“Your scars.” She moved toward him, fascinated, and traced her fingers over the long scar on his belly.

He laughed. She felt his laugh under her fingers. “You’re tickling me,” he said. He wasn’t laughing anymore. He pushed her back, gently but insistently. “Last man tickled me, he used a cat.”

“A cat?”

“You know, teacher—the kind with nine tails? The kind where each leather tail is knotted wet around a steel rivet and then dried in the sun till it’s nice and tight?”

“They whipped you?”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, woman! You have no idea what goes on in this world. Lynching—it’s an old custom in these parts.”

“Turn around. Let me see.”

“You don’t want—”

“Turn around.” She turned him and saw the bare flesh of his back. She swallowed the bile that rose in her throat. His flesh was pink, white, and black, crosshatched in overlapping scars. The texture was corrugated—that was the only word that described it. She said the word to herself, to remember the effect later.

“Have you ever seen a lynching?” he asked quietly, his back to her, staring out the curtainless window. “Do you know what happens when a man is whipped?”

She said nothing. She had never seen such a thing in her life.

“They tie your arms up over your head, like this.” He raised his arms and crossed his wrists, then let them down and picked up her umbrella. He whacked it against the desk. She jumped. “At first, it stings. You close your eyes and you can see the stripes on your back—each one as it is laid on, as if your eyes were watching through your own skin.”

Whack! “How it makes a long, red welt.”

Whack! The rubber tips at the ends of the umbrella ribs ricocheted against the wall. “You feel the knot biting, then flicking off. Each time it flicks off, a little piece of flesh goes with it.” Whack! “By the third lash, the welts start to bleed. They don’t sting anymore—now, they burn. Now, it’s like fire is being poured onto your back.” He flailed at the desk with the umbrella till it was beaten shapeless, the fabric shredded. He flung it away.

She wanted him to shut up, she didn’t want to hear any more about it, but she didn’t dare speak.

“Like liquid fire. You keep your weight on your feet no matter how bad it hurts, so your arms don’t pull out of their sockets. You say to yourself, Lord, help me keep standing on my feet. You promise him anything.”

“Please,” she managed to say.

“No, I don’t guess you want to hear all this. But I believe this is what you came here for. I do believe that.”

“I don’t think—”