How did it come to this? Marcus found himself wondering. As a young attorney, he spent a day in court for every day behind his desk. From season to season, in the upper gallery the fans would be waved or the sneezes stifled as he rose deliberately from his chair and walked toward the jury box to face the twelve of his fellow men who had been summoned to sit in judgment—each one fashioned in the Lord’s image, yet no two alike. It was for that very moment that he had become a lawyer: that moment when the citizenry, intent on voicing its innermost concerns and meting out the full measure of its vengeance or mercy, was still prepared to listen.

And yet, Marcus had not entered a courtroom in more than three years.

In fact, half the very documents that were stacked upon his desk had been drafted to avert an appearance in court: stays; requests for summary judgment; terms of settlement. On top of the stack that Miss Ross was straightening at that very moment was a motion to dismiss—which had presumably begun its journey as a tree. Solitary and majestic, that tree had provided shade to some little patch of America: in a churchyard, perhaps, or a pasture, or along a bend in the river where Whistling Billy McGuire had cast his line. And then, after half a century of providing relief from the sun so reliably, this tree had been unceremoniously felled—so that a middle-aged man without a wife or children sitting in an office a thousand miles away could string his carefully qualified arguments together end-to-end.

Through words and clauses.

Paragraphs and pages.

Quires.

Reams.

Bales.

In just three years, Marcus must have caused the clearing of ten thousand acres of virgin growth—single handedly stripping the likes of the Ozarks as bare as might five generations of shipbuilders.

How it would have confounded his father to see it—his father, who for more than thirty-eight years served four hundred families six days a week, providing all manner of seed and feedstock by the pound and the bushel and the peck, and who left behind an unlocked iron box with a marriage license, a birth certificate, a balanced bank account, a cancelled mortgage, two pages of outstanding receipts, and a handwritten last will and testament—for a grand total of ten pieces of paper.

A ray of sunlight graced the paper-laden desk. Marcus followed its diagonal trajectory back though the louvered shades, out into the dusk of the whippoorwill’s call, beyond Buildings Five and Six, beyond Stages Ten, Eleven, and Twelve to the farthest reaches of the lot where that well-stocked tributary of the Mississippi River flowed without effort or interruption.

Miss Ross politely cleared her throat.