“I’m sorry this is happening, but each time Leroy sees us, he re-examines his parents’ death. We were all together when the news came. Leroy’s convinced his father sent him to Mountain Trust in order to protect him. Sometimes he thinks he was sent away because his father could feel something about the danger they were in. But he knows better.”

Towbin flashed on the twenty-eight of them, the colored kids. The Experiment in International Living, they’d called themselves. Twenty-eight out of nine hundred. And they were supposed to be in heaven, lolling about New England with the blue-bloods. Mountain Trust was never the same after them. Them, the Other. Who wore their ties under their turtlenecks, so the mentors would have to touch their varied skins. Them, in tennis shoes at chapel. Them, demanding invitations to public schools for socials so they would meet some folks who’d been colored all their lives and didn’t have to talk about “how does it feel?” Mahlon, Leroy, and Towbin guarding their table in the dining hall, lest some good Samaritan white kid sat down wanting to expand his or her cultural horizons. Black kids living in a socialist dream world that cost upwards of $4,000.00 a year. All of them raised a ruckus when they learned they had to work in potato fields and tend animals, even though they were on scholarship, everybody except Leroy and some of the Africans. Even so, what the fuck did they have to milk cows for, or paint barns. Towbin recalled saying, “Sheeeit, muthafuckah, I’ll go to town and get you some goddamn milk.” That was before the solitude seduced them, and let them have the right to struggle with the land. Thoughts they had no rights to be anywhere they chose, blew away with the coming of winter, until that day the telegram about Leroy’s folks had arrived.

“Towbin,” Leroy called out, “stop whispering to Cypress.”

“We weren’t whispering, man, I was giving her background information.”

“Oh, my background. I come from a long line of civil rights activist doctors and preachers, who have always managed to get killed at home, never while fighting for their country . . .”

Towbin could stand no more, and with all his authority ended Leroy’s flippant histrionics. Cypress wanted to hug Leroy up close to her; rub away the mean lines that had grown across his forehead. He looked toward her, like she might leave him too, the way his parents did—without a word, in the middle of the night. She smiled to let him know that he was still the most perfectly perverse man she knew; the man she loved.