The Song of the Blue Bottle Tree

by India Hayford

Genres: Coming of Age; Small Town & Rural; Christian Suspense

Synopsis

Disguised by years in exile and a name she found on a gravestone, an unconventional young woman returns to her childhood home in rural 1967 Arkansas in this hauntingly visceral Southern tale of desperate choices, found family, folk magic and noisy ghosts.

Genevieve Charbonneau talks to ghosts and has a special relationship with rattlesnakes. In her travels, she’s wandered throughout the South, working in a Louisiana circus and as a hootchy kootch dancer in Texas. Now for the first time in a decade, she’s allowed her winding path to bring her to the site of her grandmother’s Arkansas farmhouse, a place hallowed in her memory.

Disguised by years in exile and a name she found on a gravestone, Genevieve intends only to visit briefly and leave. But a chance meeting with a guilt-ridden young Vietnam veteran draws her into more unexpected connections. Her hard-won independence inspires an abused woman and her daughters to find their own path to empowerment, and a hypocritical preacher is brought to a long-deserved reckoning.

With undertones of magical realism and dark humor, here is a powerful story of discovering—and sometimes rediscovering—one’s place in the world, and the unexpected challenges and gifts that present themselves along the way.

Release date: March 25, 2025

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

Ghosts started whispering to me by name the spring I turned twelve, the same spring the flesh mounded up under my nipples and the dark moon blood began its monthly flow from between my legs. Back in those days, I lived with Meema, my mother’s mother, while Papa drove a truck filled with oranges from Florida or onions from Alabama. Meema had a big old house and seventy-five acres on a red clay road outside of Washington, Arkansas. My mother grew up in that house, lived there until my papa swooped in and took her off to live in San Diego, Mobile, Galveston, and half a dozen small towns I can’t recall the names of. Their wedding picture sat on a dressing table in Meema’s bedroom. I used to perch on the matching chair and hold that picture in my hands, trying to remember what it was like before Mama died and left me and Papa to flounder through life like leaky boats trying to reach land through a thick fog. In the picture, Papa is wearing his Marine uniform and Mama is in a white dress with lace at her throat and a belt that shows off her tiny waist. They’re smiling into the camera, and he has his arm wrapped around her like he’ll never let go.

Papa came from northeastern Alabama where the last tumble of the Appalachian Mountains play out. Until he joined the Marines a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Papa never set foot more than twenty miles from home. He had a hard time in the service on account of the way he talked, and the funny ideas other folks have about Southerners, like “southern” means ignorant and “slow-talking” means slow thinking. Papa put up with them calling him hillbilly and meaner things until they got bored and let him alone. It’s still hard for me to understand how he could be so nice about it. I wanted to make those mean mouths bleed even years after most of them died on specks of land in the Pacific Ocean. Some people need to taunt someone the way other folks need someone to love. Papa never said a mean word when I was little, not even about the Japanese he’d fought so hard against. When I asked about them, he said, “Most of ’em was ordinary fellers trying to follow orders and wanting to get back home. Their leaders had brass for brains, but the foot soldiers was just folks like us.”

Papa didn’t talk much about the war or his part in it, but at times he remembered clearer than he wanted to. More than once he woke up in the middle of the night hollering for someone named Dayton. I never asked who Dayton was or what happened to him, but I knew it was bad. You don’t wake up screaming for someone who got shot in the shoulder and went home a hero.

Mama was patient with his nightmares and the times he blocked out the world and sat listening to things in his head that he couldn’t or wouldn’t share. Her patience extended farther for him than it did for me by a long shot. She loved me, but when she said go, I’d better get, and when she said run, I’d better say yes, ma’am, how fast and in which direction.

Thing was, sometimes I could hear what Papa heard, not like reading his mind but like we were both tuned into a radio station no one else could hear. Back then we lived in a little nothing town in central Alabama. He used to sit in his chair on the front porch, rocking and looking at cars go by without really seeing them. I’d creep out and sit in the swing, not to talk to him or bother him in any way, just to be near him. He didn’t mind me being there. Sometimes he didn’t even notice me. One summer before Mama died, he and I sat together in the fading light almost every evening, me swinging and him rocking, and all those cars headed south to Mobile or north into Tennessee. I tuned into Papa’s mental radio station so gradually that I didn’t even notice when voices first came through the static. Pretty soon, though, I could make out a few words or an occasional sentence. Mostly the words made no sense, and those that did weren’t very interesting. I was young back then, maybe seven or eight, and the voices were just part of my evenings on the porch with Papa. Sometimes Mama sat with us after she finished the dishes, but she attracted mosquitoes like she was the only red meat around, so she preferred to sit at the kitchen table and read. I asked them once about the sounds I heard in the air. Mama said it was crickets. Well, it wasn’t, and Papa knew it wasn’t because he looked sideways at me like what I said worried him. I pinned my lips together and concentrated on pulling sandburs out of my white cotton socks. Somehow, I knew better than to ask Papa what he heard.

