“Listen: The same time as Millie I had a yardboy. Great big man over six feet but he could work his way weeding through a flower bed as if he floated over it. Now, he was a young man, in his thirties. With a wife and family. So it was very much the money to him. Good lord, Fred Fox, hands on him like a set of hams and black as Piney Woods pitch. And he stood pleading with me when I let him go. But all that first season, an evening or two a week he’d come by and work on the flowers out front. Push the little lawn mower out back. Trying to keep things up, keep them right. Because he knew that was how they were supposed to be. I’d go out and tell him, ‘Fred, if you keep working here then I have to keep paying you and I don’t want to keep paying you so you have to stop working here.’ He’d tell me he didn’t want the money, just keeping things up. I told him I didn’t want things kept up. Finally I warned him I’d call the police and have him picked up for a trespass. He just stood looking at me, brushed the dirt off his hands onto the front of his pants and told me have a good evening. That was the end of that.”

“So letting those people worked for you go, that was just some way of making a change for yourself. Is that it?”

“Maybe.” Alexander Mebane grinned at him, the same sly grin as earlier on the porch. “Maybe I was just running out of money.”

“I told you I wasn’t after anything like that.”