“They’re only different categories in people’s heads. There are really only two categories, Jack. Alive . . . and dead.” The first head he’d dug up does all the talking. The others stare at her with their slick white onion eyeballs. “I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to leave you.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“Wasn’t it?” She smiles, eyelids sinking with a certain sly suggestion.

He looks back at the farmhouse and spits.

“They’re going to do something bad, Jack,” she says. “Your father is going to do something bad.”

“He already did something bad.”

“hhhhhhHHHHHAAAAaaants! Haa-ants! Haants in my p-p-pants!” says the mum with ants crawling in and out of the hole in her temple.

“No, love,” says Mum #2. “Not in your pants. They’re in your brains.”

“Grains?” says the deformed mother. “G-grains? Haaants in the grain!”

A few of the other mums sigh.

“He’s going to do something worse than what got done to me,” says Mum #1.

“I know. I know what he’s going to do and how he’s going to do it. He’s got all of it out in the barn: the fertilizer and the nitro. Connor is going to use it to blow people up.” Jack almost adds, And kill himself while he’s at it, and then Dad can marry— but he won’t even allow himself to finish the thought.

“You need to go. You need to warn people.”

“Why didn’t you warn people?”

Mum #1 smiles sadly, wistfully. “He had you. He said he’d kill you if I told. He’d shoot you, and then he’d shoot himself. I thought Meemaw could help us, but she didn’t get here until after I was gone.”

“She didn’t get here at all.”

“Yes she did,” she says, and the smile is sly again. “You’ve already met her.”

The other heads are nodding. A black, three-inch centipede falls out of the dirty root-tangle of Mum #2’s hair and onto her forehead. It crawls down the bridge of her nose, and then her tongue pokes out of her mouth and reaches up and licks it off. There is a crunch as she closes her teeth on it.

Jack says, “You were a seed. I planted you myself. You can’t really be my mum. You’re just pretending. You’re like that movie. The one where the plants wrap up people who are sleeping and grow copies.”

“We are rooted in your blood, Jack McCourt. And in hers. We draw from her strength even now. Our roots are tough and hardy and grow fast, to find what we need.”

He thinks of the piglet and shudders. “You must be thirsty. We’ve been in a dry spell. Do you want me to get the watering can?”

“We’re not thirsty for that,” Mum #1 confesses.

“No,” he says. “Do you want another piglet?”