“Well, that I certainly do understand,” said the woman. “Hated my stepdads, both of them in their turn. Could have danced at their funerals.” She took a long drag of her cigarette. “Good luck, kids. Hope you find what you’re looking for.”

“You too,” I said, and she smiled.

We turned off the pavement and onto a gravel road, bumping and snaking along, the trees growing thicker around us, Spanish moss hanging down, all of nature doing its damnedest to capture the light. We drove down a dirt road to a padlocked metal gate that was rusted and chained, big metal KEEP OUT signs hanging all over it.

“So maybe this isn’t a great idea,” I said.

“Too late now,” said Murphy.

Murphy hopped out of the car and went to work on the gate. Turned out it wasn’t locked, the gate just had a rusty metal chain draped over it to look like it was.

“See?” she said. “Grandma’s not even trying to keep people out, not really. It’s just for show.”

The gate swung wide open, and we bounced and bucked down the pockmarked dirt and through the trees. It had been ages since I’d been so far into the country, and I remembered how much I loved it. I’m not really a nature kid, but it’s hard to love poetry and not get a rush from all the green light hazing around you, from the flitter and dart of birds, the brown scurrying squirrels, the idea that there’s all this life everywhere and you’re just a small part of it. I guess what I mean is, being in the woods is kind of like staring up at the stars. You realize you aren’t so important, that you’re just one of a billion different things out there, and this world wasn’t really made for you. At least not you alone. And there’s something to that. A whole heap of poems have sprung up from that very idea.

We had dawdled so long trying to find the place that the sun was on its way to setting, and it burned mean and orange over the treetops, a far-off fire casting its glow on us. It felt like we were departing the real world for this sunburnt dream forest that clutched all the light deep in its leaves. I don’t know what I’m trying to say except that it felt like we were leaving what we knew and traveling on into something else, something different. I felt a shiver go right through me. Murphy just stared wide-eyed out the window.

The trees broke, and before us stood a house, old and columned with flaky white paint, three stories high, gold-cast from the setting sun—a kind of glimmering angel of a house, each of its windows like the black eyes of cherubim in the Bible, dozens of them, all fixed on us bouncing down the rutted driveway. I felt like how I felt in church the few times Mom ever let me go, when I looked up at the wounded wooden Christ dangling up there, all carved agony and red-paint blood, and it was like He could see me, like those wooden eyes were flesh and that painted blood became real, and all that pain was actual pain, was my pain, and that hunk of wood was Christ alive and watching me. It was just like that, driving up to that house—it seemed alive and watching, each of its black eyes fixed on us, the secrets of death and life and salvation hidden inside.