground that still lingered in the wake of recent rains. Consequently, not long after they’d begun plowing, the tractor had bogged down, and they’d returned to the Alday homestead and picked up a jeep they intended to use to pull the tractor from the bog in which it had become mired.
    After several unsuccessful attempts to pull it free, Ned and Jerry decided to get more help. They drove out of the field and headed down River Road, hoping to find a few of the other Alday men to lend a hand. In the bright mid-May sun they could see the broad fields of their neighbors, the green leaves of their budding crops, even from time to time the slender fronds of the small palm trees that had managed to sprout in this northernmost corner of the semitropical zone. But as they continued up the narrow paved road, they found no one who could help them free the tractor, and so they returned to it for yet another try.
    At about the