“Give me credit here—I made it short. Of course I was ready to wash myself. Get something to eat. It’s true, I wanted her gone. I had my reasons. But I did not torture her further. There was nothing left to tell anyway. It was just a detail to finish it off. How her mother then went out that night and walked the tracks to where the span is high over the river and dropped herself down into that water. That was all. I told her there was no grave. No marking. The niggers is afraid of suicides. But then, we all are, aren’t we? Then I left her. Alone in my room. So she could pull herself together and leave. I thought that was a nice touch, giving her that privacy. Even as I wanted her again and likely could have had her. But I was weary with it all. Some ways it had been so much for so long for so little. In the end, so little. Still, it was a good job. Wasn’t it?”

Foster could taste his eggs, the whiskey from the night before. His stomach was tight. Mebane was no longer smiling but his face was bright, pitched up. Foster ran his tongue over the roof of his mouth and swallowed. He said, “It was all a trick. Is that right? It wasn’t true?”

Mebane made a sound, a sigh, a hiccup of sadness, despair. It could have been a chopped-off laugh. He said, “I never knew where Helen went to. What happened to her. I was bad sick with fevers and somebody—it could have been her—got word to my mother in Raleigh who came after me. It was a terrible time to travel. The railroads was all torn up and shut down, the roads filled with Yankee patrols and every other sort of criminal you could think of. I don’t know how she did it. She got a man and a team and made that trip for me. Thirty miles. But by the time my mother got to me I was alone. Helen was gone, the other old nigger woman too. I didn’t know where, didn’t care. I recall lying on a tick in the back of that wagon sweating under a stretched canvas, crying with every step and jounce of the way.”

Foster stood. “It was all a lie then. What you told her was lies.”

“I was not interested in anything,” Mebane said, “except watching her break. All I wanted then was her gone. She needed something and I gave it to her. What did it matter? She needed that bad news the same way she needed to make the deal with me to get it. She did you know! She needed that deal. Maybe more than me. She had tried to trade her way into a new life. Fancy-go-to-town nigger woman! I wanted her to know what it cost. Cost me. I wanted her to have that weight over her every walking moment of her life.”