Channing fixed me with an angry glare. “It was over before I knew it. Every time I wanted the senate nomination they had someone else. ‘It’s not your time yet,’ they’d say at the meetings. Took me a while to see it never would be my time. They were ashamed, damn them. I was just there when it needed doing and afterwards the bastards shunned me for it. Oh, they never said right out what it was, but you could feel it—they’d never warm to you. George left office and died. Hargrave was almost comical. He thought he’d be a hero, but when he tried to get backing for governor the party laughed in his face. It near to broke him; the vain stupid fool wouldn’t look you in the eyes. He even stopped bringing Lydia downtown, so for a while I hardly saw her. Funny thing is it was all for nothing: everyone but him could see being governor was never in the cards. Two years later he died on the bench probating some farmer’s estate. They passed me right over, didn’t even ask if I wanted it. Just hung those two nigras like a millstone ’round my neck and walked away.

“Hargrave was dead and so I got stuck here paying for what they’d wanted and he’d wanted to give them: to hang those nigras.” He jabbed a finger at me, voice rising to an angry blast. “For a hundred years we were all about nigras—hell, we choked on ’em. Got stuck with the tub-thumping trash while quality men like Richard Russell couldn’t be President, all because of the nigra. My God, the sheer waste of that—it took someone like Nixon to make Sam Ervin respectable. Now we’ve got civil rights and air-conditioning and all the sudden we’re a fit place for Yankees to live in. That’s the biggest joke of all—not long before this goddamned trial a mob of white men in Detroit lynched a nigra for sticking a toe on their beach. And now there’s riots in Boston and Yankee companies flocking here like lemmings to get away from snow and nigras. But that’s fine: now we’ve got civil rights. And a hundred years of our best men paid for their hypocrisy.”

Channing glowered with dammed hatred. In one terrible moment, I understood: his Grangeville was a white man’s tragedy, with Channing its Richard Russell. “What about the McCarrolls?” I asked quietly.

“They were executed.”

“I meant the wife and boy.”

“Don’t know,” he snapped. “Never saw them again.”

“You mean you saw them during the trial?”

“Outside, maybe.”

“Ever look at them close?”

His stare lit on the glider next to me. “What does it matter?”

“I was wondering if there was something unusual about the little boy—a discoloration in one of his eyes.”