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counting her Stanley, Holly’s girls, and Carter’s boy. Maybe sometime soon Sam and his wife would let her take them out here so she could tell the story to their boy, and then it’d be five generations.
    Aileen had come within ten feet of her older brother and was about to ask him if he had gone deaf when he spoke first.
    â€œI want you to look at that,” he told her, and his face had the purple splotches on it that usually just meant he was about to throw a fit.
    Aileen looked at where he was staring, at the barn’s side.
    â€œWhat?” she asked him, and he looked at her for the first time.
    â€œCan’t you see it?” he asked her. “Can’t you see the head up there, and the arms out here to the side? And the feet? Lookahere. There’s even a nail there.”
    Aileen moved closer, squinting through her bifocals and staring at the bleached boards, where moss had gathered during the cold, dark fall and winter, until she could finally make out what he was pointing to.
    And, she said later, she had to finally concede that what her brother had on the back side of his barn was a fairly believable rendition, done in moss and the vagaries in color that varying sunlight had caused over decades, of Our Lord Jesus Christ, up on the cross.

CHAPTER FIVE
    In the four years she and Sam have been married, Nancy has been in the same room with Lot twice, both times the same day. It was Christmas two years past, just before Wade was born. They were in Old Monacan, at Sam’s late grandparents’ house. There were only two times of year that the house was used any more, Sam’s father had told her: Christmas and the family Easter egg hunt.
    Nancy watched Carter wedge the unused, wadded-up Christmas Day newspaper between the hearth and the grate, then place the oily fat lightning pine on top of the grate, finally putting on a few small split pieces of oak. The fat lightning ignited from the paper as if it held gasoline inside its nearly transparent shell, and soon the oak caught. Nancy was sitting as close to the hearth as she could, the two sides of her body many degrees apart in warmth, when Aileen heard tires on dirt and went to one of the big-paned windows with its imperfect glass.
    â€œMy lord,” she said. “It’s Lot.”
    The rest of the family went to the window. Lot was getting out of his old red Chevrolet pickup. Tufts of auburn hair hung out from the sides and back of an adjustable baseball cap. He was wearing work shoes, work pants, a tan work shirt and, for some reason, a blue tie.
    Usually, Sam had already told her, Lot would go somewhere, nobody knew where, if the family was going to get together. He didn’t mind a couple of his sisters coming out, or Carter, but he said he didn’t like to be crowded.
    Lot walked up the rotting steps to the front porch, and Holly, Sam’s youngest aunt, opened the door slowly. Lot looked for a second as if he were going to hug her, but then he just walked in the door, squeezing her arm a little too hard as he went past.
    Nancy, who had been looking out the window since the doorway was packed with full-blooded Chastains, saw a man whose eyes seemed to be pure black, making his attempt to smile appear more mocking than kind.
    â€œI don’t reckon you all expected to see me today,” he said, in a high, nasal voice.
    Although it seemed obvious that this was a rare visit, nobody ran forward to greet him right away. Rather, they approached him cautiously to shake hands or give him a hug or just to be introduced. It reminded Nancy of the way she and Marilou used to try to catch Pat’s old Walker hound when he’d escape, fearful that a sudden move or loud noise might make him run beyond their grasp.
    â€œWell, come on in and have some dinner,” Aileen said.
    Sam took Nancy’s hand and led her over.
    â€œUncle Lot,” he said, clearing his throat first, “this here is my wife. Nancy,