“I can’t rightly say what Pastor will do, Sheriff. I’m sure you’ve heard the good Lord works in mysterious ways.”

“So does the law,” the sheriff said. “You tell Chambliss and the rest of your people that I’ll be around to see them.”

The sheriff turned to walk up the porch steps, and when he did my grandpa looked up at him. The sheriff stopped and held up his hand to block out the glare from the floodlights, and then he stared hard at my grandpa. My grandpa stared right back at him. It was quiet except for the sound of the slow footsteps crunching in the gravel where Mr. Thompson and those two men were walking out to their truck.

“So you’re back in town,” the sheriff said to my grandpa. He lowered his hand, and the light hit him in the eyes again. He looked from my grandpa up to me where I stood behind the screen door.

“You figuring to stick around this time?” the sheriff said.

“We’ll see,” my grandpa said.

“I guess we will,” the sheriff said. My grandpa stood up from the steps real slow to let the sheriff pass. Then the sheriff opened the screen door and I moved out of his way too. He took off his cowboy hat and held it down by his side.

“Where’s your mama at?” he asked me.

“In the bedroom,” I said and pointed to the next room.

I watched him walk through the front room and into the dining room, and I heard his boots on the hardwood floor, and then I heard him open the bedroom door.

“Mrs. Hall,” he said. He closed the door quietly behind him.

I looked outside and saw my grandpa standing at the bottom of the porch steps. He had his foot propped up on the bottom step, and he was looking up at me. It was the first time I’d gotten a good look at him. He had gray hair curling out from under his baseball cap, and he had gray whiskers too. His eyes were just as blue as Daddy’s, and his nose was crooked. I heard voices coming from the road, and my grandpa turned around and looked out into the darkness at the top of the yard.

“Mr. Hall,” Mr. Gene Thompson’s voice said from out in the dark, “Mr. Hall, I want you to know that we’re all sorry for your loss.”

“Stay away from my family,” Daddy said.

I WAS SITTING BY MYSELF ON THE SOFA IN THE FRONT ROOM WHEN Miss Lyle came back inside the house. Her hands were full of washcloths that were soaked through with blood. She walked right past me toward the kitchen.

“This is all just a mess,” she said to herself as she went by.

I heard the bedroom door open off the dining room, and I heard the sheriff’s boots walk across the floor. He stepped into the front room and looked over at me on his way to the door. He put his cowboy hat back on and looked out the screen door. I heard my daddy and my grandpa talking quietly out in the yard, but they stopped talking when the sheriff opened the screen door and walked out onto the porch. He walked down the steps, and I heard him moving through the grass toward where I figured my daddy and my grandpa were standing.

I could just barely hear all three of them talking, but they were being too quiet for me to understand exactly what they said. But then I heard somebody raise his voice like he was mad.

“That ain’t your decision to make.”

“It ain’t yours either,” the sheriff’s voice said.

“It’s all right,” said Daddy’s voice. “He’ll run him home. It’s all right.”

“You sure?” the sheriff asked.

“Yeah,” Daddy said. “I’m sure.”

“Can you take care of that boy?”

“He’s my grandson, ain’t he?”

“I reckon so,” the sheriff said.

E

IGHT

IT WAS HOT AND SMELLED LIKE SWEAT IN MY GRANDPA’S TRUCK, and there were papers and stained napkins and balled-up cigarette packets tossed all over the floorboard. The truck’s windows were rolled down all the way, and I watched Daddy and the sheriff walk up the porch steps to go back inside Miss Lyle’s house. Mama was waiting on the other side of the screen door for Daddy. My grandpa put the key in the ignition and started his truck. When the engine fired up, it sounded like pieces of old metal were beating against each other under the hood.

“Are my mom and dad not coming with us?” I asked.

“No, they’re going to stay with your brother,” he said. “Just for tonight.” He pulled his pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and shook one out, and then he pushed in the lighter on the dash to get it hot. “I’m going to carry you home and stay the night at your house, if that’s all right with you.” He looked at me and tried to smile. The lighter popped, and he pulled it out and brought the orange glow up to his face. When he lit up his cigarette, I saw that his fingers were twitching. He went to put the lighter back, but his hand shook so bad that he couldn’t hardly get it in. I heard it tapping against the dash until he finally fit it back in there.

He left the cigarette burning in the corner of his mouth and pulled the gearshift down. He put his arm across the back of my seat and turned his head to back into Miss Lyle’s driveway so he could turn his truck around.

The moon looked like it might’ve been hiding somewhere behind the clouds and the road was dark except where his headlights shined, but his truck was old and his headlights weren’t as bright as the lights on my daddy’s truck, even though my daddy’s truck was a pretty old one too. I couldn’t hardly see a thing except for what was right out in the road in front of us. His truck was so old that the insides of the doors had started to rust. When Daddy saw rust like that, he called it “car cancer,” and I’d heard him say that if you get it inside your truck you might as well give up hope and let it die. I reached out and touched the rust with my fingers, and it crumbled into my hand. I wiped my hand on my blue jeans and saw that it left a dusty brown stain.

“This is an old truck, ain’t it?” my grandpa said, but I didn’t say nothing back to him.

We rode alongside the river and I looked through the windshield down past the other side of the truck, and I could just barely see the water shining in between the trees in that little bit of moonlight. I thought about me and Stump and Joe Bill skipping rocks this morning, and then I thought about how long ago it seemed that we were all together down there on the bank. Through the trees I could see the lights from Marshall twinkling farther down the river. I knew we’d pass the church soon and if I wanted to I could look to my right out my window at it when we did, but I decided that I didn’t want to. I just stared straight out at the headlights, but I knew when we passed the church just the same.

My grandpa took the road up to the highway, and I felt us climbing the hill and I heard his old truck pulling hard like it was straining to make it. When we stopped at the stop sign at the top of the hill, an ambulance turned off the highway and passed us and headed down toward the river from where we’d just come. The ambulance didn’t have its emergency lights on or its siren blaring, and I noticed how slow it was driving. I looked out the back window and watched its taillights disappear into the darkness at the bottom of the hill. When I turned around again, I saw that my grandpa was staring at it in his rearview mirror. He sat there just looking at it for a second longer, and then he put his foot on the gas and we turned left onto the highway.

“YOUR DADDY AND ME TOOK A WALK IN HIS FIELDS THIS EVENING,” he said. “There’s a lot of burley tobacco to be brought in. A lot of work that’s needing to be done.” He sat there, and I could tell he was trying to think of something else to say so it wouldn’t be so quiet while we drove.

“Mr. Gant helps Daddy do all that stuff,” I said, just to let him know that Daddy didn’t need him around all the time just because he’d decided to come back and surprise Daddy all of a sudden. I felt him look over at me, but I stared straight ahead at the road.