He asked Grayson and me to wait while he went inside his place to get his things. I parked and watched him disappear inside the smaller of the two trailers, the one with the wooden step. Snow made the cans and chicken wire of the trash pile look cleaner somehow, newer. It gave it a fresh crown.

Grayson leaned in from the back seat. “How long should we wait?”

“I don’t know.” I looked closer at the piles of junk.

The burn pile didn’t have the usual nest of brush and broken chairs. Instead, there were long, thin strands in the ashes, knotted and coiled. I knew what they were: pipes and wires, pulled from the walls of houses. Dance or his missing daddy had been trying to burn insulated wires, to get at the copper scrap.

Grayson said, “Is this even a good idea?”

I craned back to look at him. “None of this is a good idea.”

It was snowing when Dance came back to the truck with a backpack and a sleeping bag. He chucked his stuff in the bed, and got into the front seat with me. He had on a different pair of glasses. The bridge of this pair had been repaired with tape, but the lenses were intact. A gust of wind broke over the ridge, rattling loose a piece of aluminum siding from his trailer.

“How did you and your daddy live out here?” I asked.

“Live?” He laughed a little.

“What did you do for money, I mean?”

“We were ginseng hunters. Root diggers. There was a buyer in town who paid cash. No questions asked. Ginseng, morel, goldenseal, black cohosh.”

Seasonal work, then. That explained the copper wire in the burn pile. They had not been able to find and sell roots for a while.

Snow feathered the windshield. I turned on the wipers, and the flakes drifted away, soft as dogwood blossoms. “So, your work is basically over?” I said.

“Yes. My life is over.”

I looked over my shoulder and backed slowly down the ridge. I saw faces pressed to the windows of the houses, ghostly as fish underwater. But no one came out onto their porches again. It was too cold. And they knew where we were going.

Away.

Grayson fell asleep in the back seat, after complaining that his foot hurt. “At least this injury is good for something,” he said as he bunched a pillow against the window. “I know when it’s going to snow.”

“It’s always going to snow,” Dance said. “That’s no gift anymore.”