“Ain’t nothing you could do anyhow,” she said to Arbuckle.

“Ain’t nothing I could do? I would’ve tried to get you,” he said.

“To get me? And then what?” She looked up at him from where she sat, watched as his own eyes worked the room for the answer he did not have.

“I don’t know. We could’ve left—we could’ve—”

“You know I can’t leave. Not now, anyway.”

As she said it—the thing she had known but had never said aloud, that her mother and grandmother had known but had never spoke of—she bit her lip and crossed her arms over her chest.

“I know,” Arbuckle said. “I know. But this here, what we saw out there? That’s different. What’s to say that ain’t someday you or me up there on the scaffold?”

“That ain’t going to be you or me.”

“How you figure?” he asked.

“’Cause you ain’t going to say nothing. No more questions, Arbuckle. No more what-ifs like you used to talk about. It just ain’t safe no more.”

“Weren’t never safe,” he replied softly.

In her mouth was the taste of it was him and what can we, but she worried that Arbuckle would stagger, bewildered and unforgiving, out the door. He might lay his hands on the first Deputy he saw, and then what? He’d be torn apart just like the man on the scaffold, and she’d be forced to watch the last thing on earth she had rise white and hot up into the sky.

What if he goes too, Mama?

We all go sometime, my girl.

Arbuckle let out a long sigh, and she turned to see him put his hand on her great-grandmother’s quilt, which hung on the back of the sofa. It was a small gesture, but Lady Mae knew he was thinking of when he had found her standing in the middle of the living room screaming nearly six years before. She didn’t remember—didn’t still to that day—but Arbuckle had told her the rest. From his own shack, he’d seen her mother running down the crescent road, the Deputies following not far behind. He had snuck out of a window and crept along the asters on the settlement’s edge until he got to Lady Mae’s lot. He inched his way toward the back door and peered through the cracks in the wood. There was shouting. Chains on wood. The high peal of laughter. A thump. Lady Mae’s tiny voice growing into a stone gull’s song. Arbuckle had waited in the dark until the Deputies were gone and went around to the front of Lady Mae’s shack. The door was open, and from where he stood, he could see her mother’s feet splayed apart, boots on. He knew before he crossed the threshold that she was dead. And when he entered the shack and saw Lady Mae still but for her mouth that opened and closed with each deep breath, he thought only to cover her, to wrap her up and lift her to her feet. This is what he told her.