Norman was quiet awhile, thinking everything she said was true and sure also it was not. When he spoke again it was dark with the summer stars out the open loft door of the barn showing bats slipping out from under the ridgeline, cutting slim arcs against the night sky. He said, “You going to tell me the rest of it now or you want to wait some while longer?”

“Tell what?”

“Whatever it is that gets you so spooked around strangers. Whatever it is you done wherever it is you come from. Something makes you think somebody’s watching for you. Or might be.”

“You got that all figured out.”

He shrugged even though he guessed she couldn’t see it. “I guess you’ll tell me when you’re ready. Although it might not hurt if I knew what it was we’re looking out for. Or not.”

“I’m not keeping nothing from you Norman.”

“Didn’t say you were.”

“I just ain’t told you everything yet is all.”

“I guess there’s plenty about me you don’t know too.”

“You hush up Norman. Trying to talk to you.” He could not see this but knew she was frowning in the dark. Then she began speaking and her voice gained a flatness he hadn’t heard before, without passion or tone, the voice older than she, as if the voice of the place she spoke of, the voices held there and rising from that place through her.

She told him of Sweetboro: the late February afternoon alone in the kitchen of the house, with her mother Helen and the old woman Rey not three dozen steps out the back door in their cabin, Leah alone heating flatirons on the stove and pressing the clothing of the white people, all now gone to Raleigh but for the younger son somewhere in the house behind the kitchen door. The white people were clutched near to panic with disarray: firstborn Spencer dead almost a year defending Petersburg and the younger Alex just fourteen run off two months before and returned almost immediately with his right arm gone to the elbow, the pus-stained wrappings among what Leah ironed because everything the white people wore in any way when washed was also ironed. Alex would not leave the house, as if his arm lost was somehow not enough, that it was disgrace to have come back at all. Mebane took his wife and two daughters to the capital where life was only less grim because there were more white people to share it with. Leah was not so much happy with the white people gone as no longer caring; the rumors of the past four years she’d learned to ignore, but what was clear was the state of the white people and she knew things had in some fundamental way already changed, even if she still stood with rising steam burning her nostrils as she pressed their underclothes.