DK: Wait a minute. They sat and talked at Hardee’s? You sure? Somebody said it was at the old Dixie Motel.

DM: Yeah. Howard Grimes. Michael never understood how that old coot got the two parking lots mixed up. Turns out it was a good thing he did though. See, Janie starts asking so many questions that somehow, before Michael knows how it happens, he asks her if she wants to see the barn. Of course she does. Then she acts like it’s a done deal that they have to drive out together, and since she’s got the baby and all in the backseat, she drives.

God, he’s such an innocent, Michael. He’s got no interest in women, so he forgets they might think he’s the sexiest looking thing they ever saw.

DB: What’d you say, Deborah?

DK: Nothing. Denn’s right though. Michael was a hunk in those days. I just never realized Janie was looking, too.

DM: She was looking, kiddo. They get out to the barn and she takes the baby upstairs with her to see how Michael’s roughed in the partitions and laid out the baths. Marble slab for the hearth. And all the time, she’s giving him this line about how it might surprise him to know that Cotton Grove’s as sophisticated as New York in some ways. Right. And then she tries to kiss him. Takes him so off-balance that he blurts out something that makes her guess, and he’s too flustered to deny it right away. And to show you how sophisticated she is, she totally freaks. I mean, she’s bouncing off the goddamn walls, yelling what the fuck’s happening to Cotton Grove? Is everybody in the whole fucking town queer as a three-dollar bill? When did Cotton Grove become the fag and dyke capital of the county? I mean this lady’s the homophobe from hell, right?

You want to hear the kicker? Seems she’s been jumped by a couple of lesbians a couple of weeks earlier! She’s decided she has to get it on with Michael to prove to herself that there’s nothing queer about her, and damned if she hasn’t hit on the only man in town who can’t get it up for her!

DB: You wanted to say something, Deborah?

DK: No.

DM: Well, she starts screaming that she doesn’t care who he is. Cotton Grove doesn’t need his kind of filth. She’s going to tell everybody in town. He’ll be run out on a rail. His family disgraced. The whole schmear. She grabs her coat to go and-

Okay, he never says he actually pushes her, but he does panic. He sees this messy scandal, his mother totally wiped out with humiliation in front of the whole town, his father shamed. He can’t let her do it. I don’t know how it happens, but suddenly she falls over backwards and cracks her head open on the sharp edge of the marble hearth. There’s blood all over everything. Now he really panics. It’s bad enough she was going to tell the world he’s gay; now he’s a gay who’s assaulted a sweet young mother.

He knows he ought to drive into town for help, but he’s too scared of what’ll happen when she regains consciousness. He thinks, What if she never wakes up? His secret will be safe. She almost quits breathing. He’s sure she’s going to die any minute and he’s paralyzed. It’s like a bad dream with no way out and he sits there for hours till it’s past dark and he realizes that he’s waited too long. There’s no way he can call for help now. And soon somebody’s liable to notice how long his truck’s parked at Hardee’s.

The baby’s screaming. He runs down and finds a bottle of milk and the baby drinks it and goes off to sleep. He’s not thinking clear at this point or he’d put the baby in the car and leave her, but he’s afraid no one’ll find the car before she gets a heat stroke and dies. Anyhow, he drives Janie’s car back to Cotton Grove, leaves it behind her father-in-law’s office, and walks over to Hardee’s about a block away, where he picks up his truck and goes on home to his parents’ house like nothing’s happened.

When he gets there, he hears that Janie and the baby have been missed and that half the town’s turned out by this time to look for them. He hardly closes his eyes that night, and next morning, he’s almost afraid to go back out to the barn.

He finally does. Janie’s still alive and the baby’s screaming like crazy till he can’t stand it. He picks Janie up and carries her down to the creek. It’s still cool and rainy. At first he thinks maybe he’ll put her in the water and let the creek take her away. But he just can’t do it. He keeps walking on down the creek bank. When he gets opposite the mill, he’s talked himself into believing that even if she’s found now, she’s too far gone to ever regain consciousness. He’ll just put her and the baby in the mill loft and soon somebody’s bound to check it out.

DK: But they already had. My brothers were there that Thursday morning.

DM: Yeah? Was that why it took ’em so long to find her? I wondered about that.

DK: But Michael knew my brothers were there, Denn. He told Gayle and me that he’d met them coming out of the lane and that’s why he didn’t search the mill himself.

DM: Yeah? Well, he probably said that to throw you off, keep you from wondering why he didn’t go over himself. Anyhow, he spends Thursday cleaning up the blood till there was no trace of it. Every minute he expects the sheriff or somebody to drive into the barnyard and ask if he knows anything about how Janie got in the mill, but nothing. Another awful night. The tension’s killing him. He stays away Friday. Doesn’t come back till early Saturday morning and they still haven’t found Janie. So now he decides that she’s never going to be found. It’s over with. He just has to carry on normally. He’s arranged for a couple of guys to work that morning, so he goes and gets them and drives them out to the barn. I guess you know the rest after that? How they found her. And Michael had to go over and look at her. It was awful for him. Just awful.

DK: When did he shoot her?

DB: And what did he do with the pistol?

DK: Come on, Denn. Finish it up.

DM: That’s the part he never wants to talk about. In fact, I don’t find out for months that that’s how she finally dies. He tells me all that I’ve just told you when he comes for me. How it was an accident, but he can’t ever tell anyone. But he doesn’t mention the shot and there’s not that many people around here talking to me yet. It’s on into next spring and somebody says something abut Janie Whitehead being shot and it surprises the hell out of me. He wouldn’t tell me any of the details. “It had to be done,” he says. “She suffered too long as it was. I was a coward not to do it the first night.”

DB: If he was so afraid to have Cotton Grove know he was gay…

DM: Why’d he come out of the closet and bring me down?

DB: Yeah.

DM: He tried it straight and look where it got him. He’s in total despair. Can’t sleep. Can’t eat. It’s like he has to do something major to make up for hurting Janie. He talks about atoning.

Gives up art. Or thinks he does. He says the fine arts are a snare and a delusion and from now on he’s just going to be a simple artisan and make plain utilitarian things. Like the Shakers. Only he really is an artist, and even when he’s trying to be plain, it’s plain with a spin on it, right?

And it’s still not enough. He’s like one of those strange desert monks from early Christian times, those guys that sit inside hollow trees or on top of pillars. Michael really loved me, I know he did, but at the same time, coming out of the closet was sort of like a hair shirt.

Okay, okay, I know it sounds strange, but it sort of makes a crazy sense-Janie gets hurt because he denies what he is, right? Even though I tell him it’s not really his fault. And when you think about it, she’s as much to blame for what happened as he is. It’s not him who goes looking for her, is it? But Michael can’t see it like that, and so to punish himself, he admits to the world that he’s gay.

DB: He gets to be himself and this is punishment?