The sky, now a classic spring sky after a quick rainstorm, seemed higher, wider, cleaner. The frogs, now happy and wet, sang joyous and raucous songs. He smiled and reached into the mud, into the soggy sod where the ashes had melted, and in one motion smeared his face with them, as though to reacquaint himself with the sensation of touch. Again he smiled, his face as vacant as his soul. The voice said rise, and he rose, stripping buck naked, as the voice told him, tearing off his clothing as though he were afire, wallowing like a hog where the ashes were, with innocent abandon. The voice told him to go in to the house and get his grandfather’s old rifle. He did, and turned and waited for the voice in his head, staring over the starlit fields toward the woods. The voice said merely, Walk. He did, his body mottled in clotted wood ash and mud, his skin cool but not cold, listening, listening for the voice that now seemed his only salvation. Salvation? Was that it, now? Beyond hope, beyond faith? Just to survive in some way. To live.

Did he see the low swooping owl or the scurrying wood rat as it dashed into a gulley just by his bare foot? His mind was on spiritual things. For it was just as preachers had been preaching it all the years of his life, warning: there are wretched, wicked spirits that possess us and force us to commit unnatural acts. It was clear to him now: he had been possessed of just such a wicked spirit, and the rain was a sign to prove that he could not be purged. Why fight any longer? said his brain.