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invisible hat, before righting himself and accepting her apple.
    But the biggest, reddest apples she’d save for her brother, who looked forward to her visits. Teague would crunch them between his teeth, gold-colored juices soaking up in his red beard. He’d lick the sticky off his fingers and Emaline would dab her kerchief on his lips and his hands, shaking her head, saying, Oh, Homer.
    For months, Eli worked out in the levee camp under Teague, digging ditches, driving mules, and hauling cement. Breakfast bell comes at five, and if you ain’t got your card, you ain’t eating—then it’s down to the riverside till the quit bell rings. In those long hours the men would wait on those bells, hearing them when there wasn’t nothing to hear at all—just a magpie screaming or some faraway train going, tearing through the world like it was made of butcher paper.
    The work was hard and grueling but on Saturdays, they’d clear out the equipment shed and him and a few of the boys would get a special dispensation into town. They’d come back with barrels of white whiskey and a hog to slaughter and roast over the fire pit. Once they stole a piano—took four goddamn men to lift—and Eli would drink that white whiskey and beat those keys and make them forget. The crooked card games, the lying women—one more song, just one more song. They’d rise to their feet, and shut their eyes, feel the wash of sound against them, pulling back like sand on the tide. And those D.C. white boys would just look the other way, down at their rolls of paper, at their pencil sketchings, and let those sorry niggers alone.

    ONE MORNING HE SAW HER, Emaline, stumble up the grassless path. The sun was on her shoulders, moving through her hair. Eli had been working at the wall, reinforcing the berm with cement when she stopped and greeted him, her high laugh speckling above the rill of moving water.
    You’re a performer, she said to him. That’s what one of the men told me anyways.
    Eli let his shovel rest.
    Yes, miss, he said. He stood the shovel against the wall and wiped his brow with a kerchief.
    I knew it! How come you never told me that before?
    Eli shrugged and glanced down the line to where her brother was busying himself with a mule driver and his team. He seemed irate, pushing that small man about and violently unhitching the beasts from the wagon.
    Nothing to tell, I suppose, Miss Teague.
    Well, what’re you doing out here?
    Even performers got to eat, he said.
    She thought for a second, then crinkled her nose, laughing.
    What do you perform at?
    I play the piano, Miss Teague.
    She clapped her hands together.
    The piano! Can you teach me to play?
    Eli smirked. I can teach you to shovel.
    She laughed again, touching the back of her wrist to her mouth.
    You’re too much, Mr. Cutter, she said before she continued down with her morning greetings. She was an attractive girl, he recognized. He watched the other men get mealymouthed around Emaline Teague, hemming and hawing and striking the ground with their heels. She flustered them with her jokes and that was her right, he supposed. But in his gut he could feel the danger there—her brother’s hot eyes on those around her.
    There were rumors about Emaline and her brother and the things that went on in that plantation house on the outskirts of town, but near as Eli knew it was only idle talk.
    Then one day Emaline stopped coming down to the levee camp with her basket of apples, and it seemed like that foul angry weather would never lift from Homer Teague. He’d come down to the banks, red and mean, his eyes puffy and his cheeks swollen, looking for any chance to take his meanness out of some nigger’s hide.
    He’d work his strop hard, taking whole teams sometimes out under the shady oaks. Each of them would off with their trousers and wrap their arms around a tree trunk. Real hard now, he’d hiss. Like hugging your