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Hadley around the yard, the broken fingers of The Grasshopper swiping within an inch of Hadley’s shoulder blades. Sometimes, when Hadley made Loomis mad, Loomis threatened to sneak into Hadley’s room while he was asleep and scratch his back. Hadley didn’t think it was safe for a boy like Loomis to possess something so powerful. Loomis bragged that he was the only one at Browning House who could not be fired. 
    “A deathbed promise is more binding than glue. Hell, I could itch Mr. Browning’s back until he croaked, and lessin’ they decide to cart me off to jail, there’s nothing no body could do about it. You can’t mess with a deathbed promise. I’m as good as married to this fancy-ass place.”
    Though Browning House wasn’t a proper plantation—it had a block of corn, a kitchen garden, a vineyard, forty hogs, two champion riding horses, and a lazy old cow called Toil-n-Trouble, or Tee Tee, for short. Word had it that when Mrs. Browning was still alive, everything was vastly different. The servant children were chauffeured to school in a coal-box buggy by old stooped-over Cuffy the driver. A better cook made meals for the servants in those days, too. The current cook, Miss Missy, was a kindly little thing, but her hoecake was hard as oak. Those that could remember said that Mrs. Browning was a true saint. 
    To be sure, she had a saintly look about her in the painting that hung over the mantle in the Rose Bud parlor. There was a portrait of her in the Harlequin parlor too, but by then she was suffering with the dropsy that would eventually kill her, and that portrait was just too sad to look at. The painting in the Rose Bud parlor showed a young woman with coffee-colored eyes that seemed to return Hadley’s curious stare. Her dark hair was tied with a pale blue ribbon, and Hadley had discovered that, if he stood with his heels against the far wall, she would look at him and cock her chin in a wondering sort of way.
    Every time he found himself in the parlor, Hadley searched the paint strokes for some similarity between Lucinda and her mother, but there wasn’t a nose or an eyebrow or a smile that appeared to connect them. 
    Old Cuffy grinned a big crooked yellow grin anytime he found reason to speak of the late Mrs. Browning. “When Missus looked at you, you felt like more than a driver. You felt like a whole person with feelings and dreams and a life beyond the uniform.” 
    Even though Hadley didn’t have a uniform, he thought it would be the best thing in the world to be looked at that way. 
    After Mrs. Browning died, there was no more school for the servants. Miss Missy replaced the more expensive and more talented Cookie James. The Cajun gave up trying to speak. The rooms filled with more and more things to dust.
    One of those things was a big deer head that sometimes hung over the telephone table and sometimes would be loaded into a piano-moving cart and disappear for entire weeks at a time. One afternoon, there was a loud crash in the Log Cabin Room, and everyone ran to see what it was. The deer head had fallen off its hook. It lay in the middle of the grapevine rug, staring at the ceiling. Later, Hadley would be given the job of gluing the top half of the buck’s right antler to the bottom half, but in those first few minutes, everyone just stood in a circle around the head waiting for Mr. Browning to say something. Eventually, the man cleared his throat and said, “Daddy’s dead.” Then he went to his study and closed the door. 
    Because Hadley and Loomis were the most nimble of the gawkers, it was decided that they should move the head out to the summer kitchen until it could be repaired. Loomis being Loomis, he took up the wall mount, leaving Hadley to hang on by the more precarious chin. With the deer balanced between them, they began maneuvering it out of the house. 
    “What’s this old head got to do with Mr. Browning’s daddy?” Hadley asked.
    A frizzly tuft of Loomis-hair stuck