I’d loved traveling with Isaac. We’d driven to Bynum to see the wooden giraffes with silk-flower eyes and to Lucama to see the fifty-foot whirligigs. Isaac always forgot to toggle the switch from vegetable oil to diesel when he turned off his car, but you couldn’t get the car started on vegetable oil, so one of us would have to open the car lid and suck on the fuel line to the engine until the taste of vegetable oil gave way to the taste of diesel fuel—really, more of a feel, a scalding evaporation. The insides of our cheeks bruised black.

I was quiet, next to Bay. I was overflowing with questions about the Ash Family but too nervous to ask the wrong thing. Finally, I introduced myself. “No way are you a Beryl,” he said. In his voice it sounded like Burl. “I will never call you that.”

“What will you call me, then?” I said.

He looked over at me and tilted his head. “Dice will decide,” he said. “You’ll have to show yourself to us somehow. For me, Dice said I was a bay, like a harbor.”

“What’s your real name?” I said.

“I forget,” he said.

* * *

At last, Bay pulled up to a mountain cabin, a rich-family one, with red shingles and white-frosting eaves, a redwood deck and large windows facing into the gloomy Smokies.

“What is this?” I said.

“The free store,” he said. “We need coats.”

He parked the car, and we walked to the door. I raised my hand to the doorbell, but he shoved me aside.

He took a plastic card to the lock and opened the door into a dark, glossy foyer, exhaling heat.

“Are we stealing?” I was breathless from the shove. He’s a farmer, I reminded myself, a shepherd.

He said, “No one’s been here in months.”

“I saw lights on.”

“That’s just automatic.”

“To keep people from stealing,” I said.

“Listen,” he said. “If you want to fall down the hole of believing in property, in a sense, you’re stealing from me. Because I’m taking care of you.”

“You wanted company, you said.”

“Did I?” He smiled. “Do you think society is unequal?” He peered down the hallway and shifted his head like a snake. “Would you go to a rally?”

“Yeah.”

“Would you break a big-box window?”

“Yeah.”

“Would you shoot an oilman?”

“No,” I said. I wasn’t violent. I didn’t even eat animals; Isaac had taught me to be a vegetarian. Isaac used to say, It’s easy to be an activist when you’re heartbroken. He was talking about the people who smashed windows, whom he did not respect. It’s easy to imagine that rage against one person and rage against society are in sync. I didn’t know how to explain this to Bay. “Think about the oilman’s family,” I said at last.