who had it. You were colder than all of us, colder than Maynard, colder than me, perhaps because of what was done to you. But you had the makings, and I do believe that in some other time our separate acres could be swapped and perhaps there I might be the colored and you might be the white.”
I heard this the way an old man hears a young unrequited love attest to their true feelings from that bygone era—the mix of trivia and nostalgia, an ancient wound reawakened by the rain, the ghost of a feeling, once deeply held, but now only a stray memory from what seemed another lifetime.
In this lifetime, I looked over and saw my father now nodding into sleep. I took my glass, still half-filled with cider, and walked upstairs to his second-floor study. In the corner, I saw the mahogany highboy, the same one I repaired only a year ago. I took a drink of cider, set it on the windowsill, and then opened the drawers. Inside I found three thick bound ledgers. For the next hour I slowly pored over these ledgers, committing them to memory. Together they painted a picture, a grim picture, that would help fulfill my mission, according to Corrine, to ascertain the situation here at Lockless.
When I was done, I closed up the ledgers and returned them to the highboy. I thought of Maynard, when we were young, rifling through our father’s things. I laughed to myself and then opened a second drawer. Within it, I saw a small but ornate wooden box. I thought to pull the box out and open it, but thinking again of Maynard, I remembered how shameful I felt when he pilfered from our father. So I shut the drawer and walked back downstairs. My father was snoring lightly. I roused him to take him up to bed.
He said, “I got plans for you, boy. Plans.”
I nodded and moved to help him out of his chair. But he looked at me like a man condemned to death, as though he feared that if he slept he might never again awake.
“Tell me a story,” he said. “Please, any story.”
So I withdrew and sat in my own chair, leaned back, and I suddenly felt myself grow old right there, because I saw before me the room come alive with the specters of Caulleys, Mackleys, and Beachams, and all the families of Quality who’d once bid of me a story, a song. No, I thought. Not far enough. And I, with my words, took my father’s hands, back through the ages, back to the stone monument in the field, back to the Bowie knives, the catamounts and bears, the tasking men hauling stones and breaking creeks, back to the time of our progenitor.
* * *
—
The next day Hawkins drove Corrine over for one of her visits from Starfall, where she had installed herself for some time. Bryceton was mostly left to Amy and the few other agents who could keep up the cover. On these visits, I would confer with Hawkins and deliver any intelligence I had discerned. And so it happened on that day. We walked down to the Street, where the cabins were mostly abandoned, thinking this would provide us the privacy we needed. I maintained a hope of seeing Sophia, though I had begun to keep her at arm’s length. I was divided against myself. The intense feelings of only a year ago had not dulled, indeed had grown, so that knowing she was right there at Lockless, but not with me, made me sick. And that sickness scared me, for I now knew that some part of my welfare was in the hands of someone who held her own secret motives and designs.
“So what you think?” Hawkins asked.
We were seated in one of the abandoned cabins closest to the main house, and farthest from Sophia’s. We could see the tobacco fields, now mostly left to fallow.
“Not much,” I said. “Not much at all.”
“Yeah, I know,” Hawkins said, looking over the fields. “Place look dead.”
“The whole county feels dead. Nobody come to see him. No afternoon tea. No big dinners. No socials.”
“Yeah, not sure how Corrine think this gon fit into anything. Maybe it’s good she ain’t marry that boy.”
“I will tell you this, she would be marrying into a pile of debt.”
Hawkins looked over at me. “How much debt?” he asked.
“Well, there ain’t been much intelligence to be gleaned from society on