Some nights the static crackled so bad that it like to drove me crazy, but other times I could hear people hollering and a deep rumble like a faraway thunderstorm. Once while we sat on the porch and watched it rain, a big voice popped into the static and said, “Tarawa,” just as loud and clear as you please.

“Tarawa,” I repeated. “What’s a Tarawa?”

Papa’s rocker squeaked to an abrupt stop, and I looked up to see him staring at me like I’d used a word that might get my mouth washed out with soap. I gnawed my lower lip, waiting to see if what I said warranted a chewing out or a rare session with Papa’s belt laid across the seat of my shorts.

“Tarawa,” he said, and ran his hands over his face like he was trying to tear it off. “It’s an island in the Pacific Ocean. A bunch of people had a fight over it in the war. Lot of those people died.”

I wanted to ask if he’d been there, but I had better sense than that. I smiled uncertainly at him, wishing I’d kept my mouth shut. He finally shook himself like a wet possum, smiled back, and commenced to rocking again. We never said anything else about Tarawa.

Sometimes on weekends, Papa loaded me and Mama into the old blue Nash and took us traveling. I don’t remember a lot about those trips except for the yellow-and-black signs that told us curves were coming up. Papa and Mama convinced me that the curved arrow on the sign was Mickey Mouse’s arm waving at me. Papa liked to travel at night. We’d sit up late talking in the front seat while Mama slept in the back and the headlights drilled into the darkness ahead of us. I loved passing through little towns, all quiet and vulnerable in the night like a painted lady who’d washed her face, so her real skin showed through. As we drove down some long tunnel of light, Papa’d tell me stories about our Scotch-Irish ancestors who traced the route in wagons or on foot a hundred or two hundred years earlier.

Most summers, they carried me to stay with Meema on the farm in Arkansas while Mama traveled with Papa. I loved those visits. No one ever raised a voice or hand to me, no matter how dirty my face got or how many times I tore my dress. I played with the barn cat’s kittens, rode my secondhand bike down the washboard road to see my town friends, fed the chickens and ducks, and helped in the great big garden and apple orchard.

Once in a while, Papa’d take us up to a place in the Alabama mountains where he’d grown up to visit an aunt and uncle and a few cousins who were Papa’s closest kin. We never stayed long, and I was glad of it. Mama didn’t like those folks. She was always polite because she didn’t know how to be anything else, but I could tell she hated being there by the way the corners of her mouth twitched when she tried to smile and how she kept picking her feet up off the floor, one after another like she expected something to crawl up her legs if she didn’t. I got tired listening to the grown-ups drone on about people I didn’t know and things I didn’t care about. I whispered to Mama that I wanted to go out and play in the yard, but she made me stay right by her in that boring house with those boring people until it was time for us to leave. I knew better than to argue. Mama was usually gentle, but she had a mean streak that showed up if you crossed her too hard, and when that mean streaked out, she’d as soon blister my bottom as look at me. I wasn’t a dummy, and neither was Papa. When the nervous tic of her mouth smoothed out into a hard flat line, he knew it was time to tell his kinfolk, See y’all later.

After Mama died of a hardness in her breast, we took her back home to Washington to bury her under a rose bush in the cemetery down the road from Meema’s house. I slept in Mama’s old room at Meema’s house that night after the funeral, just like I always did when I visited in the summer. The next morning, I woke up to find out Papa had left without me. Meema explained that he was taking a job driving a truck to California and that I’d live with her while he was on the road. I cried some, and she gave me the big pink conch shell off the kitchen shelf to play with and take my mind off being motherless and abandoned. I took the shell and hid out beneath the big magnolia tree at the edge of the yard to cry some more. When I put the shell to my ear to listen to the ocean, I heard voices murmuring just below the roar that was supposed to be ocean waves. I couldn’t tell what any of them were saying, but they comforted me all the same, especially a low soft voice I thought maybe belonged to Mama.

