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needs.”
    “Yes,” Ben sighed. “Thank you, Ninah.”
    But I knew my explanation wasn’t quite right.
    Mustard looked at me like he couldn’t believe what I’d said, and then Ben attacked him directly.
    “And you will understand one day too,” he said to Mustard, “if you listen instead of speaking.”
    For the rest of that night at church, we all recited, obediently, and nobody else spoke out. But my ears were still hot, burning almost as fiercely as the inside of my chest, like nettles, and the whole time I prayed quietly that Mustard wouldn’t have to spend the night in a grave to contemplate the wages of sin, prayed that I wouldn’t.
    L ater that year, when the men loaded up bundles of tobacco on big ton trucks and hauled them off to the warehouse to be auctioned, when school started again and I climbed on the bus and found myself twenty miles away, at a big school where seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-graders teemed through the halls like ants and I couldn’t pick out another Fire and Brimstone anywhere, later that year I had a change for the worse.
    It started with the bleeding. I wouldn’t have known what it was except that they showed us a film at school, and Nanna had mentioned it to me once, briefly. I still didn’t want anyone to know. I hid my underpants in a box that first month, pair after pair until I was forced to sneak into Pammy’s house and steal some of hers, the lining so white it made me cry.
    Then there was my hair, so heavy that it hurt my neck to carry it, so heavy that when I leaned my head over the side of the tub on Saturdays to wash it, I couldn’t pick my head back up until Mamma lifted it and squeezed the water out.
    “Her head stinks,” the girl sitting behind me in social studies would whisper to the girl to her left. “Why doesn’t she wash it?”
    And I’d turn around to see them waving their hands in front of their noses and smiling conspiratorially, but not at me.
    When I washed my hair on Saturday, it was still wet on Sunday, and if it was braided, it didn’t dry until Sunday night.
    Then there was the problem with my chest, my nipples behaving like somebody had scared them, trying to crawl back inside of me just when everybody else’s were showing off. It wasn’t easy to undress for gym in front of all those girls who had bras. I couldn’t do gym in a dress. I couldn’t tell Mamma or Daddy because if they knew the school issued us shorts and T-shirts, they’d call up and make a scene. James had already warned me not to. In the few years since the school had required dressing out for gym class, the handful of Fire and Brimstone children had kept the secret. It was our only chance to prove that we had legs.
    That was the year that Everett married Wanda, and they moved behind us into a cinderblock house between David and Laura’s and Bethany and Olin’s. I was the only child at home then, living in the house behind Grandpa and Nanna’s. To the right of Grandpa and Nanna’s, nine other houses filled with Fire and Brimstone relatives sat in a field like great mushrooms. All the houses were gray, and mostly they looked just alike. But to the left of Grandpa Herman’s house, in the next field, the church emerged from the ground like a peasant’s castle.
    All I had to do was stand on the doorsteps, and I could yell out to anyone at all. If I filled my lungs enough and imagined them the color of Jesus’ blood, I could call out so loudly, so clearly, that even the third cousins on the other side of the compound might hear. But it wasn’t the same, being the only child in the house. It didn’t matter that we were always together or that when I leaned out my bedroom window, I could see inside the other houses, the land all around us, the two new houses being built, the Fire and Brimstone fields. It didn’t really help that I could see the barns, the pigpen, the chicken coop, the silo where we kept the grains, and beyond, all the woods that belonged to us too. It