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times Lily had heard the song before. Although they could probably prove nothing about Lily and Channing (Nancy Channing, he thought, would not have bothered to get whatever evidence there had then been; she had divorced him a long time ago and simply said mental cruelty but of course she might have had the evidence anyway—more variables, incalculable again), they could imply plenty, maybe prove something else, possibly even drag Martha’s name into it once they talked to Nancy Channing (he did not know how much if anything Nancy Channing had known about Martha), sink the knife in Lily, make it hard for a jury to believe she would have drawn a line, started screaming after that many times around.
    But it was possible: Lily could probably make it work. They would drag it all out in the newspapers (give Francie Templeton two drinks, she’d probably testify herself) but Lily could make it work. She would say anything now, not particularly to save him but to save them all, him, Knight, Julie, herself. It would be a sweet trial, all right; a sweet trial for Julie. Well, he wanted to save them too. (Never had Julie seemed more precious to him than she had tonight: he would consider the world well lost to keep her intact, her small bones, her sunburn, her white dress, her hair so like Martha’s, her longing for a straight-stick Thunderbird. And his entire commitment to Lily had become an unbreakable promise to protect her from the mortal frailties which were, since they were hers, his own.) He wanted to save them and he would. It was only that he was not sure how. He could sort out no clear reason, no starting point. It was the kind of letters he got from Sarah and it was Martha buried there by the levee and it was the way Knight had talked in June; it was the way he had always felt about the kiln burning, only that no longer mattered. It was as if the kiln had burned already. Everything seemed to have passed from his reach way back somewhere; he had been loading the gun to shoot the nameless fury which pursued him ten, twenty, a good many years before. All that had happened now was that the wraith had taken a name, and the name was Ryder Channing.

1938–1959

4
    A little late for choosing, she had said to Everett, quite as if it hadn’t always been. Was there ever in anyone’s life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a point when choice was any more than sum of all the choices gone before? A little late for choosing: her father had known it, even as he denied it. But deny it he had. You say what you want and strike out for it , he told Lily on the morning of her sixteenth birthday: it was one of their rare attempts to grope through a conversation with each other, deafened as always by the roar of the blood between them. (Neither Walter Knight nor his only child ever forgot that blood: dumbly, they exchanged deliberate commonplaces, phrases perhaps dry and hard enough to carry the weight of something for which there was no phrase at all. Take care of yourself. Do you need any money. Write.) You say what you want and then go after it, and if you decide to be the prettiest and the smartest and the happiest, you can be .
    “Just you remember that everybody gets what he asks for in this world,” Walter Knight repeated, making two stacks of the sixteen silver dollars he had dropped on her bed.
    “Maybe that’s not such a prize,” she said. “Getting what you ask for.”
    She was aware that the attainment of her own most inadmissable wish, to be asked to play Scarlett O’Hara in the movie version of Gone With the Wind , was not only outside the range of probability but not, over the long stretch, in her best interests. It would not, per se , build character. On the other hand her father was not talking about her character, which was one of the things that distinguished him from other people’s fathers. Another was that he was good-looking enough, despite what was called in her mother’s family “a weak mouth,”