“He was a child. Just a child. Six years old. When I tied the tourniquet, I had to wrap it four times around.”

Lady Mae stood in the space between the living room and kitchen. She could not figure what her mother was saying, not exactly. But her mother’s voice had trembled, and there even in the falling light of the day, her mother’s sorrowful shoulders sagged and shook, her body engulfed in sadness.

“What’d he done?”

“Don’t know. I just read the statement.”

“Didn’t it say nothing? Didn’t it give an explanation?”

She wanted badly for her mother to say the boy deserved it; that he had murdered or destroyed or tormented. Instead, all her mother said was, “It don’t work like that. Statement just gives directives, that’s all.”

“And what were they?”

“Four atonements.”

“For a child?”

“Don’t matter big or small.”

“What’d he chose?”

Her mother didn’t reply right away. Instead she leaned toward the window, quickly looked out, her eyes scanning the road and then the room before turning back to Lady Mae. She kept her hand on the latch.

“I couldn’t do it.”

“What do you mean you couldn’t do it?”

“I couldn’t do it. Didn’t do it. Sent him home, packed up my things, and came back here.”

They spoke back and forth in the dark now. Just the other day they had talked about her inheritance, but Lady Mae had not asked what would happen if the resident committing the crime was the butcher. It had occurred to her, though, and she had often wondered in the thick, black night if she could just say no. But she never broached the subject as doing so would tell her mother all she needed to know. Lady Mae didn’t want to add to her mother’s worry that she carried inside, and so she said nothing. She had kept it hidden and secret all this time, a burning, torturous question to which her mother held the answer. Now, in the living room, Lady Mae held her great-grandmother’s quilt in her arms and finally understood. You said we all got to obey, Mama.

Lady Mae rubbed her fingertip against her thumb, pressing the nail into the skin to keep the fear that she first felt in her feet from creeping up her legs into her heart. “Mama?”

Her mother bent her head toward the window once again. Lady Mae approached her, finding solace in her mother’s physical presence. Arbuckle was right: her mother would protect her from whatever she was waiting for. She looked past her mother’s head out the window, toward the empty road and the fog that lay high enough to see where it started, a divide suspended just above the ground.

“Mama, what’s going to happen?”

Her mother stepped away from the door and took the quilt from her daughter’s hands. She folded it and draped it across the back of the sofa. Then she turned and embraced her daughter before pulling away and holding her hands to Lady Mae’s hot cheeks. “Listen to what I say exactly, and please do not fear.”