This unassailable culture of failure, passed intact by each generation to the next, infects the young, before they can even talk, with a social disease to which there appears to be no immunization and no antidote.

And those exceptional few, the lucky ones, who by sheer native intellect, tenacity, and stupendous power of will, do manage to claw their way up from the abyss of despair, are from then on under continual assault from their families and former associates in a perverse attempt to grapple the escapees back into the fetid social cesspool from whence they came. For to escape the colony and succeed at life is to be a living reminder to the lepers that it can be done, and that the failure to try is the greatest failure of all.

No, I thought. Junior is an apt student, one who has learned his lessons exceedingly well. He is the logical end point of all the human history that has gone before him in his line of ancestry. And if he lives, he will most likely beget more of the same.

“Joree,” I said, pulling her back to the present. “It seems to me your son is old enough to look out for himself. Let’s you and I talk about Tonya.”

Joree turned to me as though she were seeing me for the first time. Then, as she let go the sad thoughts of Junior, recognition came across her features, and she turned her mind again, to the even sadder memories of her lost daughter.

“Yeah, I reckon so,” she said in a forlorn tone of voice.

“Tell me about Tonya’s friends,” I prodded. “Who was her best friend at school? Did she go to church? Who were her friends there?”

“Well,” Joree began, lighting another cigarette. “She and Sandy Willis was real close—they had been since they was little girls in grade school together. The Willises lived just down the road a ways back then. The girls rode the county bus together from elementary all the way through high school.”

We’re getting somewhere at last, I thought.

“And they both went to church down at the crossroads—at that new church. You passed it on the way here. Well, it ain’t exactly new,” she continued after a puff on her cigarette. “It’d been sitting empty for a long time, ’til that new preacher come and opened it again. The girls liked to go there. I know Tonya was there every time the church doors was open.

“She tried to get me to go with her, and I went just the onct—with Tonya that is. But I didn’t much care for it. I just don’t take to carryings-on like that in church—what with them drums a-beatin’, and electric guitars a-frailin’, and all that shoutin’, and dancin’, and a-speakin’ in tongues and all. I just don’t think it’s dignified, myself,” she concluded with a sniff of disapproval.