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.