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perfectly. He was beautiful. Mr. Thing, as you call him, was knocked out with him. And then he shot a mallard and Elvis got right up to the water and crouched down to jump…and then he looked around at us and grinned, and wagged his tail, and wouldn’t move. Nothing Dad did could make him. Nothing. We finally just came on back. If I was you I’d get that dog out of sight for a while. I think Daddy might kill him.”
    Trembling, Emily knelt down and put her arms around Elvis. She could feel a fine shivering and twitching muscles under his damp, curly coat.
    “Did anybody yell at him—or hit him?” she whispered. Elvis put his head under her arm and burrowed against her.
    “Oh, shit, no, of course not,” Walt Junior said impatiently. “You know Daddy wouldn’t mistreat a dog. He just didn’t…talk to him anymore. Bundled him into the crate and stuck him in the back of the truck and brought him home. He was out of it and up the steps before Carter and I could open our door. We got the crate down and let Elvis out. He knows he did a bad thing, though. Look at him.”
    Emily gathered the dog up in her arms and stood, holding him close against her.
    “He did not do a bad thing. He’s never done a bad thing in his life!” she spat, feeling her face whiten as the blood rushed from it. “The only bad thing anybody did today was to take him out there and show him off like a…a prize steer! I hope he never hunts! I hope he won’t hunt for anybody else on this place ever again!”
    She turned to start up the stairs to her bedroom with Elvis. Her father’s bedroom door flew open, and he stood at the top of the landing looking down at her. She stopped still. His face was tight and white, and there was wildfire in his eyes.
    “What the hell did you tell that dog?” he shouted at Emily.
    She was up the stairs with the dog and past him and in her room before she heard her aunt Jenny say, in a hushed, furious voice, “What are you talking about, Walter Parmenter? Are you crazy? Just listen to yourself. Don’t you speak like that to Emily ever again in my…”
    Emily slammed her door and, for the first time she could remember, locked it. It was a very long time before she opened it again. When she did, nothing and everything had changed.

3
    DEEP INTO THANKSGIVING night Emily dreamed.
    She dreamed of a crystalline white mist rolling in from the river, much like the usual fall and winter mists and yet not. This mist was palpable. It had form. It spread itself in a layer over the house and the river and the marsh, over all the plantation land, from Toogoodoo Creek upland almost to Hollywood, back down to Yonges Island on the Wadmalaw River, to the mouth of the North Edisto.
    Somehow she was riding on the mist, sitting cross-legged atop it. Soft sweet sun spilled down over her. Fresh wind teased her hair. She was looking down on the plantation that she should not have been able to see through the carved-marble white mist. For a long time she simply sat on the mist and looked, and was happier than she could remember being in her life.
    She was directly over the house, and she could see it as clearly as if in ordinary daylight. The simple Greek Revival architecture was the same, with the two-story main house and the wings spreading out from it, and the encircling wooden porch and the four plain white wooden columns. It still sat on its arched brick foundation, raised to catch the breezes from the broad Wadmalaw behind it. Sweetwater had never been an ornate, manorial plantation like those of the Ashley and Cooper and the Peedee Rivers. But it had a kind of pared-down symmetry that seemed a part of the river light and the wide skies over it, and in the dream it gave off its own light, soft and radiant, like an August moon.
    It was morning in the dream, a spring morning, and the new gold-green of the marshes and the shining fresh-paint green of live oak groves that had never been there glistened like vermeil. Wildflowers rioted