At the crossing-over time, when daylight ends and dusk begins, they approach their Daddy and dare to touch his arm.

He shudders, the child-fingers hot coals against bare skin.

Hides his face from their terrible eyes. On their small shoulders angel’s wings have sprouted, sickle-shaped, and the feathers of these wings are coarse and of the hue of metal.

Holy Saturday is the day of penitence. Self-discipline is the strategy. He’d promised himself. On his knees he begins his discipline: rod, bare skin.

(Can’t see the welts on his back. Awkwardly twists his arm behind his back, tries to feel where the rod has struck. Fingering the shallow wounds. Feeling the blood. Fingers slick with blood.)

(Not so much pain. Numbness. He’s disappointed. It has been like this—almost a year. His tongue has become swollen and numb, his heart is shrunken like a wizened prune. What is left of his soul hangs in filthy strips, like a torn towel.)

Lifer. He has become a lifer.

But lifer does not mean life. He has learned.

Shaping the word to himself. Lifer!

—twenty-five years to life. Which meant—(it has been explained to him more than once)—not that he was sentenced to life in prison, but rather, depending upon his record in the prison, that he might be paroled after serving just twenty-five years.

As incomprehensible to him as twenty-five hundred years might be. For he could think only in terms of days, weeks. Enough effort to get through a single day, and through a single night.

But it was told to him, good behavior might result in early parole.

Though (it was also told to him) it is not likely that a lifer would be paroled after his first several appeals to the parole board.

Where would he go, anyway? Back home, they know him, and he couldn’t bear their knowledge of him, their eyes of disgust and dismay. Anywhere else, no one would know him, he would be lost.

Even his family. His. And hers, scattered through Beechum County.

Who you went to high school with follows you through your life. You need them, and they need you. Even if you are shamed in their eyes. It is you.

Problem was, remorse.

Judge’s eyes on him. Courtroom hushed. Waiting.

What the young lawyer tried to explain to him before sentencing—If you show remorse, Earle. If you seem to regret what you have done …

But he had not done anything!—had not made any decision.

She had been the one. Yet she remained untouched.

Weeks in his (freezing, stinking) cell in men’s detention. Segregated unit.

Glancing up, nervous as a cat, hearing someone approach. Or believed he was hearing someone approach. Thought came to him like heat lightning in the sky—They are coming to let me out. It was a mistake, no one was hurt.

Or, thought came to him that he was in the other prison now. State prison. On death row. And when they came for him, it would be to inject liquid fire into his veins.