“Tick tock, tick tock,” Ray said, jutting out his chin with swagger. “Just you wait.” His father shot him a look, and Ray’s chin disappeared like a turtle’s.

“Now, what’s all this here?” Margaret Goodfellow opened the screen door and poked her head out. Her eyes scanned the scene—the tense Ranger, her son with a rifle out. “Donald, put that thing away this instant.” His mama’s words evidently carried more weight than a Ranger’s, because Donald took the gun from his drum and set it at his feet. “We’ve got dush’-cut and dah-bus for lunch,” she said to Darren. A clear invitation that riled young Ray Goodfellow.

“He’s hunting after Leroy, E’-kah,” he said.

“He’s fishing,” she told Darren. “But you welcome to join us while you wait.”

She looked at the others and said of Darren, as plainly as if she were saying the sky was blue and they were fools to quarrel with her about it, “I like him. He’s got kind eyes. Music later. We eat.”

Darren Mathews had never been offered food on a woman’s front porch and refused. It was simply unheard of the way he was raised. So he spent the next hour or so in Margaret Goodfellow’s dining room, his long legs folded up under him at the low table around which the family sat on the floor. They were joined by Donald’s wife, Virginia, and his sister, Saku or Sadie—Darren heard both names used—who was much younger than Donald and a new mother. She held a chunky, barely walking toddler on her lap through the meal, feeding him by scooping a few beans from a decorative clay pot on the table onto a piece of golden fry bread, blowing on it, then easing the bean-soaked bread into his mouth. It was faintly sweet, the bread, and of a texture that was a feat of culinary physics: crisped with oil on the outside and as soft and chewy as a doughnut on the inside. The bread paired with the smoky beans was perfection, a simple meal that rivaled any of the Creole food he could get in Jefferson. The men mostly ignored him, but Margaret asked about his family, where he came from. In turn, she told him she’d been born in Hopetown, as had everyone sitting around the table except little Benji in Sadie’s or Saku’s lap. He’d been born at the hospital in Marshall, the first hospital delivery in a generation. “We lost our midwife year before last,” Virginia said with an air of mourning as she poured Darren a second glass of sweet tea mixed with sliced apples. “So Ray was the last one to be born in Hopetown. Well, Ray and Leroy’s daughter Erika.”

“She the one encouraging him to sell?”