“But don’t you think,” I said, emboldened by his compliment, “don’t you think moving off the grid means you can’t have a real effect on the ruling class, on politics, on the workers?” That was something Isaac would have said. That was how he defended his decision to stay in Durham, to stay in the system, change it from within. I followed Dice up onto the porch.

Dice didn’t ask me what effect I’d had recently on the ruling class and politics and workers. This was a kindness. He nodded. “Marx said he didn’t want to write recipes for the cookshops of the future. The people will find their own best way. We found ours.”

We walked through the bedrooms to his door. I remembered how Isaac used to reassure me, when we worried we weren’t doing enough good. “My friend used to say that even a hypocrite could be an agent of change,” I said. I thought he’d nod again. Instead he rounded on me. His low brow had lowered farther and his eyes were shadowed.

“Who said that?”

“Someone I know in Durham.” My heart was pounding.

“A fool,” he said.

Dice unlocked his room, which smelled, unlike the rest of the farm, soapy and piney. A loud cat with too many toes sat in the middle of his floor, and he picked it up tenderly. “And after all these years,” he said, his tone turned kind and gentle again, “the developer company, Delta, is closing in on us, and we’re not going to let them take our land. You’ll see.”

His room was furnished with a pink velvet love seat, a bookshelf topped with a row of needle-sized bones. He showed me his bathroom. A stove with blue and white tiles occupied much of the space. The tiles showed fish becoming horses, and trading ships with all their sails.

He sloshed a vat of water from the stove into the tub. The steam was so thick it was almost a froth. He poured in a cap of lavender oil, distilled in pits, he said, a light oil sparkling in the water. “Few people know it’s a tonic, not a relaxant,” he said. He lifted my wrist, his touch shocked me, I laughed. He was looking at my splinter.

“Do you have tweezers?” I said awkwardly, not quite willing to take my hand away from him. That was how my mother took care of splinters.

“Just let your hand infect a little, and the splinter will slide out on the pus. That’s what the infection is for,” he said.

He paused and looked at me. In the light, he reminded me of a mossed-over weatherworn statue in the cemetery. It was hard to look at him—he was too attentive. “You can take a bath if you want,” he said. “Hot baths are a rarity around here.”