We turned from the lower field as the sky began to lighten. When would the holler realize I was gone? I would have to tell the boy with the station wagon. I would have to make other arrangements, at last. Would squatters overtake the house? Would nature: cold cracking the windows, snow pooling on the floor, rodents curling up in the holes they’d chew in the mattresses? I didn’t look back at the big house.

I had said my goodbyes to the farmhouse last night, shut it up, locked what I could. The basement room was dark and would stay dark. There was nothing behind its door now, no mystery. In the field where my house had been parked for years lay a matted shape, the grass pale and dead, dirt showing through, a square cut from snow.

We drove slowly down the driveway. Grayson and Dance were silent, waiting for me to say something, to give them a clue of how to feel. The tiny house, unfamiliar and huge-seeming, swayed on its trailer. I concentrated on driving, turning onto the empty rural route. This time of morning, not even the farmers were out with their wagons. The main road was paved. The driveway was not—and instantly, I felt a weird loss. I missed the bumpy gravel and mud of the driveway to the farm. I parked the truck, got out by myself, and locked the gate behind us for real, for the last time.

The padlock cinched with a crack. It thudded against the chain, snow flaking off the gate.

On one side of town was The Church, where Lisbeth had disappeared every Wednesday night and all day Sundays. But on the other end was the Compounds: the acres beyond the railroad tracks, the marshes and hills that held trailers, patched-together houses. Land was cheap because it was hard to farm, mostly former quarries and crenulated hills. Coal companies had removed the top of the mountains so they were no longer mountains but sharp and fallow ridges, like a furrowed, angry face. Shacks perched on the edges. Abandoned mines meant the earth beneath was hollow, unstable. The creeks ran orange with acid damage.

Nobody wanted the land because nothing could be done with it—nothing grew except mud, went the joke—so you could buy acres and acres for cheap, have your own compound with a farmhouse, a couple of aluminum-sided sheds, a few dead cars for parts. Friends could live out on your land in a trailer, an arrangement of a few weeks that often turned into years.

Dance’s family lived in the Compounds. What was left of his folks. His older brother had enlisted a year ago, after the first time we skipped spring, and his daddy, always a drinker, drank more once the weather turned.