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his hands on my shoulders and looked at me. He leaned his head close to mine. I leaned my own closer to his.
    “Follow us,” he said. He whispered it.
    I leaned closer.
    “Follow us away on out of here, Daughter. I will slow the wagon. Follow us like you did when you tracked me through the wood.”
    My father had my own green eyes and I could see mine in his, and we leaned there together as my mother and Linus Lancaster stood off at some distance and looked on. “Hey, Papa,” I thought. I could hear myself holler it. But I heard it as if I was standing down at the bottom of a hole or somewhere under the waters, and hadn’t I just those days before stood there and watched my holler from the past die its death on the forest floor?
    “I am married now, Father,” I said.
    “And living in that fine house,” he said.
    I did not answer this. We stood on there in the morning light a minute, then he turned.
    “All right, I’ve had my look,” he said, then clumped up into the cart, and my husband, Linus Lancaster, handed up my mother and nodded at my father, and they clicked the horses and went off back over the stone bridge. I never saw one nor the other of them again.

There is a boy here works for Mr. Lucious Wilson who can sing. They say he came out singing and never quit. He has sung at the county fair and won himself an invitation to sing at the statehouse. I have heard him at the church, which is one of the places I do still go. They like to all go quiet now and again so he can have the show. It is a pretty kind of singing and a pleasant kind of voice. But when I lie down at night and think of that singing and the kind of singing Linus Lancaster could do at that place in Kentucky I know that the boy they stop the piano at church for here doesn’t have half the gift. Linus Lancaster could sing the skin off of one back and onto another. He told it once when a tinker was visiting and they were at the bottle that in Louisville he spent his share of time on the stage making speeches and singing, and that there were fine ladies of the neighborhood in attendance who had cried when he had done so. I did not cry when I listened to Linus Lancaster sing. But I listened and knew I was hearing something.
    There were times after supper when Linus Lancaster would push back from the table and make a sound in his throat and give a curl to his lip, and we all knew it was time for a song. Horace and Ulysses could strum and thump when they were on their own time, and Cleome liked to clap and Zinnia to sing in a slow, private way, but it was all quiet when Linus Lancaster got the mood on him to sing after his supper. No one in that house made a sound when Linus Lancaster pushed his chair back and sucked in his air and blew that trumpet out of his throat. There were no uh-huhs or mmm-hmms, and if there was a drop of sweat tickling some lip or a fly biting at some neck the song was over before any of us moved.
    Someone once told me when I was still living in my father’s house that I had a handsome voice and ought to shepherd it and not keep it to myself. After that I sang a little louder at our church and took a turn at a solo at my school. One night my first winter in Kentucky I thought to share that solo with my husband when that singing mood came upon him after his supper. He had not favored my story, but I thought he might favor my song. I sang and reckoned it was fair crooning, but Linus Lancaster’s fist came out so fast I thought an angel of the Lord had flown down off his shoulder to bestow its wroth. Even after Cleome, who was standing in attendance, had helped me back to my bench and my husband had wiped his hand and recommenced singing I thought this. I thought it then and now here it still sits. Funny how you can once think a thing then never see the tail of it.
    My father liked to say God lived in the lightning and look out below. He told it that in the battles he fought when there was lead or arrows in the air the boys