“He ain’t going to do nothing to you. I won’t—”

“You won’t what? Ain’t nothing you can do.”

Arbuckle held out his hand to Lady Mae, but she did not take it. To take it would be to say they want your hide too and everything I touch just goes up in flames.

“Look at me,” Arbuckle said. “You ain’t do nothing that you didn’t have to.”

“Says you who ain’t gone and done nothing to nobody.”

“Yet,” he said. “And you didn’t—”

“I could’ve tried,” she said. “Could’ve made them see what my mama said.”

“And what was that?”

Arbuckle sat down on the sofa next to Lady Mae, but he did not move to touch her. Instead, he leaned forward onto his thighs and dropped his head.

“Forgiveness. She said it was the answer. That without it there weren’t much point to anything.”

“It’s true,” he said.

“It ain’t that easy.”

“I know it.”

“And they ain’t ever going to forgive me.”

“You might be surprised,” he said softly. “What people can do when they put their mind to it.”

She looked around the living room of her shack. Her eyes danced from the iron stove to Arbuckle’s cot to the darkened spot on the floor that was still visible no matter how many times Lady Mae tried to get rid of it. She leaned back against her great-grandmother’s quilt. Arbuckle sat up straight and slipped his fingers between hers and together they fell silent. The windowpanes rattled quietly. Lady Mae half expected the Deputies to come to her door, as if they somehow knew of their plans. She pulled back the curtain and peeked out. There was nothing there.

“I want to go.” Lady Mae spoke quietly but with certainty. Deep down it glimmered, the thing from the dust, from the square.

“You sure now?” he asked.

“Sure as I’ve been about something near I remember.”

“It ain’t going to be easy,” he said.

“No such thing as easy, anyways.”

“All them years I sent you books,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to convince you—didn’t mean to press you or nothing like that.”

“You ain’t the only one thinking this whole time,” she replied.

“Then you tell me. What are you thinking?”

“The way I figure is them Deputies? They ain’t ever going to leave us be. My mama, your pa—might as well be you and me. Might well be, too.”

Arbuckle put his arm around Lady Mae’s small shoulders. “I ain’t ever going to let anything happen to you,” Arbuckle said.

“So we go up there.” Lady Mae said it with a rushing clarity as if, should she speak too slowly, the hills might crumble before they could reach them.

“We go up there,” he said. “And we’ll stay on the move. Over the ridge, down into the other valley. Like I said, I got it figured—know them mountains like the back of my hand.”

She thought then of the Deputy—Deputy Iverson, of his shining eyes and high-pealed screams and the stick he used to crush her mother’s skull. He was there, in the settlement. He breathed the same air and walked the same dust. She had waited over five years to see him again, and now that she had, she wanted to run out of her shack and down the crescent road and bang on the residents’ doors. She wanted to yell what she’d discovered, how the Deputies were wrong about nearly everything. But the residents already knew, didn’t they?