“Take her into the house,” he told the oldest.

She picked up the little girl and carried her toward the house, where faint lights burned behind curtained windows. I watched them go until the darkness swallowed them. When I turned I realized that Gillum was gone, and I searched the yard until I saw his shape moving away from me toward a small well house. I stood watching his retreating figure and suddenly realized that people were moving past me in the darkness. The neighbors who’d left earlier had returned, and many of them were carrying aluminum buckets and plastic drums. They walked quietly through the yard.

I found myself following the group up to the well house, where someone handed me a bucket and I stood and waited for Gillum to fill it with water from the hose. Behind me I could hear the hiss of the hot ground being cooled as bucket after bucket was dumped onto the smoldering grass. The pump inside the well house clicked on, and the low hum competed with the noise of the fire and the sounds of the feet shuffling in and out of the line.

When my bucket was full, I carried it toward the fire where the others circled the barn and soaked down the grass along its perimeter. A few had even climbed a piece up the hillside and were tossing buckets of water into the trees. The only light came from the fire, and the darkness around me moved with the sound of falling water. I carried the bucket by the handle, and in its swinging the water overflowed the sides and wet my pants and my boots. I moved slower until I felt the heat of the fire on my face, and I stopped and stood beside another man and carefully soaked a strip of grass at my feet.

I went back to the line, where Gillum refilled my bucket, and I worked my way around the barn, soaking down the grass and trying not to inhale the sour smoke from the treated lumber. The earth grew wet until my feet were sloshing through the grass, but I continued to refill my bucket and follow the others clockwise around the barn. I poured the water methodically in straight lines until the grass was no longer steaming. I looked to my right and saw a man in a baseball cap beside me with a cigarette in his mouth. He was using both hands to dump the water from his bucket and trying in vain to blink the smoke from his eyes. I walked back to the well house, where Gillum was still standing and filling emptied buckets. He was talking to someone; when I got closer, I saw it was Robert Clovis.

“I’m going to help you put this back up,” I heard Clovis say. “I can’t help but feel responsible for it.”

“There’s no need for that,” Gillum said. “We can see to that tomorrow. I just want to make sure I don’t lose nothing tonight that I can’t get back.”

“I’m sorry,” Clovis said.

“There’s no need,” Gillum said. Clovis waited until his bucket was full, and then he walked back toward the barn. I stepped forward and held my bucket before me, and it grew heavy as the water from the hose began to fill it.

“I appreciate your help,” Gillum said. I looked up at him and nodded my head, and then I turned to follow Clovis back to the barn, but I stopped when I saw that the fire was slowly burning itself out and the field was already full of inky silhouettes moving against the darkness.

S

IX

THAT NIGHT, WHILE GILLUM’S BARN SMOLDERED IN THE wet grass, Carson Chambliss suddenly showed up on the radar of the Madison County Sheriff’s Department, and he’d been there ever since. He didn’t seem to have any connections to the area, and there wasn’t any family in this part of North Carolina that I could find. I called on a couple folks around here who I trusted, who I knew could keep their mouths shut about these kinds of things, and I found out he’d come up from north Georgia: Stephens County, about three hours southwest of here. It took a few phone calls, but it wasn’t hardly a day or two before I was on the phone with Sheriff Tyrie Nicks in Toccoa, Georgia, asking him if he’d ever heard of a man named Carson Chambliss.

“Good God,” he said. “Who hasn’t heard of that son of a bitch?” Nicks said Chambliss always told folks that he was a mechanic, but all Nicks had ever known him for was being arrested on little charges like petty theft and possession of marijuana and controlled substances. “I’d had my eye on him for a long time,” he said, “but he had to go and blow himself up for us to have something that would stick.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“He cooked meth,” Nicks said. “And he moved like a squatter back and forth between shacks and abandoned trailers and we couldn’t ever catch him. And then one morning we had an old house explode about ten minutes outside Toccoa. It was Chambliss, what was left of him anyway.”

“Was he hurt bad?” I asked.

“You ain’t never looked at him up close, have you?” he asked me.

“No, Sheriff,” I said. “I haven’t.” The truth was that at that time I hadn’t laid my eyes on him yet. I couldn’t have picked him out of a crowd of two men.

“Well, that explosion took off something like forty percent of his skin. It almost killed him. They had to graft big old pieces from his legs and his back. He must’ve worn a gas mask or something over his face while he cooked it, because you can’t quite tell it just by looking at him. But his chest and the right side of his body are just awful-looking. If you saw him without clothes on, you’d swear he was a danged mutant.” He sighed like he was about to tell me something he either shouldn’t or didn’t want to. “You want to hear the messed-up part?” he asked.

“I sure do,” I said.

“He had him a sixteen-year-old girl in that house when it exploded, a runaway from Mississippi. She died a week later from her burns. Her folks drove up here from Jackson and took her home. It was just a sad story all the way around.”

“What happened to Chambliss?” I asked.

“We tried to get him on second-degree murder, but you know how it is, Sheriff. His court-appointed suit got it argued down to involuntary manslaughter, and the newspaper made that poor girl sound like a conspirator. They only gave him three years. I think he might’ve served two.”

“That don’t seem right,” I said.

“It wasn’t right,” he said. “But like I told you, you know how it is.” It was quiet for a second, and I thought he’d finished telling me all he knew about Chambliss. Then he cleared his throat. “You want to know something else? After he got sent to the Allendale Pen down in Alto, he was explaining away those burns by telling folks that God had done it to him. He told them that the hand of God Almighty had come down and set his body afire to purify him from the sins of the world.”

“But what about the meth explosion?” I asked. “What did he have to say about that?”

“He said that was how God chose to do it.”

“And what about that girl?”

“He didn’t ever mention her, not after he got to the pen anyway. It was just like she’d never existed,” he said. “But let me tell you this, and you ain’t going to believe it when I tell you, but the warden told me he couldn’t hardly keep that man from setting himself on fire once he got inside the pen. Warden said Chambliss started up some kind of cult called the Signs Following. He said they’d hold services right there on the spot, wherever they felt moved: the chapel, in their cells, out in the yard. He said they’d speak in tongues, heal each other, talk about the Devil like he lived next door. But the thing was, once they got going, they’d pull out anything flammable they could get ahold of and light it on fire and run their hands over it, hold it right up to their faces: shaving cream, cologne, cleaning spray. He said if you confiscated lighters and matchbooks to try and keep them from setting that stuff on fire, then they’d up and drink it. But not a single one of them psychos was burned or ever got sick. He said Chambliss got him a little following together and there was nothing outside of solitary confinement that could keep those folks away from him.