By the end of the day, she was praying. Lying against Luther’s chest under an oak tree a hundred yards upriver from the party with the Big Walnut dark and sparkling in front of them, she told the Lord that she feared she could love this man too much one day. Even if she were struck blind in her sleep, she would know him in a crowd by his voice, by his smell, by the way air parted around him. She knew his heart was wild and thumping, but his soul was gentle. As he ran his thumb along the inside of her arm, she asked the Lord to forgive her for all she was about to do. Because for this wild, gentle man, she was fit to do whatever would keep him burning inside of her.

So the Lord, in His provenance, forgave her or condemned her, she could never be sure, because He gave her Luther Laurence. He gave him to her, in the first year of their knowing each other, about twice a month. And the rest of the time, she worked at the Buchanan house and Luther worked at the munitions factory and ran through life as if he were being clocked at it.

Oh, he was wild. Yet, unlike so many men, wildness wasn’t a choice for Luther, and he meant no harm by it. He’d have corrected it if you could have explained to him what it was. But that was like explaining stone to water, sand to air. Luther worked at the factory and when he wasn’t working he was playing ball and when he wasn’t playing ball he was fixing something and when he wasn’t fixing something he was running with his boys through the Columbus night and when he wasn’t doing that he was with Lila, and she had the full force of his attention because whatever Luther focused on, he focused on it to the exclusion of all else, so that when it was Lila he was charming, he was making laugh, he was pouring his full self at, she felt that nothing, not even the warmth of the Lord, projected such light.

Then Jefferson Reese gave him the beating that put him in the hospital for a week and took something from him. You couldn’t right say exactly what that something was, but you noticed the lack of it. Lila hated to picture what her man must have looked like curled in the dirt trying to protect himself while Reese pounded him and kicked him and unloosed all his long-bottled savagery. She’d tried to warn Luther off Reese, but Luther hadn’t listened because some part of him needed to buck against things. What he’d found out, lying in the dirt while those fists and feet rained down on him, was that if you bucked certain things—the mean things—they didn’t just buck back. No, no, that wasn’t enough. They crushed you and kept crushing and the only way you escaped alive was through pure luck, nothing else. The mean things of this world had only one lesson—we are meaner than you’d ever imagine.