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the stream dried to a trickle, then stopped. Mike’s perverseness became as accepted a fact as her motherlessness.
    By the time she was eight or nine, her companions were a phalanx of little black boys from Lightning and Rusky’s sweet-tempered J.W., with whom she had grown up. With her band she roamed the deep woods behind the Winship house after school, swung from the dizzying heights of Indian Cave on a kudzu vine, caught crawfish in Turnipseed’s Creek. When, at her puberty, John Winship intervened and forbade further association with the boys on the grounds that “it just won’t do; it would break your mother’s heart,” Mike disappeared into the depths of the Lytton branch of the CarnegieLibrary in her free time, and only came out to eat and sleep. John Winship’s quiet household bowled on into the 1960s.
    As Mike grew, Rusky aged rapidly and her blood pressure and “the sugar” grew more virulent, and the fall Mike turned twelve Rusky settled with a sigh of relief into the tiny tenant house at the back of the Winship property, which had long stood vacant, and thereafter came to the big house only until midafternoon. J.W. faded away, too, into the shabby concrete-block Negro high school on the edge of Lightning, and pretty, feminine DeeDee became a fussy little mother to her rebellious, changeling younger sister and a ghastly miniature wife to John Winship. It pleased and involved her endlessly to putter officiously with home economics and meals and little sugary treats for her father, and she never failed to lay out the least objectionable and most coordinated of Mike’s outfits for her to wear to school each morning, clicking her tongue wearily like a woman three times her age when Mike refused to put them on. Rusky did the actual cooking, leaving a meal for DeeDee to heat up each evening, and she did the heavy cleaning and washing and ironing, but John Winship was charmed and soothed with his fluttering surrogate, and praised her ministrations with all the rusty animation left to him. He did not precisely ignore Mike; he took her, with DeeDee, to Sunday school and church each week, and asked her with remote courtesy at least once during each evening what she had done that day and what she had learned in school, but since she always answered, “Nothing,” and since he knew that if fresh trouble broke over her duck-down head he would eventually learn of it from DeeDee, he did not try to peer beneath the smooth, closed surface of her angular little face. It would have seemed like prodding at a mirror.
    DeeDee Winship could have had any young man shelaid her blue eyes on, so Elizabeth Taylor-pretty was she, but from eighth grade on she had gone exclusively and inexplicably with Eugene Wingo, widely known as Duck, a handsome, hulking boy from Lytton’s first and only trailer park on the outskirts of town. From the very beginning of their alliance Rusky had pronounced him “sorry” and the only time Mike ever saw the gleam of tears in John Winship’s eyes was at DeeDee’s wedding to him directly after their graduation from Lytton High. DeeDee dutifully settled into a new semi-wide with Duck and began classes at the nearby state teacher’s college, and Duck took his bursting calves and biceps, his Robert Mitchum hooded eyes and sliding grin, and his reputation as the best Triple-A fullback in the state’s recent history into sales. For that first year, he sold Ford pickups and John Deere tractors to every Lytton Blue Devils supporter in a fifty-mile radius. It was a job with a high gratification quotient, but certain limitations as to future. The dealership inevitably ended up with more pickups than the Blue Devils had supporters. Duck moved on into hardware.
    DeeDee got her degree in elementary musical education six days before her first child was born. Duck got his fourth job, selling marine fixtures 350 miles inland, the day after the baby arrived. They named the child John Winship Wingo, and John