But you needed a lawyer, if you were accused of anything. Under the law you were innocent until proven guilty and only a lawyer could guide you through the process of such proof.

As the lawyer had protected my brothers and the other boys from serious consequences, at the time of Liza Deaver.

In a paralysis of dread I lay with my hands pressed over my ears as my father continued to question my brothers almost directly below my bed. I wondered if in my parents’ bedroom at the end of the hall my mother too was lying awake, unable to sleep, listening for sounds—footsteps on the stairs, a softly closing door—that the ordeal was over, for the night.

Whatever Daddy was asking my brothers, they were giving him answers that were not satisfactory. This, I seemed to know.

Daddy must have been humiliated by the ordeal in the police precinct. He knew South Niagara police officers, and they knew him. He’d gone to school with some of them. Possibly, they were embarrassed for him.

Of the four boys brought in for questioning, Jerr, the oldest, would have seemed the most convincing as he was (seemingly) the most intelligent; Walt, a cousin, the son of one of Daddy’s younger brothers, would have seemed the most innocent, and the most easily led. Lionel, uneasy in his body, grown inches within the past year, with the red cut beneath his eye like a lurid wink, would have seemed the least trustworthy. And there was Don Brinkhaus with his Marine-style haircut and broad heifer-face who’d been on the varsity football team at the high school until he’d been expelled from the team for fighting two or three years ago.

Had the guys been driving on Delahunt Road, and had Jerr (unknowingly) struck something or someone on the shoulder of the road?—this was the issue. Lionel wanted to insist that nothing had happened at all. Aggrieving, whining to Daddy—We didn’t do it. We didn’t even see him. They just want to arrest somebody white.

I wondered: Did Daddy believe them?

AND I WONDERED: DID MOM BELIEVE THEM?