Arbuckle wrung his hands together and then touched his fingertips to his temples. “I mean, my heavens, they were skinning him alive!”

“We don’t know what he’d gone and done.” She was trying to soothe Arbuckle, who had worked himself up good. What would come of her telling him it didn’t matter what the residents on the scaffold had done? Or that maybe, just maybe, they hadn’t done anything at all?

“If he had done something, wouldn’t you know it?”

“No.”

“But you’re the butcher.”

It was the first time he’d ever called her that. He said it softly, as if he didn’t want to remind her of what she was. He said it gently, as if the weight of his words might knock her down quickly and without strain. He’d named it, finally, eighteen years after they’d met in the dust, each ostracized for their lineage. She’d never mentioned how the residents feared he’d grow into a violent man like his father, and he never said anything about the fingers and toes she’d take. They had an unspoken bond, an implicit agreement between two children that did not have the right words.

“Don’t mean they tell me nothing,” she said.

“Well, they should. You got more sense than the lot of them.”

“I know it.”

Arbuckle turned his body toward Lady Mae and rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. He breathed in heavily through his nostrils, whistled the air out between his parted lips. If she told him about the Deputy, it’d be the last thing he heard anyone say. The blood would boil in his ears, the rage, all of it he would take with him as he ran into the square yelling. They’d hear him, and they’d come out, their fingers curling around the wood and metal they held in their hands.

“You okay?” Lady Mae reached up to Arbuckle’s face. It was scraped and bloody, but nothing seemed broken.

“Aye. Didn’t much like you diving in and trying to stop it. You could’ve been real hurt.”

“But I wasn’t,” she said.

“This time. I don’t want you doing nothing like that ever again. No matter what happens to me.”

“You ought to report it.”

Arbuckle didn’t say anything, but behind that silence was his belief in redemption and a justice that wasn’t just about punishment. He’d want to talk to Edmonds, understand why he’d lashed out. Was it just that Arbuckle was there? Or had the old man seen him and taken to him as he should have done his father?

“Maybe if I just talked to one of the Deputies—I’m sure they saw it. I could just say what he’d done and that there ain’t no need for further involvement.”

She felt the ends of the ball inside her tighten, little tendril-like fingers poking at her guts. There was her mother and there was the Deputy and there was her kit and there was the fall of night. When Arbuckle fell asleep that evening, she could slide out through the window, land quietly on her feet. She’d go back to the square, behind the scaffold, and up the courthouse steps. That Deputy was in there somewhere—that’s where they slept, somewhere in the belly of the jail, a room full of heaving bodies shrouded in darkness. She’d get to him, kneel by his bed with the needle to his heart.