Or was he simply acting out some sort of adolescent angst with his parents and it wasn’t about me at all? And for that matter, why wasn’t that boy in school instead of traveling with a carnival?

“Not your problem,” said the pragmatist who lives in my I lead and tries to keep me from messing with things that aren’t my business.

From the other side of my head came the preacher who tries to keep me from acting only in my own self-interest. “The Ameses are poor wayfaring strangers.”

“With plenty of friends to comfort them,” said the pragmatist.

But there had been something odd about Val Ames’s words: “We don’t need the help of any damn Knotts.” As if it weren’t just me he was angry at, but other members of my family, too.

Had some of my nieces or nephews insulted him since the carnival came to town? Or gone down to Widdington last month and caused trouble? None of my brothers’children are bad kids, but they aren’t Sunday school saints, either. Andrew’s son A.K. spent a couple of weekends in jail last summer for vandalism and Herman’s Reese has brawled his way into overnight lockups a time or two. Some of the others, including the girls, have collected DWIs and misdemeanor possession of marijuana before settling into respectability. And let’s not talk about the times I’ve danced with the devil myself.

Haywood’s Stevie has always stayed out of trouble, though. So why had he and Eric Holt sneaked away from the carnival without telling Dwight’s people that they’d played the Dozer?

I wasn’t crazy about any of the possible answers.

Maybe it was time to listen to the pragmatist for a change, or as Daddy’s housekeeper Maidie would say, “Don’t trouble trouble till trouble troubles you.”

Nevertheless, blood-smeared quarters troubled my dreams all night, only they were blue beneath the blood, not silver.

CHAPTER 4

SATURDAY MORNING

Saturday dawned hot and sunny. My calendar might say this was the last weekend in September, but nobody had told the thermometer that it was no longer summer. Cutoffs and sneakers had been fine last night; unfortunately, today’s obligations called for more formal wear.

A policeman’s lot is not an ‘appy one, according to Gilbert and Sullivan. The same might be said of a judge’s. Most of the time, we’re called upon to pass judgment on society’s offenders “who’d none of ‘em be missed.” But at least there’s dignity in the courtroom. So why are we always being asked to judge things outside the courtroom?

Which is to say that rather than catching up with laundry and all the household chores I tend to let slide during, the week, I was due to spend this Saturday morning judging the Some Yam Thing or Other contest at the harvest festival.

Sweet potatoes are a big money crop in Colleton County, and farm kids have always had fun with some of the oddities to be found when digging potatoes in the fall. I still remember one in which the root end was so forked that it looked like a man on tommy-walkers. If the contest had existed back then, I’d have painted that yam in a red, white, and blue Uncle Sam suit with a cotton beard and entered it. Today I could expect anything from yams shaped like cell phones to Elvis look-alikes. The only rule is that the base potato has to remain uncut. Contestants can augment, but they’re not allowed to carve.