“We’re talking. He stops to puff a cigarette kind of nervous like he does, not really pulling the smoke down, and still watching the bush. He’s gotten old around the eyes. Scouting’s hard, and he’s got two months of hard waiting. I try getting him off it. ‘What you gonna do back in the world?’ I ask. He puffs and thinks. ‘Gonna move things,’ he says. ‘Get me a truck and move the man’s shit all over the country.’ He’s almost smiling. Then his face just disappears. Don’t even hear the whine.”

Lee’s fingers gripped the wooden bench until veins raised in the back of his hands. “I brought the rest of him back and put him in a green bag. He was nothin’ but a lump of canvas. I lit one of his cigarettes and sat next to it. Looking at the bag I didn’t see Curtis no more. I see my daddy, hammering at the forge. ‘You gonna grow up strong as me,’ he says. ‘Better start workin’ now.’ Then he gives me a hammer he’s made, just like his only smaller. I take it in my hand. And then Hargrave walks that dark-haired girl by our door like she was a princess, nodding and smiling.

“I remember what my daddy promised Hargrave and then I understood, sitting there next to Curtis. It didn’t matter who killed Daddy. Daddy hadn’t raped that girl; they’d killed him for being black. Like Curtis. The V.C. didn’t kill him, they just finished him off. It was the white man put him there—for being poor and black. When I’d finished his cigarette I knew I was going to find that woman and kill her like I’d known about Hargrave. For bein’ his daughter, and for bein’ white.”

I flashed on Lee squatted by the body bag, a blasted-out life staring at a trail of devastation and wasted time. He spoke with an inexorable, pounding anger. “I thought about it, long and hard until I got out. After that it took time to find where she was. But when I walked up that long driveway, I thought, Isn’t this fine. Forty years no one paid for my daddy and she’s been living here like it never happened. I knock on the door and that stuck-up maid answers and looks at me like I was trash. I had to beg and shuffle on the front steps to get the white lady even come to the door.