After an hour or so I passed a blue sweep of lakes nestled in low piny hills and speckled with rowboats and a few shirtless men standing hip-deep with flyrods. Then bait shops began, then gas stations, a small sign marking the turn for Grangeville, two miles of bare asphalt, and I was there.

Past a few stores and a Church of Christ whose sign promised that “Blessed Are the Optimists,” the road stopped at the town square. It was surrounded by quaint stores and packed with shoppers strolling among side-walk stands. At its center was a green rolling lawn shaded by oak trees. From their midst the bell tower of the county courthouse rose to a painted gold spire, gleaming in the sun as it had when the black woman and small boy had stood outside, waiting.

I parked and began walking toward a corner phone booth at the end of the crowded sidewalk, weaving among stands and people there from long tradition: Grangeville Trading Day, held for eighty years the first Thursday of the month. Parents and children ambled among handmade quilts and factory-made junk while vendors watched with studied indifference. A sidewalk fiddler in wire-rimmed glasses sawed vigorously and on the grass boys chased a small black dog past shade trees where men sat whittling with keen-edged knives. Their seamed faces spoke of lives spent in harsh sun and the older ones were strikingly the same: sharp chins and noses, spectral eyes, flat cheekbones with cheeks so gaunt they were like grooves. They talked and whittled with utter lassitude, like the fallout from a hundred years of inbreeding.

I got to the phone booth and went through the directory. Then I approached one of the old men, whittling in overalls, wood shavings curled at his feet. “Help me find something?” I asked.

He spat a brown stream of tobacco juice and looked up with a surprising smile that lacked several teeth. “Might could.” The words were guttural and half-swallowed. “What you looking for?”

“Montgomery Street. Luther Channing’s place.”

His smile inverted. “That’d be the old Hargrave place,” he said flatly.

“How do I get there?”

He looked me up and down, then pointed. “Take Main and turn left at the third street. Big, shadowy white house on the right. Only one like it.”

“Thanks.”

He spat and looked away. I went to the car.