It had been raining on the morning we gathered under the green Jenkins Funeral Home tent to bury my mother. The tent hadn’t been big enough, and we huddled so close to the coffin and the grave it seemed we were crowding Momma out of her own funeral. Especially Daddy—the way he stood next to Preacher Tilson, saying amen after each passage, reading from the Bible himself after Preacher Tilson finished and telling Aunt Margaret what hymn to sing. Then, as we walked back out into a day gray as the gravestones, Daddy told Preacher Tilson it was finally over and what a blessing that was. I marveled at how even at the moment when all five of us could hear the rasp of shovels, the dry splash of dirt against the varnished wood, he couldn’t acknowledge we’d never hear Momma’s voice again, couldn’t realize that the best way to honor Momma’s silence was not to speak but instead to listen to the sound of the shovels gathering dirt and the dirt hitting the wood and, all around that, the steady hush of the rain. The rest of us realized it but Daddy didn’t. He kept on talking, all the way to the car.

I knew something else as we moved through that stone maze the dead had placed between us and the rest of our lives: It wasn’t only Daddy I was angry with but Momma as well. Because now I was left to set things right between us. Momma had surely sensed my anger as well, because she could always intuit things like that in a way Daddy never had. She may have even believed my resentment was about having to nurse her those weekends, that I was twenty years old and wanted my Friday and Saturday nights for something other than helping my mother die. She’d never asked about the anger, never acknowledged it. But that was how it had always been. Silence then and silence now.

CHAPTER 3

The Tamassee Community Center was little more than cinder blocks, tables, and a few dozen metal folding chairs. The roof needed new shingles, and the one window had a piece of plywood where a pane had been. Hawkweed and broom sedge sprouted thick around the edges, some of the plants sortieing out to rise in the gravel parking lot. People voted in this building and occasionally a revival or gospel sing would be held, but passersby would most likely take it as a boarded-up honky-tonk.

But not tonight. The parking lot was full, mainly with pickups. Luke’s battered blue Ford Ranger was among them, on its back window a faded decal with EARTH FIRST printed beneath an upraised fist. I did not see my father’s truck, and that in itself said a lot about how sick he was. He was a man who’d want to have his say in this matter.