So he went to sleep in the cellar and woke up with a crick in his neck and the smells of long-dead dog and too-recent cigar in his nostrils. Right off, he heard raised voices coming from upstairs. Feminine voices. Luther’d grown up with his mother and one older sister, both of whom had passed on from the fever in ’14, and when he allowed himself to think of them it hurt enough to stop his breath because they’d been proud, strong women of loud laughter who’d loved him fiercely.

But those two women had fought just as fierce. Nothing in the whole world, in Luther’s estimation, was worth entering a room where two women had their claws out.

He crept up the stairs, though, so he could hear the words better and what he heard made him want to trade places with the Hollaway dog.

“I’m just feeling under the weather, Auntie.”

“Don’t you lie to me, girl. Don’t you lie! I know morning sickness when I see it. How long?”

“I’m not pregnant.”

“Lila, you my baby sister’s child, yes. My goddaughter, yes. But, girl, I will strap the black straight offa your body from head to toe if you lie to me again. You hear?”

Luther heard Lila break out in a fresh run of sobbing, and it shamed him to picture her.

Marta shrieked, “James!” and Luther heard the large man’s footfalls coming toward the kitchen, and he wondered if the man had grabbed his shotgun for the occasion.

“Git that boy up here.”

Luther opened the door before James could and Marta’s eyes were flashing all over him before he crossed the threshold.

“Well, lookit himself. Mr. Big Man. I done told you we are churchgoers here, did I not, Mr. Big Man?”

Luther thought it best not to say a word.

“Christians is what we are. And we don’t abide no sinning under this here roof. Ain’t that right, James?”

“Amen,” James said, and Luther noticed the Bible in his hand and it scared him a lot more than the shotgun he’d pictured.

“You get this poor, innocent girl impregnated and then you expect to what? I’m talking to you, boy? What?”

Luther tilted a cautious eye down at the little woman, saw a fury in her looked about to take a bite out of him.

“Well, we hadn’t really—”

“You ‘hadn’t really,’ my left foot.” And Marta stomped that left foot of hers into the kitchen floor. “You think for one pretty second that any respectable people are going to rent you a house in Greenwood, you are mistaken. And you won’t be staying under my roof one second longer. No, sir. You think you can get my only niece in the family way and then go off galavanting as you please? I am here to tell you that that will not be happening here today.”

He caught Lila looking at him through a stream of tears.

She said, “What’re we going to do, Luther?”