“Go ahead!” cackled the old man gleefully. “Go ahead! Go right on ahead and hit an eighty-year-old man—that’s about all you’re able to do, with your big college education! Huh! Listen, you just listen: We got us somebody in town with a little piss-and-vinegar now. We got somebody that knows it ain’t right for black coons to mix with our white children, and that somebody’s gonna stop it, you watch. He ain’t gonna sit around, just sit around, writing little words on paper and all that bullshit.”

“Be quiet, will you!”

Gramp stamped his foot. “You’re for this thing, Tom McDaniel, that’s what the hell what. Go on, why don’t you admit it—ain’t you?”

“No!” Tom said angrily. “You know as well as I do that I fought it right from the beginning. While you were boozing it up at Rusty’s, I was in Farragut, talking—oh, what’s the use?”

“Sure, that’s right, what’s the use? Talking. The fella on the phone, he said that the time for that was over and done. Words ain’t gonna do no good now.”

“Then what will?”

“Action!” the old man squawked.

His face took on an inner brightness.

“Action,” he said again; and Tom knew that he was returning to other years. Whether they had existed, whether David Parkinson had ever been a young man with firm flesh, that was something else.

He was flickering over the past now, the mighty past, when he’d been a Dragon in the Klan, when he’d ridden black horses and set fires and issued orders in a loud voice.

The mighty past.

“Got to do something . . .”

Tom disliked being in the same room with Gramp—Gramp with his snuff, his chewing tobacco, his cheap cigars and vile language. Many times Tom wondered how Ruth had turned out to be so quiet, so ladylike, so different— But he supposed that the old man was not all bad. He would perform sudden acts of generosity, usually at the tag end of a tantrum, and these would always have a certain flair. Like the time he went out and spent his month’s pension check on the coat at Bennett’s that Ella had been admiring for such a long time. No—not all bad.

“All right,” Tom said, after a full minute. “All right. Let’s not argue.”

“Who’s arguing?”

“You are.”

“Sure, always me, never you. Ruth, get my medicine—it’s on the top shelf. Your goddamn husband is doing his best to give me a heart attact.”

Ruth McDaniel sighed, hesitated, as if trying to find exactly the right set of words that would shut her father up; then she went out of the room and came back with a small bottle.