“I have thought a lot about what you told me,” I said, to break the silence. He looked relieved.

“It really is remarkable,” he said.

“This is where I used to play with Ben Daisy when I was a girl. But still, I don’t know anything about the gods you talked about.”

“Well,” he said, “not many of us here do. But in Haiti, everyone knows them.”

“Even the Christians?”

“Everyone’s a good Christian in Haiti.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s possible to be many things at once, Libertie.”

I walked a little farther into the warmer part of the grass.

“You like riddles,” I said.

“It’s not a riddle. It’s like the marriage you’ll officiate.”

“Another riddle,” I said. “You aren’t doing much to convince me.”

“But it is,” he said. It had caught his imagination now, and he turned toward me, eager to talk. “When a man and woman marry, they become one, correct? One being bound together, but two very separate people. They remain separate, but act and work as one, for the better of all.”

“You are very modern,” I said, laughing. “A woman remains separate from a man? She’s not swallowed in him, whole, to replace that missing rib?”

I had found my rhythm with him now, I thought. I understood now why Madeline Grady teased so much. It made it easier to talk to a man if you pretended everything they said to you was false.

But Emmanuel Chase was hard to understand, because sometimes he became very earnest. As now. He reached out to catch at the tallest cattail and broke it off, then tossed it away, impatient. “I believe in companionate marriage,” he said, rather proudly.

“So you are very modern.”

“It is only logical that a man and wife should share friendship and charity and understanding. They should be friends for life.”

This embarrassed me, and so I looked away. “That’s where my father is buried,” I said, pointing at the grave. freedom stood out on it, as stark as ever, but his name had worn down, no longer deep in the stone but risen faint to the surface. “I do not know if it was that way between my mother and father, though it makes me sad to think she lost not only her husband but her closest friend.”

“It is a pity. A house needs a man and a woman to function.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “We did just fine.”

He smiled, as if he disagreed but was too polite to say, and I felt a rush of sympathy for my mother, a wish to defend her.

“Was it like that with your parents?” I asked. “Were they companions?”

He didn’t turn from my father’s grave. “No,” he said. “They were nothing of the sort.”

And then he was silent, and we listened to the wind move over the grass and, behind us, an exasperated Miss Annie telling the children to quiet.