Folks here always seemed to think any black person they encountered was probably “up from Chicago.” It was one of those things that gave me Dorf-claustrophobia.

Then I remembered how the picture had creeped me out the night before. Maybe I wasn’t any better myself.

“I don’t know. I didn’t actually talk to him. I just saw him walking in front of J.T.’s.”

“Sure it wasn’t Grange Consecki or Bob Garter?”

Bob and Grange were the only African American men who lived in Dorf.

“No, he was way shorter than them, and he was really thin. And his skin was darker.”

“Like a Hershey bar?”

“No, more like licorice.”

I did not just say that. Oh my god, what’s wrong with me?

“Huh. Well, I’ll ask around and see who he is,” Suzanne said. Then she winked. “You know Twanda will want to hear if there’s a new man in town.”

Twanda Sullivan was the only single African American woman in town.

Great. Now Suzanne would talk to Twanda, and Twanda would think I thought she wanted to jump every black man who walked through town, no matter who he was. Why did I bring this up? I needed a fire alarm, so I could escape in the chaos. Or maybe a fistfight. Suzanne would forget all about the mystery man if that happened.

Unfortunately, no one chose that moment to faint or moon us or do anything else the slightest bit distracting.

“Well, we’ll just see,” Suzanne said, looking like I’d put her on the hunt.

Thank god I hadn’t included the nudity thing. That would’ve had her asking every person in town about him, for sure, and probably calling the cops, too.

It took another twenty minutes to get out of Pete’s. I drove home feeling especially shitty for reasons I couldn’t exactly put my finger on — some combination of acute racial embarrassment, Justine’s outburst, and a nebulous sense of anxiety.

Since the light was better that afternoon than it had been the day before, I picked up my camera and drove out to the old cemetery behind St. Mary’s. I shot a whole bunch of pictures. It made me feel better, tamping down my anxiety, as it often did. After that, I headed to the grocery store. There’d be time that evening to hit the computer and get a better look at the images I had taken.

I stood there holding a photo of a nineteenth-century grave marker. The eroded carving wasn’t legible in the picture, but I’d looked at the stone many times and remembered what it said: “Daught. Died Dec. 25, 1859. Aged 2 yrs. 9 ds.” It was such a strange, sad monument. It offered no name for the dead child, yet told us exactly how long she had lived and that she had passed on Christmas Day.