I lived there with Meema until the spring after the voices started calling me by name. That April, a storm blew up that carried more thunder and lightning than I’d ever seen in my life. When we heard a sound like a train about to drive through the house, Meema grabbed me up and hustled me down into the storm cellar. Lord, I hated that place. It was always damp and looked like a haven for black widow spiders and copperhead snakes. Even seeing the wavering column of the tornado tossing trees in the air on the other side of the pasture, I wanted to take my chances with outrunning the thing. Meema shoved me down the steps ahead of her, though, and closed the door on us thirty seconds before all hell broke loose outside. When we emerged a lifetime later, there was nothing left to see of the house, not even a pile of busted boards like most people had. The magnolia on the lawn was still there. The orchard hadn’t been touched, and there were still flowers in the garden borders, but Meema’s house was wiped away as clean as the plate of a starving child. Later I found the conch shell on top of the well house, not a chip on it, but that was all that was left of the place that had been her home for sixty years.

Meema didn’t outlast the house by too many months. The doctor called it a stroke, but I think it was a broken heart, pure and simple. We buried her in the cemetery next to Mama on a day so hot that the Baptist preacher cut the graveside service short by a good half an hour, an unheard-of concession to weather for the longest-winded preacher this side of Texas.

I expected to live with Papa after Meema died, but he didn’t want me. People said there were other reasons, but that’s what it came down to. He didn’t even come to tell me himself, just arranged for Meema’s niece to come get me after the funeral. I went home with her but didn’t stay long. She wanted to keep me, but her husband said they had enough of his own children to take care of and didn’t need an extra mouth to feed when that mouth had closer blood kin somewhere else. She tried to appeal to his sense of Christian charity, but he didn’t have one, so she reluctantly packed me up a bag of clothes, tucked in Meema’s shell, and took me down to the car where Papa’s Cousin Burgess was waiting to drive me to Alabama to live in hell.

In the shadow of Talladega Mountain, the crossroads of Kingdom Come turned its back on the wicked world and concentrated grimly on its own salvation. I clutched my little satchel and stared through the truck window at the dismal houses and trailers that made up the community. Squeezing my eyes shut, I prayed to wake up in the garden swing at Meema’s house, surrounded by the smell of cape jessamine and the sound of birds calling to one another from the top of the big pecan tree.

The truck turned into a driveway, skidding slightly on the loose pea gravel as it braked to a stop. My eyes snapped open to the bitter reality of a weathered house slung together from gray wood and stone, unsoftened by a single rose, unhallowed by a lone sparrow. The yard was hard-packed dirt, swept as clean as a merciless corn broom allowed. Only the kudzu draped in smothering folds over the trees beyond the barbed-wire fence defied the relentless hand of the faithful.

The Right Reverend Burgess Love Darnell seized my upper arm and dragged me across the front seat. My satchel caught on the gear shift, pulling it into neutral so that the truck rolled slightly. With what sounded suspiciously like a bad word, he jerked me through the driver’s door, then reached in to detach my bag and shove the gear shift back into park. He slammed the satchel into my chest. Automatically, I wrapped my arms around it, not sure if I was protecting it or hoping it would protect me. Grabbing my arm again, he hustled me up the warped plank steps, and across the surface of something that had no business calling itself a porch. I caught my toe on the front door’s high threshold. Only his bruising grip kept me from falling face-first into the hall that bisected the house and had doors at each end. Other doors opened off the hall. The Right Reverend Darnell pushed me through the nearest off-plumb rectangle. A reedy old woman enthroned on a straight-backed chair peered critically at me over the top of rimless bifocals. Her dark long-sleeved dress stretched over her knees, revealing ankles clad in heavy cotton hose just above stout lace-up shoes.

“This her, Burgess?”

“Yes’m. This here’s Cousin Robert’s girl. Oleana, Aunt Nette’s waitin’ to see your manners.” The Right Reverend Darnell shifted his grip to the back of my neck and squeezed. I gulped and murmured some words I hoped sounded mannerly, but I was so damn scared even the long auburn braid down my back quivered. One week earlier, I’d stood next to the rose brush on my mama’s grave and numbly watched clods bounce off the plain pine coffin in Meema’s grave. Now I trembled in a silent splintered house, trying to understand how I had become the ward of this ugly man with gray hair protruding from his ears.

