There was some truth to the thought, she believed. At the school, preparing for the fish fry, she had always heard stories of downtrodden men and women living such sorry lives they were a blight on the community and an abomination to God. Drunks and thieves and liars and wife beaters and whores and whore chasers. None of them worth the gunpowder it would take to send them to the gates of hell. And it wasn’t just the lowlife who earned the talk. Some were among the high and mighty, taking advantage of anybody they could just to line their pockets with dollar bills earned from the sweat of somebody else’s labor—bankers taking over land hard-worked by farmers needing credit, lawyers sending the sheriff for an old car one payment away from ownership, elected officials being bought on the sly by big business with an interest at stake in some law that had more twists and turns in it than a snake slithering through the woods.

The only people immune from the gossip of the ladies preparing for the fish fry were the ladies preparing for the fish fry.

It was one reason so many ladies volunteered, Eleanor believed.

The first person she saw when she parked her car near the school was Whitlow Mayfield.

He was nailing a sign to a utility pole.

The sign, hand-painted by Whitlow, read:

FISHING DAY, 1948
IN MEMORY OF
MATTHEW REYNOLDS

“Anybody touches that sign, they’ll answer, by God, to me,” Whitlow said to her with anger in his voice.

“Nobody’s going to touch it,” she said gently.

“They better not,” he replied. And then his body began to quake and he slid down in a sitting position against the pole like a man who has suddenly lost his strength to stand. He pulled his knees up to his chest and cradled his head on them and he began to weep.

Eleanor kneeled beside him. She asked, “Can I get you something, Whitlow?”

He shook his head over his knees, looked up at her. His eyes were red from fatigue and worry and tears. “I want to talk to you, Eleanor,” he said.

“All right,” she said.

From the window of the lunchroom, Lamar Gathers watched Eleanor kneeling near Whitlow, talking to him. Whitlow seemed to be wiping his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt.

Many moods, Lamar thought.

Many moods.

TWENTY-FOUR

It was a few minutes after six o’clock when he finished painting the store and put away the paint cans. He had done the painting faster than he thought he would and guessed it was because he was alone and not slowed down by Taylor or by customers who wanted to talk. He had seen two or three cars driving past in mid-afternoon, but did not believe any of the cars’ occupants had seen him, hidden as he was by the oak trees hovering over the store’s front. One car had slowed as he was washing the paintbrush at the spigot near the side steps, and he had seen a hand lifted in a wave, but he had not recognized the car or the person in it.