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hers?”
    “I’m sure,” said Peggy.
    Po Doggly chuckled. “Oh, you know them guineas, just like bunny rabbits, the minute they can they do.” Then he remembered that Peggy was there. “Begging your pardon, ma’am. We don’t never have ladies along till tonight.”
    “It’s her pardon you have to beg,” said Peggy coldly. “This child is a mixup. Her owner sired this boy without a by-your-leave. I reckon you understand me.”
    “I won’t have you discussing such things,” said Horace Guester.
His temper was hot, all right. “Bad enough you coming along on this without you knowing all this kind of thing about this poor girl, it ain’t right telling her secrets like that.”
    Peggy fell silent and stayed that way all the ride home. That was what happened whenever she spoke frankly which is why she almost never did. The girl’s suffering made her forget herself and talk too much. Now Papa was thinking on about how much his daughter knew about this Black girl in just a few minutes, and worrying how much she knew about him.
    Do you want to know what I know, Papa? I know why you do this. You’re not like Po Doggly, Papa, who doesn’t think much of Blacks but hates seeing any wild thing cooped up. He does this, helping slaves make their way to Canada, cause he’s just got that need in him to set them free. But you. Papa, you do it to pay back your secret sin. Your pretty little secret who smiled at you like heartbreak in person and you could’ve said no but you didn’t, you said yes oh yes. While Mama was expecting me, it was, and you were off in Dekane buying supplies, you stayed there a week and had that woman must be ten times in six days, I remember every one of those times as clear as you do, I can feel you dreaming about her in the night. Hot with shame, hotter with desire, I know just how a man feels when he wants a woman so bad his skin itches and he can’t hold still. All these years you’ve hated yourself for what you did and hated yourself all the more for loving that memory, and so you pay for it. You risk going to jail or getting hung up in a tree somewhere for the crows to pick, not because you love the Black man but because you hope maybe doing good for God’s children might just set you free of your own secret love of evil.
    And here’s the funny thing, Papa. If you knew I knew your secret you would probably die, it might just kill you on the spot. And yet if I could tell you, just tell you that I know, then I could tell you something else on top of that, I could say, Papa, don’t you see that it’s your knack? You who thinks he never had no knack, but you got one. It’s the knack for making folks feel loved. They come to your inn and they feel right to home. Well you saw her, and she was hungry, that woman in Dekane. she needed to feel the way
you make folks feel, needed you so bad. And it’s hard, Papa, hard not to love a body who loves you so powerful, who hangs onto you like clouds hanging onto the moon, knowing you’re going to go on, knowing you’ll never stay, but hungering, Papa. I looked for that woman, looked for her heartfire, far and wide I searched for her, and I found her. I know where she is. She ain’t young now like you remember. But she’s still pretty, pretty as you recall her, Papa. And she’s a good woman, and you done her no harm. She remembers you fondly, Papa. She knows God forgave her and you both. It’s you who won’t forgive, Papa.
    Such a sad thing, Peggy thought, coming home in that wagon. Papa’s doing something that would make him a hero in any other daughter’s eyes. A great man. But because I’m a torch, I know the truth. He doesn’t come out here like Hector afore the gates of Troy, risking death to save other folks. He comes slinking like a whipped dog, cause he is a whipped dog inside. He runs out here to hide from a sin that the good Lord would have forgave long ago if he just allowed forgiveness to be possible.
    Soon enough, though, Peggy