Papa had merely snorted on his end of the long-distance phone call when I’d begged to stay in Arkansas. “Meema’s gone, don’t none of her kin have room for you, and I ain’t got time to watch you and drive the truck both. Cousin Burgess and Aunt Nette are willin’ to have the load of you till you’re old enough to marry. No, I don’t want to hear no more, Oleana. You go get your bits and pieces together and be ready to head on out when Cousin Burgess gets there.”

I had left Arkansas with a few clothes, a ragged fabric dog, and the conch shell from Meema’s dresser hidden deep in my satchel. Now I clung to the bag like it was my last grip on sanity and listened while the Right Reverend Darnell and Aunt Nette wrangled over my future.

“You didn’t tell me she was pretty, Burgess.” Aunt Nette scowled at me, her eyes narrow and mean as her mouth. “Didn’t tell me that.”

“Now, Mama, you know the devil’s in this girl just by lookin’ at her, but I reckon you and me can drive him out and leave behind a good gentle woman. Won’t hurt for her to have a shine on her then. Give her a year of the Lord’s way and she’ll do us proud, ain’t that so, girl?” He shook me by the back of my neck and accepted the whiplash of my head as a yes. The space his left incisor once filled showed beneath his upper lip as he grinned at me. I stared at the dark line of snuff that edged his lower lip, trying not to gag. I’d felt safer around junkyard dogs and copperhead snakes.

That night, I cried myself to sleep between sheets that stank of bleach and scratched with starch. My dreams twisted through dark, demon-filled lands with horror at every turn. Sleep held me down and allowed a monster to come close, let it lay its scaly hands on my breasts, let it scratch the tender skin of my thighs. Shrieking in terror, I fought the monster with fists and feet until it swore a human oath and extinguished me with a smothering hand pressed over my nose and mouth.

I awoke alone in a tangle of sheets, scared and sweating in the warm spring night. Light from the setting moon slid through the open window, illuminating Meema’s conch shell on the bedside table. At first, I only heard the gentle sounds of ocean waves when I pressed the pink cleft of the shell to my ear, but I waited patiently for the voices to come. They swam to me through the surf, ebbing and flowing beneath the sounds of the sea until the chorus sang loud enough to be understood, sang a single word over and over: Run.

The woman waited beneath the crepe myrtle, her flame-orange hair clashing with the deep pink blossoms. When she gestured with a single finger, I looked to see which child she wanted, but the crowd of youngsters flowing out of the doors of the junior high school moved past her without recognition.

“Oleana.” I read my name on the woman’s lips; the laughter of children drowned out all other sounds. Once more, the woman mouthed, “Oleana,” and beckoned again with a long slender finger.

Reluctantly, I slid one foot after the other until I stood in the shade of the crepe myrtle an arm’s length away from the woman. A young woman, only a few years older than me, but with a pair of deep lines between her eyebrows that didn’t belong with her beautiful face and flowing hair.

“Hail, thou that art highly favored; the Lord is with thee,” she whispered. “Once he was with me.”

I blinked.

“I was called Anna, but now shall I be called Mara, for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.” Her hand darted out and closed hard around my wrist. “Does he do the laying on of hands with you?”

I looked into the wide, mad eyes and frantically tried to wrestle my arm out of her grip. Help, I cried silently to the children streaming past us. Help me. I might as well have been invisible.

“His name is Love!” the woman cried. “His name is love and he loved me until you came. Loved me . . .”

I twisted free. She reached out to grab me again, but I shoved her hard enough to send her reeling back into the crepe myrtle. Dropping my armload of books, I darted back into the sunlight and pushed past the children who crowded the schoolyard. When I reached the dirt road that wound south into the forest, I ran like a frightened deer, away from the woman named Bitter, away from the nightmare of hands laid on me, away, away from Kingdom Come. If only I could run clear to the Gulf of Mexico, maybe I could find enough water to wash myself clean. I ran and ran, but in the end, the distance defeated me, and I collapsed into a sandy loam rut, my breath rasping in and out of my raw throat. Turning my face to the sky, I rocked on my knees and bawled like a lost calf, knowing I had nowhere to go but back.

Alabama dervishes spun around the sanctuary, arms outflung, heads thrown back, shouting, singing, praising the name of the Lord in tongues known and unknown. Sister Aileen Dunham clattered her heels across the worn wooden floor, hands uplifted, face twisted into ecstasy that bordered on agony. Skirt swinging in her holy tap dance for the Lord, she traced a slow circle around a pair of woven baskets topped with wooden lids. A grimace snarled her lips back, making way for the harsh syllables forcing their way through her clinched teeth.

