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things heavy on his mind that he’d been meaning to say but never got around to. So Toy went to the woods, and he listened. He and Walter had hunted those woods together since they were towheaded kids. They were close, the two of them. More than blood close.
    Toy knew all the stumps and fallen logs where Walter liked to sit down and have a smoke, and just enjoy the peace. So that’s what Toy had done. For an hour or so at a time. Then, when the peace was too much for him, and he couldn’t take it anymore, and his chest would feel like it was about to bust from the tears he’d been holding in, Toy Ephraim Moses would shatter the peace with a shot or two from his rifle. If he hit something, fine. Toy hoped Bernice would outlive him. If she should happen to die before he did, that was one funeral he’d have to go to, and he was afraid he’d turn out taking potshots at the mourners.
    Swan found out early the morning of the service that Uncle Toy wasn’t going.
    “Uncle Toy has no respect what-so-ever for the dead,” Lovey had said at breakfast. Lovey was Uncle Sid and Aunt Nicey’s youngest child. Ten years old, and spoiled rotten. She had insisted on sleeping over the night before, mostly so she could rub it in to Swan and her brothers how much better she’d known Papa John than they had, and also, so she could shame them for not crying as much as she thought they ought to. They had squeezed out a few tears, but nothing like the gallons Lovey produced. They hadn’t needed to grieve, because Papa John had lived and died a stranger.
    “You hush your mouth, young lady,” Grandma Calla had said to Lovey. “Your uncle Toy has his own ways, is all.”
    Swan had been hearing about Uncle Toy and his “ways” ever since she could remember. For one thing, he was a bootlegger—not that Swan had a clear idea of what that meant. She knew it was against the law, though, and that it could be dangerous. If Uncle Toy wanted to break the law, why not just work in Never Closes with Papa John? That sure seemed like a safe proposition. But it was like Grandma Calla said. Toy had his own ways.
    He’d been in the war, and was decorated for valor. Something about going through enemy fire to save a comrade. A colored man, no less. He got shot doing it, too. Got one leg blown clean off. That was why he walked so stiff-starched. His artificial leg didn’t have any give to it. But bootlegging when he could have been working in the bar and getting his leg blown off to save a Negro weren’t the only things that got Uncle Toy talked about. He’d killed a man once, right here in Columbia County. A neighbor named Yam Ferguson, whose family had “connections.” Yam hadn’t had to go off to war. He got to stay home and help run the Ferguson Sawmill, and chase after the wives and girlfriends of the boys whose families weren’t so well connected. Yam lived through the war, but not through the night Uncle Toy got home from the V.A. hospital.
    By the time the rest of the family was dressed for the funeral, Swan had made up her mind not to go. She got ready, along with everybody else, but she told her mama she was going to ride with Aunt Nicey, and she told Aunt Nicey she was going to ride with Aunt Eudora. Then, while everybody else was piling into the line of cars parked out in front of the store, Swan sneaked upstairs into Papa John’s bedroom. She would not look at the bed Papa John had sat down on to finish what he had started out in the pasture, under that tree. She would not look at the wall that the neighbor women had washed clean. She especially would not look at the Bible on the bedside table. It made her shudder to think that Papa John was in touching distance of the Holy Word when he did what he did, as if he just had to insult God one last time. There was no doubt in Swan’s mind that Papa John was already burning in Hell by now, unless by some chance, God took insanity into consideration. But, she figured, why have a hell if