“This,” he said.

* * *

The day broke hot and unrelenting and already the earth was scorched when Lady Mae and Arbuckle set off for the courthouse. They walked from her shack in the same broken, comfortable silence that had accompanied them at breakfast. She had taken his hand as she descended from her porch and did not let go on their walk to town. She spoke with him about the weather, about the empty shacks they passed, about the birds crying overhead. She spoke around and around her love for him, too afraid of its fragility and consequence to say anything directly.

As they rounded the curve of the crescent road, Lady Mae saw in the distance a crowd gathered at the bottom of the courthouse steps. From where she was, it seemed small, maybe ten residents at most, but large enough that Lady Mae gripped Arbuckle’s hand tighter and slowed her gait. He followed the direction of her gaze and said quickly, “Don’t worry about nothing.” He squeezed her hand three times. “They won’t do nothing to you.”

The residents’ eyes were on the two of them, all grown up yet childlike still. Lady Mae straightened her back to steel herself against the words that she knew would erupt as they crept closer to the crowd. Her mother would’ve told her to keep her head up, that the residents don’t know nothing about anything. And on the nights when her mother had held her young daughter’s cold feet in her warm hands, she would say your grandmother and hers and me and you and the law’s got to count for something. So although Lady Mae was afraid of the residents in front of the courthouse and could taste the sick in the back of her throat, she grasped Arbuckle’s arm and walked ahead.

There were men and women both, and from behind the legs of one a young boy appeared—maybe he was ten or twelve, but a child nonetheless. They made no sound; the birds above called out, and the boy looked up. The residents stood chain-like and unmoving, their arms entwined. But once Lady Mae was near enough to the crowd their stillness ceased. They began moving slowly, twisting and bending their bodies up and down, their shoes scuffling in the dust. Taken by their slow and purposeful dance, she did not hear Arbuckle calling to her, did not feel him tugging at her sleeve. She was mesmerized by the motions, which at first she did not understand, not until her eyes focused in on one man’s hand raised high in the air. He had spread his fingers wide enough that Lady Mae could clearly see three were missing. Her eyes darted to the woman to his left who had lifted her skirt to her knee to expose empty space where a leg should have been. Behind her was another woman whose only foot stuck out from underneath her dress.

One by one, they revealed to Lady Mae the pieces of themselves that they’d lost, the parts that she or her mother or grandmother or great-grandmother had taken from them by law and without hesitation. She knew all of them—some better than others—but it didn’t matter if she’d been gentle with a knife or the bone cutter. They hated her and their hatred burned under her skin. Arbuckle tried to pull her away but she resisted, planting her feet in the road and wriggling her hand out of his. She watched the group that stood frozen once again in silence, their clothes undone and their shoes off and their hats cast aside. On their bodies, they had written the words vile and pig and thief in coal dust, the black of which had already smeared in the sticky heat.