There was the schoolhouse, which was empty now, because it was spring and most children were working. It would start up classes again in a few weeks, when they returned, and I would sit there, too, away from Mama.

There was the low, rambling building that was Mr. Culver’s pharmacy. His son, John, was regularly running from Mama’s to here, passing messages between the two of them. Out front sat six glass vials, filled to the brim with blue and green and red liquid remedies—the sign to all, even those of us who did not know our letters, that Culver’s was a place for medicine. I knew the front room well. Culver’s also was our general store, where we could buy seed and burlap and thread from a welcoming face, not the begrudging white ones downtown who sold the same, at two times the price for colored people.

And finally, there was the church, the building everyone was proudest of. It had been the first one built, after our grandfathers bought land here, and it stood back, next to a little glen of trees we took turns pruning to keep pretty, and the graveyard shaded lower on the hill, protected from any passerby.

Mr. Ben looked around. “This it, then?” he repeated.

“We play over there,” I said, pointing to the other side of the churchyard, where in the summertime a meadow always sprang up, which I and the other children liked to run through. In this new spring, it was bare, but I tried to explain it to him, what the future glory would look like. “We run so hard there you feel like you’re bursting.”

His face was unmoved.

“But I guess it’s all just mud now,” I said, trailing off.

A crow called above us, wheeled in the sky, and settled on the branch of the nearest tree, shaking a too-new blossom loose.

Mr. Ben said, “I couldn’t see what this place looked like on the way in. I could only hear what this town was like, when I was in that box.”

“What was it like?” I said. “In there.”

“Awful, gal. What kind of a question is that? What you think it like, to be shut up in the dark with nothing but yourself all around you?”

He made another turn, looked up at the sky again, which seemed too white and was closing in around us.

I was seized with the wild desire for him to love our home as much as I did. He had said he was lonely for his Daisy, but maybe he was lonely because of being in the box, of having been so close to her in death but then being snatched away to rise up. I knew part of making a guest feel comfortable was to introduce them to those they might have something in common with. That is what they taught us girls in deportment at the Sunday school, anyways. And he seemed to enjoy talking about the dead. I pointed to the churchyard again.