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back in the girls were waiting with a hot supper for us. Cleome dished it up and Zinnia set it down and filled the cups and kept them filled. After Linus Lancaster was in his drink and draping his long self over the table end, my father took a piece of candy out of each of his pockets and gave it to the girls. Then he looked at Linus Lancaster asleep there in his drink and laughed. He laughed so long and hard that after a while it seemed like that laugh had left away from him and had hitched up its skirts and was dancing with hard boots on the table in front of us. That laugh danced so hard across the table I was afraid the cups would fall over onto the floor and break.
    “Shush now, Papa,” I said.
    He was old too early and crippled, but that laugh was something. Cleome and Zinnia both watched that laugh dance and both took their candies out of their aprons and slowly commenced consuming them. I expect they didn’t even know they’d done it until their mouths woke up into all of that flavor and reached down their throats and pinched.
    The next day Linus Lancaster took us on a tour of the house that wasn’t but that he said would soon someday be. We walked in its corridors and took the airs of its rooms. We climbed its stairs and stood in the Charlotte County sunshine on its balconies and looked out into the distances of Linus Lancaster’s fields. Come suppertime Linus Lancaster had Ulysses fetch up a table, and we broke our pork and corn pone in the middle of the future banquet room. My father went along on this tour and snorted not a whit when my mother, dangling like ivy off Linus Lancaster’s arm, would marvel at the line of a wall that wasn’t any more than some milkweed floating through a sunbeam or nod at the clean crack of the glistening hardwood floors we were none of us walking on. He even, at one point, when we were touring the airy attics, commented on the quality of the underroof and the clean lines of the ceiling beams.
    It wasn’t until Linus Lancaster was again asleep at the end of his own table, a line of hard drink and slobber curling off his lip, that my father opened his mouth and let the laugh back out again. This time it didn’t content itself with dancing on the table but went off dancing through the house meant to be towering everywhere around us. It danced up the stairs and out the windows and down the halls and across the rooms. Then it led us away from that table set in the middle of the dirt yard, Horace and Ulysses toting Linus Lancaster, my mother fussing next to them, back to the cabin where we all lay ourselves down.
    “I heard you laughing, both times,” Linus Lancaster said to my father the next day as they sat together in the yard smoking their pipes.
    “I know you did,” my father said.
    “If you were any other than my father-in-law I would whip you for it.”
    “I expect you would try.”
    “Old cripple like yourself.”
    “Like I said it, you would try.”
    “I saw you handing out candy too like this was your own house.”
    “It was either that or feed it to your pigs. And how would you have felt about that?”
    “Now, the both of you two,” my mother said.
    “It’s all right,” said Linus Lancaster.
    “Yes it is,” my father said.
    There wasn’t anything much more to that visit from my mother and my father. On the morning they were getting settled out to leave, I told them I was sorry to watch them go and hoped my husband and I could repay the fine courtesy they had paid us one of these times. My father was over next to me when I said this, and he turned and said that he was not sorry. That all he could see in this place with its fine fields and mansions and pigs was dark, and that more dark was coming. I ought never to have left them, and he had his own fault in that, but now that I had I could never come home. There was things in this world and in the other that got started and couldn’t get stopped.
    “Let me look at you now, Daughter,” he said.
    He put