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idea how to go about getting close with Uncle Toy. It stood to reason, though, that if you wanted to get in tight with somebody named Moses, honesty would be the best policy. Since they believed in it so strongly.
    “Lovey said you have no respect for the dead what-so-ever.” Swan hoped that was enough honesty to get his attention. She also hoped that he would take offense at Lovey for saying such a thing, and that the two of them could dislike the brat together.
    Uncle Toy just smiled a lazy smile. “Lovey said that?”
    “She damn sure did.”
    Swan figured that any man who wouldn’t go to his own brother’s or his own daddy’s funeral ought to be a safe bet to practice cussing around. She had him pegged right. He never even flinched.
    “Well …” Toy said that word like a sentence again. “I reckon I respect a person after they’re dead to about the same degree as I respected them while they was alive.”
    “Did you love your daddy a-tall?”
    “I did.”
    Which seemed to pretty well take care of the funeral issue.
    “Are you really a bootlegger?”
    “Who said I’m a bootlegger?”
    “Near ’bout everybody.”
    Toy turned the stick in his hand, examining it for flaws. It wasn’t shaped like anything, but he had gotten it perfectly smooth.
    Swan made her voice real low and ominous and warned him, “I just might be a revenuer. You better be careful I don’t find your still and run you in.”
    “You got me mixed up with a moonshiner. Moonshiners, they’re the ones have stills and fight revenuers. A bootlegger is just a middleman. Meets the deacons in the thickets, or out behind the barn, and sells them what they wouldn’ be seen buyin’ in public. How come so many questions?”
    “I’m just curious.”
    “Curiosity killed the cat.”
    “I’m not a cat.”
    He squinted at her. “You sure? I think I see whiskers.”
    She laughed. Out loud. Loving this. They were friends. They were going to get to know each other. She was going to find out everything about him, and tell him everything about herself, and she bet sometimes he’d ride her on his shoulders, and no telling what they would do together.
    “You really kill a man once?” she asked suddenly. This time, he flinched. Swan was practically sure she saw him flinch.
    “I killed a lot of men,” Toy said. Flat. “I was in the war.”
    “I don’t mean in the war. I mean did you kill Yam Ferguson deader’n a doornail, for messing with Aunt Bernice.”
    Toy had started whittling again, and now he raised his eyes to hers. Swan thought suddenly that she had never seen eyes so piercingly green. Toy’s shaggy, rust-colored brows were rearing up a little. She had touched a raw nerve, and wished she had not. But she knew the answer to her question all right.
    “You watch how you talk about your aunt Bernice,” Toy said. His voice sounded tight, like his throat was parched. “Now, get your fuzzy butt out of here.”
    “I didn’t mean anything,” Swan said.
    Toy didn’t answer. He got a dingy old rag from behind the cash register and started polishing the countertop. The countertop did not need polishing.
    “I was just making conversation.”
    Toy didn’t even look up. Just kept rubbing at some imaginary stain. Swan didn’t exist for him anymore.
    Swan turned her attention to the window. She was not about to leave the store just because Uncle Toy had ordered her to. Leaving in disgrace was not her style. Outside, a shiny red Chevrolet Apache pickup truck was stopping beside the gas pump. The driver—a sharp-featured, raven-haired man—was bearing down on the horn. There was a woman in the front seat beside him. A plump, blondish woman, holding a baby. Another, bigger baby stood in the seat between the woman and her husband. And in the back of the truck, there were two little boys, about four and eight years old. The sharp-featured man laid on the horn again. Louder.
    Swan cast an uneasy glance at Uncle Toy, who was putting the cleaning