This what you’re saying, Mama.

Let it rise inside of you, my girl.

“Everybody’s got something to say,” said Deputy Iverson. The notebook he was writing in dropped to the ground. When he bent to pick it up, Lady Mae watched him straddle the earth, his engorged stomach down to his knees. The wind lifted the pages of the notebook, and they flapped against one another. As he hunched further down he lost his balance and pitched forward too far. He stuck both arms out to break his fall, but it was too late, and he toppled over into the dust.

Lady Mae watched him scramble on the ground, lunging after the notebook and pencil, and she switched the water pail to her other hand. She gripped the handle, pressing the metal into her flesh until she felt a pinch. “Well, I ain’t the one you should be talking to.”

But as she spoke the words, which sounded far away from her own ears, she saw closely then his hideous figure, his body bent and twisted, as she did that night so long ago when she had still been a child. Her breath caught, and the wind lifted the hair from her neck. The pages of the notebook waved once again before Deputy Iverson grasped it with his other hand and stood upright. He looked at her directly with a pencil in his hand. His knife hung at his side. She knew she could get to it first, get it before he even knew what was happening. Her fingers gripped the pail harder, trying to cut open her skin with the rusty, bent metal.

“But you is the one I’m talking to,” he said.

Lady Mae saw for a moment the nothingness high up on the mountain of which Arbuckle had spoken. She was far enough away from the square that she could get to at least the edge of the settlement before anyone came for her. They’d unleash the dogs, but the river would break her trail. They’d still go up into the hills looking for her, but she’d have had a good start. The pail felt heavy in her hand—if she swung it just right she could split his head open. She gripped the handle tighter, the metal pressing into the creases behind her knuckles, and moved her wrist just enough for the pail to move. Lady Mae’s toes reached out over the edge of the top step, and there she teetered but a stone’s throw from Deputy Iverson. He was writing in his notebook and did not look up at her. Lady Mae slowly and carefully descended one step.

“Lady Mae?”

Her name. The name her mother had given her. The name that had leaped from her mother’s lips two times before there was nothing but the loud breathing of the Deputies who circled around her lifeless body. The cicadas had just emerged, and Lady Mae noticed them only after the first blow. She saw her mother try to lift her head and her lips moving, but she heard only the insects, which after so many years deep in the dirt finally woke. And as she remembered her mother as she lay silent on the wooden floor, she heard again the low drone that rose and fell from the trees. Their song had lifted up into the night sky, and even nearly six years later she could not picture her mother without hearing the insects, too. She heard them then as she stood on the second step as if they surrounded her still. The handle of the metal pail creaked as the wind blew, and her skirts snapped.