“Ah galana la laga hosama nah!”

The congregation of the Kingdom Come Church of the Holy Ghost with Signs Following groaned, swaying in rhythm to her dance around the baskets.

“Praise the Lord!”

“Galana la laga hosama nah!”

The Right Reverend Burgess Love Darnell shuffled toward Sister Dunham, sweat glistening on his red face, his white suit showing signs of collapse along the sternly pressed folds. He squatted down in front of the baskets and beat on their wooden lids with clinched fists, screaming his defiance of Satan and the illusions of sin. Sister Dunham never missed a step. Her unearthly warbling rose and fell over the cries of the congregation.

“Gahana galena ah ah neganah hah!”

“They shall take up serpents!” howled the Right Reverent Darnell. The congregation howled back its approval, hope, and belief. He ripped the lid off the nearest basket and sank both hands deep inside to lift a snarl of tangled bodies. A water moccasin poked its triangular head over the rusty red back of a copperhead to fix the congregation with a cold stare. Moaning and trembling as the spirit came on him, he handed the snakes to worshipers on either side of him. The prize of the collection he reserved for himself: a heavy-bodied eastern diamondback rattlesnake, native to the coastal plains and rarely seen in the northern mountains. Lips sneering back from his prominent teeth, he hoisted the great creature over his head and thrust her toward heaven.

“They shall take up serpents—and they shall not be harmed!”

Bedlam. The Right Reverent Darnell stomped across the floor, screaming the name of the Lord. Other people shoved past him to dip into the baskets, pulling out timber rattlers, rusty black moccasins, and the golden red of a thick-bodied copperhead.

“Galana ha laga hosama nah!”

I gripped the pew in front of me, beyond caring whether anyone in the congregation noticed the ward of the Right Reverend Darnell had both feet off the ground and tucked under her bottom. A rope divided the snake handlers from the less faithful among the congregation, but I had no illusion about the snakes’ respect for the barrier. Frantically I tried to count the snakes pulled from the basket by the believers, tried to count any that crawled out on their own, tried to keep track of the number of snakes passed from person to person. Every few seconds, my eyes swept the floor beneath me, looking for escaped serpents. My breath came in terrified gasps. As I whipped my head around to check the pew next to me, my own braid snapped against my arm, scaring me halfway into my second childhood.

Ten feet away, Brother Bingham Harkner held his timber rattler within striking distance of his nose. Possessed man and lidless serpent stared at each other with identical unblinking glares.

“Praise the Lord! Stare Satan down, brother!”

“Galana ha laga hosama nah!”

“Ah, Jesus!”

Deciding that the contest was at an end, Brother Harkner bayed like a hound moving in for the kill and shook the snake high over his head to proclaim his triumph over Satan. On the other side of the room, the Right Reverend Darnell joined Sister Dunham in her jittering dance around the baskets, he with his double fistful of conquered Satan, she with her twisted mouth and guttural gift of unknown tongues. A cacophony resounded off the whitewashed walls as worshipers on my side of the rope fell into their own frenzies.

“Crima dinahem horganasha dina bah bah BAH!” screamed the white-haired woman on my left. Behind us, a thump proclaimed the collapse of another believer under her own tongue of flame. I turned to see who’d fallen and caught a glimpse of flaming hair as the woman who called herself Mara leapt over a writhing worshiper and ducked under the rope barrier.

“Love me!” she cried. Clenching both hands around the Right Reverend Darnell’s arm, she hung on with all her weight, forcing him to lower his deadly burden. She tore the enormous rattler from him and ran her open lips over its head and down its diamond back. The Right Reverend Darnell made a snatch for his snake; Mara swung away from him, pressing the creature to her cheek, crooning and moaning to it. Fangs flashed once, twice, three times, gashing the white skin of her face, the delicate curve of her throat. She embraced the enraged serpent, raining kisses of passion on its body as it rained kisses of death on hers.

“Love me,” she begged, and collapsed on the floor with diamond-marked coils wrapped around her wrists.

The steps stopped next to my bed as they did every night. I hugged my arms across my breasts, squeezed my eyes shut, and tried not to breathe as hands traced my hips beneath the thin sheet. A hoarse whisper growled in my ears, growing louder as the hands grew rougher.

“. . . death is the sting of sin . . . death is the sting of sin . . .”

Satan stung deep and death flowed out of me in a stream of blood.

