So he was almost relieved when the door opened and Papa stood there, still buttoning his trousers and looking none too happy. “Is it safe for me to step out this door?” he asked coldly.

“Yup,” said Alvin Junior.

“What?”

“Yes sir.”

“Are you sure? There’s some wild animals around here that think it’s smart to leave their do on the ground outside privy doors. I tell you that if there’s any such animal I’ll lay a trap and catch it by the back end one of these nights. And when I find it in the morning, I’ll stitch up its bung hole and turn it loose to bloat up and die in the woods.”

“Sorry, Papa.”

Papa shook his head and started walking toward the house. “I don’t know what’s wrong with your bowel, boy. One minute you don’t need to go and the next minute you’re about to die.”

“Well if you’d just build another outhouse I’d be fine,” Al Junior muttered. Papa didn’t hear him, though, because Alvin didn’t actually say it till the privy door was closed and Papa’d gone back to the house, and even then he didn’t say it very loud.

Alvin rinsed his hands at the pump a long time, because he feared what was waiting for him back in the house. But then, alone outside in the darkness, he began to be afraid for another reason. Everybody said that a White man never could hear when a Red man was walking through the woods, and his big brothers got some fun out of telling Alvin that whenever he was alone outside, especially at night, there was Reds in the forest, watching him, playing with their flint-bladed tommy-hawks and itching to have his scalp. In broad daylight, Al didn’t believe them, but at night, his hands cold with the water, a chill ran through him, and he thought he even knew where the Red was standing. Just over his shoulder, back over near the pigsty, moving so quiet that the pigs didn’t even grunt and the dogs didn’t bark or nothing. And they’d find Al’s body, all hairless and bloody, and then it’d be too late. Bad as his sisters were—and they were bad—Al figured they’d be better than dying from a Red man’s flint in his head. He fair to flew from the pump to the house, and he didn’t look back to see if the Red was really there.