“I’ve made up my mind. If any of you try to keep those men from this church, I’ll leave with them.”

“They chose their way of life,” Caleb said. “So now they have to stick with their own kind.”

“Caleb, you’re the one making a choice here. Not those men.”

“What choice?”

“The choice to be mean-hearted.” He said, and clicked off the call.

He sat there for a long while as the rain changed over to a fine mist. All the little live things in the trees and grasses clicked and sang.

When Lydia came out he figured she was calling him into supper—he had smelled the chicken frying in the kitchen. “Caleb has called in all of the deacons,” she said. “To ask them to have a church vote on keeping you or not.”

“I hope they don’t,” he said. “I’m done.”

“You can’t just give up,” she said. “We don’t get to just sit down when we’re weary.”

He stood and went to the porch railing, looking out at the valley. She stayed behind him.

“I know you want to do what you think is the right thing,” she said. “But you have to do what’s right for us. For Justin, especially.”

A breeze rose up from the river.

“Everybody in this world has to make compromises,” she continued. “Every day of our lives—”

Asher watched the wind in the dark-green trees. Asher remembered Zelda telling him once that her Cherokee granny had always said God lived in the trees, way up in the top branches.

Lydia swept the porch now, her eyes intent on her work. He watched her move along the floorboards with the straw broom. Her arms were a golden-brown, as they always were in summertime. He had always liked to watch her work, especially outside: in the garden, around the yard. She knew how to can, how to raise plants and flowers. She could do anything she took the notion to learn. Ever since she was a young woman she had known exactly what she believed and if she had ever doubted it she had never articulated that to him. She had always believed that if she worked and prayed everything else would fall into place. He wished he could be more like that and not always full of all these questions.

And he wished he could tell her about the postcards, but she had been glad when Luke disappeared. She had never said as much, but he knew just the same.