Luke ran from the room, from the house, down to the willow-shadowy banks of the Cumberland, where Asher found him later, watching the river.

He remembered Luke’s whitish-blue eyes, the way a column of gnats had been churning above the Cumberland. The lush dark green of the trees, Luke’s clenched jaw, his refusal to cry. Up on the ridge a congregation of starlings arose in a great humming movement of blackness from the hickories, hundreds of birds becoming one undulating mass. A sign, he had thought back then. A wonder.

The second time their mother had used the word was when Luke told her the truth.

“It’s how I’m made,” Luke had said, his words even and calm, as if he were saying a blessing over supper.

Their mother had run into her room and returned with their dead father’s pistol. She’d pressed the barrel against Luke’s forehead and Asher had been frozen in place as a strange calm overtook Luke’s face.

“I’d rather see you dead than like this,” she said, her words cramped and close together like bad cursive. The pistol did not tremble in her hand. “Eat up with AIDS. An abomination. You’d be better off dead. You hear me?”

“I’m alive,” Luke had said, and there had been no malice in his voice, only a statement of fact. “I’m here.”

When she took the pistol away from his forehead a small red circle remained.

Luke stood before her, his eyes trained on hers.

“I was just trying to scare you,” she said. “Wasn’t even loaded.”

“You’re the one who’s scared,” he said, and then he left. That was the last time Luke had ever spoken to their mother and he was long gone and unreachable by the time she died. Asher hadn’t seen him in ten years.

He thought again of the two men, somewhere out there in the darkness, looking for a dry place to sleep. He could hardly stand the thought of it. He thought of Lydia, sleeping soundly back there in their bedroom, numbed by the church.

Asher took note of how silent the night stood. Usually by this time of summer there would be a symphony of crickets, katydids, tree frogs, perhaps even early cicadas. But there was nothing except the black night and a complete quiet.

He moved to a rocking chair and stayed there until the sky bloomed into dawn, a spell of stillness broken only when Lydia stepped out onto the porch.

“Couldn’t you sleep?” she asked, very quietly, and sat in one of the rockers.

He didn’t look at her. Across the Cumberland a jagged breath of mist was gliding along the ridge spine so he watched that instead. “I can’t do this anymore,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” There was a little laugh in her throat at the last word.