“Not all of it, you don’t. The landowner claimed Daddy had stole something, so the sheriff jailed him for a month. Bread and water, just like the old saying. The strap, too.” Quentin taps the right arm of the chair with his long fingers. “Seeing Daddy locked in that jailhouse cut me to the bone, Penn. I’ve never felt more helpless than I did then. That’s probably the reason I’m a lawyer today.”

“Quentin—”

He reaches out and grabs the sleeve of my jacket. “I know I’ve told that story to juries before—milked it when I had to—but I always held something back.”

Something in his voice catches my attention. “What’s that?”

“Daddy didn’t go to jail just once, Penn. And most times, when they took him . . . he was guilty.”

“What?”

Quentin nods soberly. “He stole things from the boss man. Pilferage, you know? Some tack here, a hog there. Sharecropping was practically slavery back then. I think it was Daddy’s way of fighting the system—a corrupt, dehumanizing system. Usually they only kept him in the pokey a couple of weeks. But one time they kept him ninety days. We nearly lost everything that year. Truth be told, we damn near starved. Me and my brother couldn’t hardly get the crop in. We ate our animals and our seed corn. You’d think the neighbors would help out, but they had too damn little themselves, and nobody wanted to risk helping somebody who’d upset the boss man.”

Quentin lets out a bitter chuckle. “Daddy had an attitude, now. Mama was always scared he’d backtalk some gunbull and they’d shoot him. ‘Shot trying to escape.’ You know how it went in those days.”

I nod. “The Ray Presley solution.”

“You got it. I was about twelve when he went in that time. I was so mad I wanted to kill somebody, and so scared I wanted to hide in my mama’s skirts. But no matter how I felt, I couldn’t change how things were.”

There’s a note in his voice that puzzles me. “Why are you telling me this? Are you saying Dad’s guilty?”

“No, goddamn it.” Quentin glares at me like an impatient father himself. “I’m saying you’ve been doing all you can to keep your distance from your father, and I know why. He’s hurt you. Bad. But when you see him in here, something’s gonna break in you. You’re gonna revert back to Penn Cage, crusader for justice. But boy . . . in this situation, you can’t do anything to save your father. This time, that’s my job. Your job is to give him the strength to get through the month we have until the trial. Can you do that?”