“Can’t you just kick them out, get the sheriff to evict them?”

“Lease I gave to Lester got another year on it. And wasn’t nothing in the papers said he or his people couldn’t rent out part of what I rented out to them. It wasn’t nothing I even thought about when I drew up the papers. Sheriff say they got rights too, the folks in the trailers. So I’m stuck. And it’s been some trouble.”

“Like what?”

“Mess they’ve been doing, trying to run us off,” Mr. Page said.

Darren told him he would do what he could to get him some relief, some protection from the county. Maybe if he talked to Sheriff Quinn directly, he could get the man to understand something had to be done. That it wasn’t right for a man to be harassed on his own property, especially when it was at least likely that Gil Thomason was engaging in illegal activity on the premises. “Maybe after we get through with that search of his trailer, it’ll be easier to push him and others out.”

“No matter,” Mr. Page said with a sigh, the air seeming to burn his chest on release, to hurt his heart to say that it was all over now anyway. “I’m selling.” He jammed his hands into the pockets of his blue jeans, which were rubbed through with grease in places, grass stains in others. His shoulders dipped, and then he let loose a hangdog smile, chuckling to himself. “Another few months and every one of them gon’ be out of here whether they like it or not. Boy spray-painting porch monkey and nigger on my house and threatening me ain’t gon’ do a thing to stop it. Nor disrespecting Margaret’s people and her house of worship. I’ll be in my daughter’s place in Little Rock when they come out to raze all of it.”

“And Margaret and her family? What happens to the Caddos in Hopetown when you sell?”

Mr. Page gave a look as vague as his response to Margaret’s dinner invitation. “It’s all being worked out. They gon’ be protected, I promise you that. I wasn’t raised to leave good folks behind. We don’t do people like that.”

Mr. Page’s mood had visibly soured at the mention of Margaret and her family.

“Not letting nobody run them off, no matter what else they try,” the old man said, nodding his head toward the trailer-park squatters outside.

It set off a bottle rocket in Darren’s brain. He remembered the sheriff’s words: the kid’s had problems. Vandalism, he’d said, along with the fact that his deputies had been out to the family’s trailer more than once. Gil himself had said the kid wasn’t a saint. “The boy, the spray paint,” he said. “It was Levi?”