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the father of a sixteen-year-old girl for permission to marry her.
    “Was she…?”
    “She
said
not.”
    “Did they fight? Did Burt and Gale fight?”
    “Gale had his arms up and Burt was hittin’ him. Mostly pushing him, saying, ‘You get the hell off this farm, you goddamn pervert, and don’t you dare come back here again!’ He says, ‘I’ll string you up, you hear…’ and all the while pushing him and grabbing him by the shirt and dragging him from the house.”
    “What did Gale say?”
    “He was red in the head like the dick on a dog, and mad enough to cry. You know how boys are. And I didn’t hate him so much as feel bad for him.”
    I watch her.
    “Because of the way he growed up, almost never knowing where the next meal was going to come from, or who was going to try and steal it from him. That boy had to be a fighter, and it ain’t no wonder his morals was wrong.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Gale was an orphan. He was in the boys’ school.”
    “Wrong is wrong, and everybody knows it.”
    “Did you? When you was a boy?”
    “Where’s Gale live?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe in town, but only these last two months. He never comes here by the road. It’s always through the fields.”
    “What’s he do for money?”
    “Been working at the Haynes’s Meat Market. Learning the trade.”
    I take her shoulders in my hands and squeeze. “I’m leaving Deputy Sager here. I want you to go inside the house. There’s going to be activity—law enforcement activity. Coroner stuff. And I got Cooper coming out with the dogs. We’ll get them kids’ scent and hunt ’em down. It’ll be better for you to wait in the house, with your mind on something else.”
    I get on the radio and tell Fenny to have Deputy Roosevelt check out Haynes’s Meats. Then I come back to Fay. She’s come to the hood of the Bronco.
    “Where are you going?” she says.
    “Out there.” I take the red sweater from her arm and hold it like a dead baby. “To find Guinevere.”

CHAPTER FIVE
    The casket lid was open. The Haudesert family stood in the back by the door. Burt held his hands together at his crotch; Guinevere’s brothers glanced from face to face. Gwen watched in silence. Her mother stood beside Burt, and Guinevere thought it odd; perhaps
she
should stand beside him, since he’d sought her bed.
    It must have been the black dresses and suits and the smell of mothballs that changed her mother’s look. Maybe the yellow lamp on the wall cutting a harsh shadow across her face. Fay turned to Gwen and held her gaze: a plain look that said nothing. Expressed no sorrow. No blame. No knowledge. But yet, something passed from mother to daughter, as if somewhere within the book of nature, or wherever it was written that men control the world, her mother had underlined a pertinent sentence and scrawled a note on the margin.
    Ahead in the line, men and women filed past the coffin and offered condolences to Guinevere’s grandmother, seated to the left. The woman was squat and round, arthritic and half-blind.
    Drawn by a sorrowful snort, Guinevere looked to her right, where her aunt—mother’s sister Ellen—clutched Fay’s elbows and sobbed and pulled her closer. Again Guinevere’s eyes crossed her mother’s, and they were empty. Ellen’s need of consolation was unrequited. “There, there,” her mother said. “Shhh.”
    “I can’t believe I’m crying for him.”
    “Shhh.”
    A hand on Gwen’s lower back urged her forward. It was Burt. Cal and Jordan fell in behind her, and Gwen led them to the line.
    She looked for faces she recognized. Aunts and uncles and cousins. Of those gathered, most faces were new; locals who had known her grandfather through his seventy years on the same plot of land, getting haircuts at a barbershop that had passed from father to son, the newest son there to pay his respects. The barber was a young man, meticulously groomed, and he followed Gwen with his eyes.
    Guinevere glanced over her