He paused to see if Mira could answer his question, but Mira didn’t know what he was talking about. She’d never talked to him before, and could only shrug. Mr. Loomis peered down at her a few seconds more before taking his finger and holding it in front of her face. “Your eyes,” he said, staring. The corners of his own eyes held crusty granules of rheum he hadn’t bothered to wipe away. “You look like—

“Get away from me!” Mr. Loomis suddenly yelled, recognizing in her face something that scared him. The shift in his tone caused Mira to jump back in surprise, but nothing could compare to his contorted expression of fear. “Get away from me. Get away. I want nothing to do with you.”

Every now and then Mr. Loomis ventured into one of the bars in their downtown. He sat hunched in a corner, drinking bourbon shots one after the other. He mostly kept to himself, glancing around periodically before directing his gaze back to the table, too afraid to have anyone realize he was looking. No one bothered him. Loomis told stories of how his father had been a farmer, a sharecropper of tobacco mostly but they grew other crops—oats, corn, wheat. Loomis’s father wanted him to leave, to work a better life than one of the field. “When I go, sell this land and get out of here. Don’t stay like me. This place will get you if you stay. It’ll find a way to own you forever,” his father had told him, and so he signed up for the army, thinking that would be his way out.

“Before he died, my father used to tell me they were coming for him. I didn’t understand what he meant until I started hearing the whispers,” Mr. Loomis used to say, telling anyone who would listen. “It’s only a matter of time before they come for us. Sons bear the sins of the fathers, you know, and they’re coming to take their due. I should have stayed away like my father told me, but after he died that land became mine. I came back after I served my term to take what was mine. I’m the one who owns those woods. I’m the woodsman now.”

For years Mira would wonder why he remained. If he truly believed in what he said, he must have known what would happen to him in the end. That he’d have to answer for what had been done. The land he lived on, land he’d inherited, it belonged to those his family stole it from, and as he said, sons bear the sins of the fathers. It wasn’t greed that kept him; he could have sold the land. No, he remained out of his own defiance for what he believed to be true.