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Winship set up an ironclad trust for him and slipped DeeDee a thousand dollars so she could afford to stay home with him for a while. It was a good thing. By the time Duck lost the marine job and took one selling wholesale beauty supplies across six states from his Studebaker, the baby was old enough to bring to Rusky’s laconic and shortlived successor, Pinky, at the Pomeroy Street house, and DeeDee was able to get her certificate and begin teaching music to the bovine, white-eyed children at the Lytton Grammar School. It was widely agreed among parents and faculty that DeeDee had a voice just likeYma Sumac’s. Mike, closeted away in her upstairs room with copies of
Look
and
Life
and her hopeful columns for the Lytton High
Blade
, came to flinch as DeeDee warbled ersatz Andean arias to the baby when she came to pick him up after school.
    A week after Mike’s thirteenth birthday Rusky died in her sleep in the small house behind the privet hedge, and all the howling loneliness that her protective black bulk had held at bay crashed in on Mike. She was inconsolable. She wept behind her schoolbooks in her classes, she wept in her room in the afternoons, before her father came home from work, and try though she might, she could not keep the tears from sliding down her cheeks in the dreadful, silent dinner hours. John Winship finally lifted his head from his folded newspaper to say, “I think you’d better go stay with DeeDee until you can control yourself, Micah. She never carried on like this even when your mother died.”
    The thought of DeeDee’s terrible miniature kingdom in the trailer, with Duck’s endless television programs blaring out into the nighttime trailer park, made her swallow the tears, even though the cold salt lump sat stonelike in her throat for days and she could not eat. Dinner, which had been bad enough since DeeDee and Rusky had left the echoing house, became torturous to Mike and John Winship alike. Finally, to her vast relief, he gave up the charade and asked that she simply bring him his plate to his study, pleading the press of an unusually tedious and complicated tax case. He ate there in silence thereafter, and Mike retreated gratefully to the haven of her room with her own plate. After she had finished the meal—a sad affair compared to the ones that Rusky and even DeeDee had prepared—she fled to the library. And sometimes, without his knowledge and against his wishes, she slipped back through the privet hedge and spent the evenings with J.W.
    The boy, grown now almost to man size, and so quiet in the presence of whites that it was nearly impossible to tell if he was possessed of a functioning intelligence, had simply stayed on in the little house after his mother’s death. John Winship had not attended Rusky’s splendid funeral at Little Bethel, and he had not allowed Mike to go, though she had pleaded and sobbed and stormed.
    “It’s not your place, Micah,” he had said coldly and finally. “You’d make everyone there uncomfortable, and it would ruin things for everyone else who loved her. People want to be with their own kind at times like this.” Mike had stayed closeted in her room for two days afterwards, until hunger had finally driven her out. John Winship did not speak of Rusky again to her for a long time.
    But apparently he did to J.W., because from the weekend after Rusky’s funeral on, J.W. appeared silently in the backyard to do yard work, and on most school afternoons he came for a couple of hours and did the heavy cleaning, vacuuming, and polishing that Rusky had always done. There was always a weekly sum of money left for him—an uncommonly generous one, for those times in the South—in the brass bowl that had been Daisy Winship’s on the dining room table. He ate his supper at the home of a cousin in Lightning and seemed to have adequate money for schoolbooks, a few clothes, and most notably a used television set. He never went anywhere but school, church,