I slid off the bed and curled my toes into the braided rug. The Enemy stirred on the mattress, toppled from his side to his back and snored, one arm flung back over my deserted pillow. With a hand that seemed detached from my body, I picked up the shell from the bedside table and held it to my ear. I listened for a moment, put the shell down, and glided my feet over the threshold of the room and out into the long hall. A faint glow from the moon lit the parlor door, guiding my steps past the hall tree, past the table with its load of cheap ceramic knickknacks, past the sentimental picture of an angel hovering protectively over a pair of children crossing a bridge at night. At the doorway of the parlor, I hesitated. A big wicker basket with a black wooden lid sat on the floor, waiting for the next service.

“Don’t stop now,” a beloved voice whispered in my ear.

I slid on reluctant feet into the room. A cold breath of air stirred the damp curls at the nape of my neck, and I shivered in the humid August night. Dog days, Meema called them, these hot still weeks when the air hung like thick netting over the fields and snakes were blind and more aggressive, more dangerous than usual. Dog days.

Something stirred in the basket.

“I’m afraid,” I whispered to the dark.

“I will help you. Go open the lid.”

“I can’t.”

“Oleana, have I ever hurt you?”

“No,” I answered and knelt beside the basket. I grasped the lid, but it wouldn’t budge.

“The latch.”

I undid the hasp and raised the lid. A heavy rope of silk and diamonds flowed over the rim of the basket and pooled on the rug in a gleaming coil. The snake turned its great head toward me. I stared into the black pyramids of its eyes, fascinated despite my fear.

“Lead her down the hall. Do not, for your life, look back until you reach the bedroom door.”

Gathering all my courage, I turned my back on the serpent. Behind me, the heavy body slid across the floorboards with a sound like the rustling of taffeta petticoats. I took a deep breath and glided up the hall, fighting the urge to flee, the urge to turn and see how close the snake was to my bare heels.

“I am so afraid.”

“It is not your day to die, Oleana. Turn and welcome her into the room.”

I turned. Seven feet of serpent slid toward me, stopping within easy striking distance of my ankles. There the snake paused, tasting the air with her forked tongue.

“My grandmother bids you welcome,” I whispered to death as it lay waiting. “I welcome you on my own account.”

The serpent rippled forward, swinging into the room. Her body flowed across the tops of my feet, cool as satin. I watched the snake gravely, reverently. No longer frightened, I stood until the rattle-tipped tail brushed my ankles in a final caress, then followed it into the room.

Body echoing the circular pattern of the braided rug, the snake raised her great head and sought a way onto the mattress. I knelt beside her and slipped my hands beneath the smooth coils. With an effort, I lifted the snake. The coils slid back on my arms and the tail fell to one side, but as I rose beneath the snake’s weight, the creature poured onto the bed. She twined herself in the bloodstained sheets and around the arms and across the neck of the sleeping enemy.

Voices rose and fell at the far end of his consciousness, Southern voices droning on like cicadas on a hot July night. He wished they’d shut up. Leaning forward in the car seat, he searched the dark pine forest for signs of an elusive enemy, a gleam of metal, a flash of black, a branch bent in a way no normal branch bends. He’d expected to feel safe at home, but Vietnam hung between him and the Arkansas countryside like a movie played on a screen of gray chiffon.

He couldn’t grasp the reality of home even when his mother’s long, work-gnarled fingers brushed his arm for the twentieth time since his family met him in Texarkana. When he’d limped off the bus, a single tear of happiness and relief slid down Wreath’s cheek, and her arms went out to receive her only son. A warning nudge from her husband reminded her of the rigid control he expected of her. She restricted herself to squeezing Mercer’s hand for an extra moment when she offered him the handshake John Luther deemed proper for all public greetings. The look in his eyes broke her heart; the damaged leg was obviously the least of his injuries.

John Luther Ives didn’t notice any change in his son. Intent as always on the sound of his own voice and the shape of his own thoughts, he pontificated about God, war, and the wages of sin as he piloted the two-tone Buick station wagon down the road toward Columbus. The big car rounded a curve and emerged from pine forest into a broad swath of pasture. Mercer gripped the edge of the seat until his fingers ached, all instincts crying out against driving straight across an open area instead of creeping around the perimeter. He ran an expert eye along the tree line. No snipers; not even Billy Wayne Martin shooting snapping turtles in his catfish pond. He thought he heard the distant rumble of artillery, then recognized the noise as the baritone growl of his father’s voice.

“.