Lady Mae looked up from the book. “I don’t see much hope coming. You and me, our lots,” she said quietly. “All of it’s written out for us—been so for a long time.”

“But maybe that’s the point.”

“I don’t follow,” Lady Mae said and went to turn the page.

“Maybe them Deputies are trying to keep us from hoping,” Arbuckle said, placing his hand on hers. “Maybe that’s why they came up with the inheritance to begin with.”

“Why’d they do that?”

“Well, what comes after hope?”

Lady Mae shrugged and pulled her hand out from underneath his. She was growing tired of the riddles, of always having to be the one to steer him straight again. He wouldn’t come right out and say it, not ever. When pressed to reason why, he’d said telling someone something weren’t the same as them getting there themselves.

“Let me say it this way: if you wanted something and thought it could be, wouldn’t you try to do it?”

“I suppose so.”

“And if all of us tried, who’d stop us?”

“Tried to what?”

“I don’t know. Do what we want, live how we choose. Forgive each other.”

“Them Deputies would never allow it. Anyone who tried would be up on the scaffold come Saturday.”

“But there’s only four of them. There’s hundreds of us.”

“What are you saying?”

Arbuckle brought his hand up to his head. He held his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. “I’m just saying maybe there’s something none of us have thought of yet.”

“Can’t reckon what that’d be.”

He fell quiet then. Lady Mae thought she had angered him, disappointed him in her inability to believe that what he was saying was possible. “Besides,” she said, “you know as well as I what happens when residents go and try something. When Settlement Three—”

“I ain’t talking about Settlement Three.”

“Well it’s something to think about, now ain’t it?” asked Lady Mae. She was suddenly angry at him—did he not remember how the only surviving man tore through the brush, naked and lashed, as they played behind her shack? How when he opened his mouth to speak, they saw that his tongue had been cut out? Mama, she had called, Mama! And her mother came running out of the shack, knife in hand, and approached the man. Lady Mae could not understand what the man said, but her mother, who leaned over him as he collapsed in the dust, nodded and placed a hand on his shoulder. She said something to him that Lady Mae did not catch, then told her young daughter to get inside, lock the door, and not come out until daybreak. But it had not rained, and though her mother had thrown the washwater into the dust, a dark red spot remained.

“It’s just,” he said. “It’s—I don’t know, Lady Mae. I guess just gets at me here, seeing you go through all this.” He brought his closed fist to his chest. “There’s got to be another way.”