So Mister Leland played with Walter most of the day. He tried to recount everything he had seen in the past days, but Walter could only understand the animals being shot and blood squirting out of them like water out of balloons. He wished he had seen that. Mister Leland assured him it had been something to see all right. Of course, Walter wanted his brother to take him over to see the animals—he must have been secretly hoping their blood was still squirting out—and Tucker’s burned-down house. Mister Leland said he was too little to go. And Walter said he was not too little at all, but proved that he was by starting to jump up and down and fume and cry and carry on. Finally, because he really wanted to go himself, Mister Leland took him. They went back through the woods, along the smooth, narrow dirt paths, and came out in the back of the gray field, and could see, far across, the jagged bits of house timber jutting up like burned cotton stalks, and the dark, fly-filled sky above the corral. They were halfway across the field when a white man pedaled up the Highway from the direction of town on a bicycle. It was an old American bike, had once been cream and the red color of bricks, but use and weather had transformed those colors into a dark gray rust. Its fenders were gone; its headlight broken. The man pulled off the road, lay down the bicycle, and stood staring around him. Then he saw the two boys. “You’re Harry Leland’s boys, aren’t you?”

He too talked as if he had learned up North, but more like Mister Harper than the Negro. The boys said nothing. They had stopped in the middle of the field and Mister Leland had taken his brother’s hand.

The man called to them again. “I’m Dewey Willson.”

That’s a lie; Dewey Willson is the General and he’s dead. He gripped Walter’s hand so he winced and protested. “Now you be quiet, Walter. This man may be crazy”…not crazy like Tucker, but really crazy because he thinks he’s a dead man. He pulled his brother along behind him, and presently they could see the man better. He was shorter than their father, but had the same sandy hair, though cut shorter. He was wearing a light blue suit with a great many buttons—three or four—and a drab tie with diagonal stripes.

“Do you know anything about the fire, little boy?” He waited for an answer but Mister Leland gave him none. “I’m a friend of Tucker Caliban’s. Just back from up North. Do you know what happened?”