The dead man was white, without shoes, his eyes sealed shut, the belt gone from his pants, the pockets turned inside out. His head rolled on his neck like a poppy gourd on a broken stem. The sheriff leaned over him with a lantern in his hand.

"They mark him?" someone in the crowd called out.

"On the forehead. 'K.W.C.,'" the sheriff said. Then the disgust grew in his face and he waved his arms angrily. "Y'all get out of here! This ain't your bidness! What kind of town we becoming here? If the Knights can do that to him, they can do it to us. Y'all t'ought of that?"

Abigail slapped the reins on her horse's rump and headed down the road toward Flower's house. She glanced back over her shoulder at the crowd by the bridge.

"Wasn't that the man who worked for Ira Jamison, what was his name, a posse was looking for him yesterday? He murdered his wife up at Angola Plantation," she said.

"Cain't really say. I've shut out a lot of bad things from Angola, Miss Abby," Flower replied.

Abigail looked at her curiously. "What are you hiding from me?" she asked.

FLOWER read in the front room of her house until late, getting up to fix tea, silhouetting against the lamp, twice stepping out on the gallery to look at the weather, the light from the doorway leaping into the yard. At midnight she heard the sounds of the saloon closing, the oak door being secured, shutters being latched, horses clopping on the road, men's voices calling out a final "good night" in the darkness.

But she saw no sign of Rufus Atkins.

She stood at the front window, the lamp burning behind her, until the road was empty, then blew out the lamp and sat in a chair with the cap-and-ball revolver in her lap and watched the sky clear and the moon rise above the fields.

The revolver rested across the tops of her thighs, and her fingers rested on the grips and coolness of the barrel. She felt no fear, only a strange sense of anticipation, as though she were discovering an aspect of herself she didn't know existed. She heard a wagon pass on the road, then the sounds of owls and tree frogs. The curtains fluttered on the windows and she smelled the odor of gardenias on the wind. In a secure part of her mind she knew she was falling asleep, but her physical state didn't seem important anymore. Her hand was cupped over the cylinder of the pistol, the back of the house locked up, the front door deliberately unbolted, cooking pots stacked against the jamb.

She awoke at two in the morning, her bladder full. She locked the front door and went out the back into the yard, locking the door behind her. Then she sat down on the smooth wood seat inside the heated cypress enclosure that had served the patrons of Carrie LaRose's brothel for over twenty years, the revolver next to her. Through the ventilation gap at the top of the door, she could see the sky and stars and smell the faint tracings of smoke from the fires burning in the swamp. The only sounds outside were those of nightbirds calling to one another and water dripping from the yard's solitary live oak, under which Rufus Atkins had paid the men who raped her.

She had overestimated him, she thought. Perhaps a lifetime of being abused by his kind had made her believe men like Atkins possessed powers which they did not, not even the self-engendered power or resolve to seek revenge after they were spat upon.

She wiped herself and rose from the seat, straightening her dress, and crossed the yard with the pistol hanging from her right hand. She turned in a half circle and looked about the yard one more time, then unlocked the door and went inside.

She rechecked all the doors and sashes to see that they were locked, then ate a piece of bread and ham and drank a glass of buttermilk and went into her bedroom. She put the revolver under the bed and left two of the windows open to cool the room and balanced a stack of cook pots on each of the sills in case an intruder tried to climb in. Then she lay down on top of the covers and went to sleep.

When she woke later it was not because she heard glass breaking or a door hasp tearing loose from wood or pans clattering to the floor. It was a collective odor, a smell of whiskey and horses and crushed gardenias and night damp trapped inside cloth.

And of leather. The braided end of a quirt that a man in a black robe and a peaked black hood teased across her face.

She sat straight up in bed, at first believing she was having a dream. Then the man in the peaked hood sat next to her on the mattress and fitted the quirt across her throat and pressed her back down on the pillow. Behind him was a second man, this one in white, her cap-and-ball revolver clutched in his hand.

"How did you get in?" Flower said.

The man in the black robe and hood leaned close to her, as though he wanted his breath as well as his words to injure her skin. The image of a camellia was stitched with pink and white thread on the breast of his robe. "A hideaway door with a spring catch on the side of the house. Lots of things I know you don't, Flower," the voice of Rufus Atkins said. "I know the places you go, the names of the niggers you teach, the time of day you eat your food, the exact time you piss and shit and empty your thunder mug in the privy. Have you figured out what I'm telling you?"

"Explain it to her," the other visitor said.

Flower recognized the voice of Todd McCain, the owner of the hardware store.

"You think you're free," Rufus Atkins' voice said, the mouth hole in his hood puffing with his breath. "But you spit in the wrong man's face. That means no matter where you go, what you do, who you see, either me or my friend here or a hundred like us will be watching you. You won't be able to take a squat over your two-holer back there without wondering if we're listening outside. Starting to get the picture? We own you, girl. Throw all the temper tantrums you want. That sweet little brown ass is ours."

When she didn't answer, he moved the quirt over her breasts, pressing it against her nipples, flattening it against her stomach.

"Damned if you're not prime cut," he said. He blew his breath along the down on her skin and she felt her loins constrict and a wave of nausea course through her body.

The two hooded figures left the front door open behind them. She sat numbly on the side of her bed and watched them ride away, their robes riffling over their horses' rumps, the cap-and-ball revolver on which she had relied thrown into the mud.

Chapter Twenty-seven

EARLY the next morning she took the sheets off her bed, not touching the area where the man in the black hood had sat. She put them in a washtub, then bathed and dressed to go to school. When she tried to eat, her food tasted like paper in her mouth. The sky had cleared, the sun was shining, and birds sang in the trees, but the brilliance and color of the world outside seemed to have nothing to do with her life now.

She drank a cup of hot tea and scraped her uneaten food into a garbage bucket and washed her dishes, then prepared to leave for school. But when she closed and opened her eyes, her head spun and bile rose in her throat and her skin felt dead to the touch, as though she had been systemically poisoned.

You've gone through worse, she told herself. They raped you, but they didn't make you afraid. They murdered your mother but they couldn't steal her soul. Why do you keep your wounds green and allow men as base as Atkins and McCain to control your thoughts? she asked herself.

But she knew the answer. The house, the land, the school, the flower beds she and Abigail had planted, her collection of books, her new life as a teacher, everything she was and had become and would eventually be was about to be taken from her. All because of a choice, a deed, she knew she would eventually commit herself to, because if she did not, she would never have peace.