“Lady Mae!” Arbuckle called as they passed by him. “Lady Mae!”

The residents turned their bodies toward him, their disdain for him—for his father—second only to the butcher and her daughter.

“Don’t let them scare you. You say what happened, now, just like you done yesterday.”

The residents, who had been staring at Arbuckle as he spoke, now craned their heads toward Lady Mae, eager for her response. They stood silently and still as if the words that fell from her mouth would be revelatory and full of weight. But she did not speak. Instead, she broke from her mother and quickly went to him.

“Arbuckle, I, I—Ma. She said I had to.”

He nodded slowly, his eyes down toward his feet. “I don’t disagree.”

“You don’t?”

“Seems it won’t stop—them getting at you—unless you do.”

Lady Mae looked behind her. “You ain’t cross?”

“Cross? Why’d I be cross with you?”

“Just I know what you think and even my ma says you ain’t wrong and I—”

“Listen, Lady Mae,” Arbuckle said and put his hands gently underneath her elbows. “What you got is worse than anything that’ll happen to me. You’re right. I do think things. And I thought long and hard about this, too. Can’t figure another way. Them kids could’ve killed you.”

“But they didn’t.”

“Not this time,” he said quietly.

“You going in?”

Arbuckle tucked his bottom lip under his teeth and put his hands in his pocket. “I will if you want me to. Supposed to go to these things anyway, right?”

What Arbuckle was doing, and no doubt doing for her, was something she’d not ever have asked of him. But she knew him well enough, and so before turning and rejoining her mother, she held her hand to his chest. “Thank you,” she said, and turned to go.

“But Lady Mae,” he said. “They’s just kids.”

She nodded, but right underneath was her dreaming in the night of killing the children who accosted her one by one, taking first their fingers and then their toes and then chiseling away at their flesh little by little until it scattered and floated around her like ash. She did not know how to say that to Arbuckle who, though condemned himself, felt not anger nor wrath.

“I know,” she said.

Lady Mae and her mother walked down the long hall past the inquest chamber, the wash closet, the framed portraits of all four Deputies assigned to Settlement Five. There was silence and the sound of crying, a cough, and then nothing. Her mother stopped in front of another windowless door, above which was a sign that said Hearings and Sentencing. Her mother pushed the door open, and they stepped into the courtroom, already warm and thick with the heat of the day.

They were the first ones to arrive and took their seats on the north side of the room where the victims sat. The perpetrators, the assailants, and offenders, would be led to the south side. There were no bars or shackles, no locked cages to put them in; each resident knew the punishment for courtroom crimes.