But one night after the familiar quarrel, they went to bed without making up. The next morning Posie discovered that Buttercup had died in the night, and when she stumbled into the yard, still in her nightgown, to call for help, she dropped dead too. The two who had shared the same bed, not having married, for thirty thousand nights were now buried side by side in the little country cemetery favored by the slaves of the neighborhood, where their mortal remains might rest, or not, through all eternity.

Roscoe continued to ride out to the Anderson Place once a week to look over the crops and to give Clovis a little money, but that made no less welcome Leon’s frequent gifts of whiskey on his own visits. It simply meant that she could drink all she wanted, and the more she drank the more she needed to achieve the desired nirvana. Leon did not ask himself why he visited Clovis; he only knew he was drawn to do it. Perhaps it was the memory of shared youth, or merely that she reminded him of his own—an instinct of kindness or guilt, or both together. Sometimes they talked, their expressions polite and formal, but never did they talk in a personal way. One day, however, when he found her there in the patch of woods between their fields, and they sat down on the log and drank from the jug one after the other, each wiping the opening after drinking, she closed her eyes for five minutes. He thought nothing of it; it was a thing she often did. She might have been sleeping or merely “studying.” Then she opened her eyes, and their intense expression showed that she had been not asleep but thinking, and she said, “I bet you want to know if he did it.”

“If who did it?” he said vaguely, not sure he had heard her right.

She nodded, still busy with her own thought. “Well, he did. He had to tell somebody. Told me, nobody but me; that I know.”

“Who?”

“Roscoe,” she said.

“Roscoe did it?” he repeated in a puzzled tone. “What?”

“Got the watchman drunk and set the fire.”

He did not answer but sat blinking at her and remembering the night he and Floyd had ridden wildly into Highboro, their eyes on a dreadful glow in the sky.

“You understand?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She laughed with a snorting sound. “You can’t prove it.”

“No.”

“I’d say I never told you nothing.”

“It’s a long time ago,” he said.

She brooded over that. “Everything is.”

When he left her, he wondered if what she had said was true, and decided that it no longer mattered anyhow.