“I’m sorry it wasn’t more, Henry.”

“That was never meant,” he said gently. “Here, let me see you out.”

We walked through the silent house, past the dining room. Opening the door, he said, “I hope you know, Adam, how much I appreciate this.”

I placed a hand on his shoulder. “No need. God knows how many reasons I have to help.”

The cool clear look he gave me said he understood perfectly. “Don’t worry about Roland,” he said. “I’ll tell him myself.” We left it there.

I drove off, absorbing what I’d seen and heard. There was something inconsolable about Henry Cantwell that seemed to reach beyond Lydia to the core of his life and steep him in a terrible calm. I figured he had faced the worst, and told me everything.

I began thinking of Henry and Lydia and Jason until, suddenly, I wanted to talk with Kris Ann—of my own parents, of Cade and her, and how the flaws of one generation could run through the next like a bad inheritance, if you let them. But I found her sleeping amidst a black tangle of hair almost phosphorescent in the moonlight, the revolver lying next to her. I put it in the drawer, and gently closed it.

Downstairs, restless, I roamed the house until I saw the book I had borrowed, Grangeville: A Southern Tragedy, next to a chair in the sunroom. I picked it up and began turning its pages.

After a moment I sat. Four hours passed in smoking and reading by one dim lamp. I hardly noticed.

It was beautifully written. The author drew me into the warp and woof of the past: Grangeville in the thirties, a courthouse and some red brick buildings in north Alabama, its people embittered by the Depression and the loss of a railroad yard, scratching crops from red clay mostly rock and sand. The town’s eccentric Republican past, back through the Civil War. The irony that few blacks had ever lived there, just a handful.

One sweltering summer day in 1937, an old farmer with a shotgun had found one of them in his barn, mounting a white girl with her dress pulled up. A second black was there: the blacksmith, the first man’s brother. A man with a wife and son.

They were prodded with shotguns to the small jail, the first man saying he’d paid her three dollars and that his brother, the blacksmith, had come to warn that sleeping with a white girl was no good. The blacksmith swore to that, and it was known that other men had paid her. But the girl said she was raped. A mob gathered in front of the jail shouting for the blacks. Her white customers stopped talking, joining the frenzy of a town whose real enemies could not be punished.