I’d never felt particularly connected to Coalfield; I mean, I felt anchored to it, like the years I’d spent here would make it harder for me to live anywhere else, but I never felt shaped by it. Everyone thinks the South is, like, Flannery O’Connor. They think it’s haunted. And maybe it is, deep down, in the soil, but I never saw it that way. We had a McDonald’s. I don’t know how else to say it. There was no bookstore, okay, fine. The museums we had were of the Old Jail Museum or Military Vehicle Museum or Railroad Museum variety. We had a Wal-Mart. I wore normal clothes. And as I drove Zeke around my town, I pointed out things like “I fell off that merry-go-round and knocked out a baby tooth,” or “That shoe store is eighty years old and if you buy a pair of shoes, you can put a wooden coin in this machine and a mechanical chicken will poop out a plastic egg that has candy in it,” or “I stole a heavy metal magazine at that Bi-Lo because I wanted a poster of Lita Ford for my room.” I felt like maybe I kind of loved the place. Or, no, I just wanted Zeke to love it. And if he didn’t, if the old-timey pharmacy where you could get cherry limeades didn’t impress him, I’d tape one of our posters under the counter and then how could he not feel something like love for it?

While we made seven consecutive loops around the town square, Zeke told me that his grandmother had heard about the posters at her Bible study meeting the night before. Some old lady had found one and brought it to the meeting. “They all think it’s got something to do with the devil,” Zeke said. “Devil worship, something like that.” One of the ladies was convinced that the words were a play on a verse from Revelation, so they spent the whole class trying to locate it, poring over the Bible, never finding what they wanted.

“Everyone thinks it’s from something,” I said.

“Everything is, kinda, from something,” he replied.

“Well, duh, but this is from me. Just me.”

“And me,” he said, smiling.

“And you.”