“Yuht.”

“You got any family, anybody I can get ahold of for you?”

“Nope.”

“Anything at all I can do for you?”

“Nope.”

“I knew your mother a little bit. Always liked her.”

“Where’s he at?”

Jackson told him. Then said, “You think of anything, anything at all you want to tell me, you know how to get ahold of me.”

The boy’s lips were a tight line. Then he said, “Am I safe here?”

Jackson said, “I don’t know. You tell me.”

“I don’t know.”

And they stood looking at each other for some short time, each knowing the other knew more than would say, would be gotten out. Then Jackson said, “It was an accident is what we think. You shouldn’t have to worry. I’m sorry about your father, I truly am.”

“That’s all right,” the boy said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

He sat that night with both downstairs doors locked and barred with furniture pushed up against them, sat upstairs on his bed with both dogs with him in the dark as the storm blew around the house, on the bed his pair of shotguns laid out both loaded; the little .410 his father had bought him years ago and the sixteen gauge L.C. Smith side-by-side he’d bought for himself the year before. After the storm sat listening to the water drip from the hemlock boughs, his window open. Some hours before dawn the sky cleared and it grew chill and then as dawn came on fog came off the river and filled the woods. He took the dogs out the backdoor, carrying the side-by-side, whistling them close with short soft chirps, watching around him in the fog. There was no one there. When they were done he took them back inside and barricaded the door again and fed the dogs. Then called them upstairs and left the window open and slept a few hours. Still dressed, blankets pulled up tight. The guns either side of him, the dogs at his feet. When he woke the sun was burning through the fog.

Four days later he sat and walked and stood through the service and burial as if asleep although he’d not slept more than a handful of hours since his father’s death. The minister spoke words that he did not understand and that had nothing to do with his father. He sat alone in the front pew because that was where they put him. Left alone, he would’ve sat at the back. The number of people there surprised him, although he recognized most of them. When somebody spoke to him he answered them back but would later not recall a single word said. It was hot at the afternoon burial, the sun splintering off the polished wood box as it sank down into the hole. Somebody handed him a spade and he set to work until someone else took the spade away from him and he understood he wasn’t expected to finish the job, just start it. It seemed to him they ought to have left him alone to do it. It seemed to him it was his job to do. Afterward there was food that people had brought that the minister’s wife laid out in a room behind the church but he went in and saw the people standing and eating and talking to each other and he went back out. It was no place for him. Outside Patrick Jackson was squatted on his heels in the small shade of the Chrysler and Foster was not surprised to see him.