“It was a good-sized place, sixteen hundred acres. And it was Buchanan’s. But that didn’t mean his father just sat off to the side of things. What that meant, for our story here, is that those dun-colored children were not just left down there at the end of the row. The boys were taught trades, smithing or wheel-wrighting, coopers, masons. The girls were all brought to the house. They did not work in the fields, those children. Well there was Uncle Buchanan, with that eight hundred dollars to commission household help for his brother. So with his genius for stabbing both ends from the middle, he picked out the middle girl, a pretty girl just fourteen years old called Helen and sent her upcountry to his brother. Half sister to the both of them and he sent her along, knowing somehow that his brother, my daddy, would not be able to refuse her and would not be able to refuse his own heart either, anymore than their own father had been able to do. Buchanan knew my father would hate that girl and love her too and hate himself for both and so poison himself. Would love her because he could not help it and hate himself for allowing what he could not help. It was poison perfect, innocent if untouched. So he sent her off. Everything his brother had asked for. And I do not fail to blame my father. As I said, some part of him must’ve known it would be that way. You do not ask the man who chopped off your foot if your hand is sound as well.”

Foster was flat down on the peastone gravel now, cross-legged, his hands loose in his lap, open. He had not seen his dogs in some time and it seemed terribly important that he locate them but he would not look away from the old man. Who sat with his palm capped over his cane-crook, looking down at him. He wrapped his tongue around the inside of his cheeks for moisture and wetted his lips and said, “So my grandmother then: she was not only half sister to you. But her own mother was half sister to her father. Is that right?”