“I know what you want,” said the spoon player. “Come on.” And he shuffled back to his car, the soles of his shower shoes slapping against his heels. Louise punched Ralph Stanley out of the tape player, and Lily drove carefully, with her eyes wide and both hands on the wheel. They followed him out of the parking lot, out onto Highway 90, past a cineplex and an industrial park. His back bumper was crumpled up and hiked up too high on one side, which gave a goofy look to the car, like a dog with one ear wrong-side out. They turned right at a light, then left at a stop sign. They passed a gun and pawn shop and an abandoned scrapyard in a pecan grove. They crossed a railroad track, then the spoon player pulled up into a little alley behind a row of dried-up-looking, old, spindly houses, long ago painted white.

“What are we doing?” said Louise. “Is this safe?”

“Stay on the risers,” he said, and they followed him up rotten steps, across a toppling side porch, and out onto the front. There was a little, weedy yard, a crumbling street, then a long slope to a perfectly round lake, shining black in the afternoon sun. Across the lake in the hazy distance they could see an old building with a sagging roof and a crooked octagonal tower.

“Look, Louise,” said Lily. “Go get the ashes, it’s Despera Springs!”

It was the kind of sight, with the dwindling season, the dappling and the shimmering and the haze, that brings simpleminded emotions to the surface, and Louise stood at the porch railing and thought about their mother, on just such a fall day as this, a happy little girl in this town, now come back for her final rest; and Lily, with the selfishness of the brokenhearted, thought about her lost love, the banjo player, and how she would never be able to stand and look at such a sight with him.

They were both lost in these easy reveries, blinking back cheap tears, when they heard an odd ruffling sound behind them and turned around to see through the screen door an old woman sitting in a straight chair holding an ax in both hands and staring into the fireplace at a big black-and-white Muscovy duck, up to his little gnarly knees in soot and ashes.

“Grab him!” she called out. “Don’t let him flap, he’ll fling soot all over the house!” The spoon player grabbed the duck with both hands, backed out with him through the screen door, stretched his neck over the porch post, and one two three whack, the old woman chopped his head off and he flopped down into the azalea bushes.