“Good riddance,” said my husband. “He’s too smooth by half. All a scam, you’ll see. We’ll move to the coast, find work, send Jim to a good school.”

“Darryl was telling me about the sea,” I said. I’d never seen it. Still haven’t.

“Or maybe we’ll move further inland,” Terrence said. Terrence Alleman wasn’t a violent man. If he’d picked a fight early on, it might have made Darryl a mite less comfortable. Might have changed any number of things.

Life went on, a little quieter. Work and dances, gossip and church. Weddings. Funerals. The lantern-bush, always flowering, was unusually brilliant that spring. You could smell it on the sunlight.

But as the weather got hotter, the vines curled back on themselves where they’d usually have stretched out, grasping. They shrivelled in the summer sun, leaves withering black.

Then the news said the government was bringing in a beetle from wherever lantern-bush had come from, to lay its eggs in the roots. It would kill them forever, across the whole state. The beetles probably wouldn’t kill anything else. They had been cleared to be released, they had been released, the lantern-bush was dying everywhere.

By then, farmers were worrying about drought and fire and flood. We’d almost forgotten the vines when the mayor unveiled the statue bought with the thousand dollars: a beetle triumphant on a bronze bouquet of lantern-bush.

“Science,” he declared, “has given our children a future!” Science, of course, was expected not to care about thousand-dollar rewards.

The next day, Darryl returned to Woodwild.

This time he put up at the Jubilee Hotel, a rickety wooden place opposite the Stockman’s: him, his pipes and (perhaps) his animal. Peg Hale was shirty with me, as if it were my fault he didn’t take a room from her, as if we’d fought. But Darryl and I hadn’t parted on bad terms. We hadn’t parted on any terms at all.

He arrived in the evening. I heard he went straight to his room—alone, as far as I know. He spent the next morning driving, looking around, watched suspiciously by my husband and by everyone else who’d heard him play the winter before. Then he parked at the Jubilee and walked to stand with his hat pushed back, considering the statue. I got a look then: sun and dirt had taken more of a hold on him—there were lines at his eyes and scars on his knuckles I didn’t remember. And a ring, the bastard. If I’d known … well, life would run a lot differently if anyone knew the half of what would turn out to have been useful. His smile, though, glittered more; he moved as if he’d grown up—knew more about the world.

Then he went to the mayor’s house, and anyone who knows anything can guess what was said.