“Well, what?” I asked him. We were seated scattered all around him and somebody touched his shoulder, and he was smiling but with eyes running water. I had hoped that the disease would spare him possible blindness. I’d read everything on the subject. I knew that—for Tad—Blindness would be just one zoning district shy of Death. The smell, that close to the dirt in March, spoke about our many chances at finally thawing out; and with spring rushing in from the inlet and up from underground, we waited there. We sat in the sad smoky smell of the beautiful crumbling house.

“About 6:07 yesterday,” Tad said, “I saw the girls who buried this,” he looked from face to trusted face. We glanced at one another. Faux-casual. First it seemed he meant that some local children had dug this box up and then maybe they’d reburied it, maybe he had caught them. But the dirt he’d been hacking at was good packed red clay, weather-baked nearly bricklike on the surface and, it seemed, unbroken for centuries. Reverend Sapp now scurried back with martinis sloshing in a red thermos lid. He had brought one of the leaded crystal tumblers we unregenerate drinkers travel with (a bit ostentatiously) and that we sometimes broke. Rev. Sapp said, “What?” like some kid who hates missing something by going for refreshments and is bitter at seeing how just that has happened. We shook our heads to show we didn’t know, not yet.

Tad downed his drink all at once and choked, then laughed at doing so, which helped. He said for the record that he had been stooping, right over there, not four feet off, at the corner of the portico the afternoon before. It had been exactly this time of day, with light reflected from the Sound moving curved lines across the brick, much as it did now. Tad said he had been cleaning out some of the giant honeysuckle that’d claimed the lattice lathing under the broad front porch. There was a clump of mint (for juleps), and he was doing battle with honeysuckle vines in hopes of saving the mint, “which I admit has held its own since 1810 but it’s never too late to give a thing a break finally, right?” He said he heard a chiming knock, like some shovel striking the chimney, just three times.