The family returned that afternoon. The bus arrived, then the truck, then Bay’s car, and Queen made me help her fill up the largest cauldron with water to boil. The family came out, dirty, gaunt, and terribly quiet. They removed their clothes, standing on their toes on the dead grass. They wore underwear or undershirts or nothing at all under the subdued half-light of the afternoon. They were like a conquered army. Dice tested the water, then the family washed, with buckets and dippers, in water slippery with cow-fat soap.

Bay walked toward us. I looked at his scars, like countless shining splinters. My heart lurched remembering he’d kissed me.

“What happened?” I said.

“Wait for Dice to say,” he said.

* * *

We ate salami and bananas and grits for dinner. Dice ate nothing. Afterward we pulled the chairs in a circle in the meeting room. A circle of chairs meant a story; a square of chairs meant singing.

“I want to talk about failure,” Dice said. “You might think we failed, but I’m not so sure.” He spoke very quietly. “Once I saw a corpse in the desert and it was only dry bones but it lay atop a patch of flowers.” In school, we always avoided looking at the teacher. But here, our attention made Dice a radiating star.

“There aren’t many wild places left in these mountains,” Dice said. “Look for the clean trunks. To the missionaries who first scouted the Blue Ridge,” he said, “these trees were a hundred feet tall. Four hundred years ago North Carolina was wild grapes as far as the eye could see, sugaring a horse’s legs to the knee, and you could catch a passenger pigeon for dinner just by swinging a heavy pan through the air.” The family hummed and sighed together. “Remember what you’re struggling for,” Dice said. “We’ll find the ennobling conflicts that will convey us to a better world.”

Out of the thousands expected, Dice said, less than a hundred showed. The first day no media came either. So for the eighty or so present, there was extra pressure to fast and stay, and so many disappeared in hunger and frustration till it was only the twenty of the family left. The next night they unchained their arms because no one cared one way or the other. “But is this failure?” Dice said.

And then when the journalist arrived, Dice said, he didn’t have his cameraman. “Is this failure?” Dice said again.

The mountaintop was going to fly off today. He said, “By what standards did we fail? I believe a protest can have five goals. You can have a protest to disrupt a harmful thing.” He spoke soberly, as though he was not trying to get anyone excited.

“Yes,” we said.

“Or have a protest to get the message to media.”

“Yes!” we shouted.

“Or have a protest to show your enemies that you exist.”