I was so skinny, my father says, the boys used to get me into a corner of the school yard and feed me graham crackers to fatten me up. That winter we lived in a cabin in the woods we heated with an oil drum my Dad had found and cut a hole in to make a woodstove. We lived on squirrels we shot and cornmeal mush. To this day I hate cornmeal mush. He doesn’t say why they’ve come to Tennessee, he and his father, Orlin, and his mother, Lona. His father, an out-of-work carpenter, shot a man, a creditor who’d come to the door looking to collect, and killed him, or so Sally will tell me later. My father and his brother, Clarence (always the perfect one, they always liked Clarence best), learned to hit squirrels more often than not with the blue-black shotgun, and my father skinned them with his old pocketknife—rusty handle, oiled blade—peeling the fur back for whatever bits of stew meat a squirrel provides. We have this same shotgun for years—always?—leaning upright in a corner of my father’s closet. He cleans and polishes it from time to time. I’ve taken it out myself, when I’m home alone, and held the oiled wood and heavy weight of it on my shoulder, looking down the long blue barrel.

My father said he was taking the millet to be milled for flour, on his wagon, and had to drive through a darkish part of the woods. (This is my mother speaking.) Then a man stepped out of the trees. My father slowed down to offer him a ride, but he didn’t say a word, just swung himself up onto the wagon seat. My father tried to talk, but the man wouldn’t speak. Nothing at all. Finally my father said, “Who are you?” and still the man said nothing. And then my father got scared, and said, “Get off of my wagon,” but the man didn’t move, and then your grandfather took the crop he used to drive the horses and went to strike the stranger—but the whip went right through him like he wasn’t even there! He tried to hit him over and over again, but the phantom just got up and walked away into the trees. And we knew it was true, when my father came home, because the wagon seat was just slashed to ribbons, and who would ruin his own wagon?