“Half past six, maybe a quarter to seven.” He took a sip of the beer.

Darren ignored his own thirst and glanced at his watch. He took stock of the sky through the kitchen window, the view of Ray’s grandmother’s yellow house and the lake beyond. It wasn’t quite dark, but it would be soon. It was only six fifteen. The old man guessed what Darren was getting at. “I had my light on me,” he said, pointing to a homemade tool belt hooked on a nail on the wall from which hung a silver flashlight. “I was on patrol that night.”

“Yeah—what is that?” Darren said, remembering the horses and the guns, the feel of a posse on the hunt. “Some kind of neighborhood-watch thing?”

“It’s legal, whatever it is,” the old man said, eyeing Darren with mistrust.

Darren threw up his hands to show he meant no harm, that beneath the badge, he was still a black man. “With neighbors like you got,” he said, coloring his tone so it was clear he meant the residents of the trailer park he had to pass through to get to Mr. Page’s part of Hopetown, “I can’t say that I blame you.”

“They ain’t neighbors,” Mr. Page said, slamming the beer bottle on top of the shellacked wood of the kitchen table. “Them folks down there is trespassing.”

“What’s that, now?”

“They living on my land,” he said, gesturing to the house, the yard and gardens beyond, the stables and buildings, his indignation reaching all the way to the turnoff from FM 727, the road that led to Hopetown. “All this is mine.”

Leroy Page had been born in this house, his mama and his grandmama too, he said. His people had settled these parts as free blacks after the Civil War, had built a utopia on the shores of the great lake, tilled the soil with the values they held most dear—not just liberty and self-sufficiency, but also forgiveness. Forgiveness was a word from the masters’ Bible that they’d been forbidden to read. But grace came naturally to Leroy Page’s ancestors, was built into their DNA, a native intelligence that told them that true freedom was letting white folks go. You could rage over what they done, or you could be free. It wasn’t a twofer type of deal. “Black folks,” Leroy said, “are the most forgiving people on earth.”