Mebane looked away from him then. Peering off into the sky above the empty shell of hospital. Without looking back he said, “It is blood-soaked. All of it is. Already now and more in years to come what we will recall is the big event of it. What people did to other people. But it will all be turned into something abstract, removed from each of us. Both colored and white I expect. I seen it happening already with G T Kress. And what will be forgot is the small everyday things that made it real. Because each man has to contribute someway to keep such a flimsy tent aloft. But once it is down we all can step away from it and say it was the other fellow—the other fellow that pitched it in the first place and the other fellow as well that helped hold it up. And so we walk away from it, from the ruins of it. And it will never be made right. It will never be repaired. Because some things are beyond repair. Those things that need it most, it’s beyond the scope of man to do the job. Because all we’re up to, most of the time, is trying to get a little bit back of what we think we lost. It’s human nature. We could flourish I guess. But it will not happen. Perhaps because in our hearts we don’t deserve it. Perhaps because it’s easier to lie between the legs of that dark sister than to call her by name.”

“Is that what you told her,” Foster asked, his voice rasped thick, “when she came back down looking for her mother. Is that what you told my grandmother?”

Mebane looked back at him. Foster had to look around the hand on the cane tip to see his face. As he watched, the hand clenched hard and the old man stood. Way up over him, looking down. Dry-skinned in the heat of the day, his face blotched with color, blanched and ripe at once. Then he turned away and went down the gravel path between the graves, a tall lean figure bent to one side, the sunlight soft as bathwater over him, the cane stabbing out hard and angry ahead. As he went he called back without turning his head. “No. I did not tell her that. I did not. I was a coward, what I was. I did no better than my father or any of them before him.”

He did not look back again but kept on going and Foster watched him until he reached the car and once there Mebane stood, his one hand holding on to the side of the car, his back still to Foster. Foster could see him breathing, the small hump of his shoulders rising and falling within his back. He looked away from the old man, down at the ground beneath him. He raked his fingers through the gravel, the stones smooth against his fingers. Then he stood. Once up, he rocked from side to side and stamped his feet against the earth. Ran a hand through his hair, down over his face. The muscles of his cheeks and jaw tight as drawn bolts. He looked out away from the files of headstones toward the pine-stand beyond the fence. The light there in sharp angles between the trees. He whistled for his dogs.