‘I was ’piscopal all my young days,’ she once told him. ‘Then Baptist with my husband all my middle days, then ’piscopal all my old days. I guess I’ll go out th’ way I came in.’

‘Cynthia and I will keep your urn,’ he said, ‘or we can sprinkle your ashes.’

‘I’d hate bein’ closed up in that little thingamajig. Where would you sprinkle me?’

‘How about into the valley where the train runs every day blowing its horn, and the river turns its face to the sun and catches the reflection of clouds passing over?’

‘That sound good,’ she said, thoughtful. ‘I’m not afraid to go. You might get Dooley to sing.’

‘He’d be honored.’

‘No organ back of ’im, just ’is voice. An’ you could put a little pinch or two on that place where you buried Miss Sadie’s urn in th’ churchyard.’

Beloved. He had written the word on a slip of paper and, unable to speak, handed it to the fellow who would engrave Sadie Baxter’s small headstone.

‘An’ a little pinch in th’ ol’ part of th’ buryin’ ground where some of my people are at.’

He took her hand and held it.

‘An’ you might maybe put a teaspoonful in th’ bushes up at Fernbank.’

He laughed. ‘I’ll be burning some fat on this run.’

‘In th’ lilacs. Th’ ones on th’ south side by th’ porch steps. Miss Sadie an’ me used to drag a little bench out there an’ peel apples in th’ sunshine.’

‘Consider it done,’ he had said. ‘But I believe we’ve got a while yet.’

He slipped into the room and sat by her chair on the low stool he always occupied during these visits. On the stool, he was twelve years old. Indeed, he felt some primordial consolation when he was with Louella, something that reached back beyond his earthly beginning. Perhaps because it was Peggy’s dark-skinned arms in which he slept as an infant as his mother and father drove the Buick from Grandpa and Nanny Howard’s town house out to a new life in the Mississippi countryside. It had been Peggy he ran to when his heart was broken or his knee gashed when he fell on a rusty plowshare. It had been Peggy he always ran to, except when he turned ten, and suddenly there was no Peggy to run to.

He had a moment of yearning for those days. The ‘old fled days,’ the Irish called their years of tribulation. In tribulation, there had been a certain sweetness, too, as marrow in a remorseless bone.

Louella opened one eye, then the other. ‘I see you,’ she said, chuckling a little. ‘I see you on yo’ stool. Where you been so long?’ She pressed the remote on the chair arm and raised the recliner to an upright position.

He stood and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Been to Ireland,’ he said, happy.

Louella reached for her dentures on the TV table, installed them. ‘Where th’ fairies are!’

‘That’s it. Where have you been?’ He sat again on the stool.

‘Dreamin’ I was in that little wagon, bumpin’ all over town. I dream a lot ’bout that wagon, ’bout Miss Sadie pullin’ me around, darin’ somebody to call me that bad word we don’ use no more.’

I have a brother, he wanted to say, but couldn’t.

Then again, maybe he could. Maybe he should. As a kid, a dime had burned a hole in his pocket before he learned the secret promises of saving. This far greater secret, kept from all but Cynthia and Dooley and Lace, had burned a hole somewhere in him, and it was still smoking.

‘Can I tell you something . . . that no one else needs to know just now?’

‘’Tween us an’ th’ Lord.’

Louella would be ninety years old any day. What if she forgot her declaration and told a nurse, or . . . He felt the shame of his selfishly endless noodling.

‘I have a brother.’ There it went, like a string winding off a ball.

‘I declare.’

‘My father,’ he said.

‘Oh, yes.’

‘With the woman who helped raise me.’

‘Black like me,’ said Louella.

‘Yes.’

‘Happen all th’ time. When you find out?’

‘July, when I went down to Mississippi.’

‘They some bad jokes ’bout Miss’ippi.’

‘Don’t I know it.’

She looked at him with the inexplicable fondness that came from that other dimension.

‘I met him,’ he said.

‘He’s a good man?’

‘A very good man. Tall, handsome—like my father.’

‘He dark?’

‘Not very, but yes. He writes poetry.’

She nodded, affirming this in some way.

‘His mama livin’?’

‘She’s about your age. I saw her for the first time since I was a boy. Peggy is her name—she left when I was ten, it was a hard thing. No one knew why she left, though she thinks my mother knew.’

‘How old a man?’

‘Sixty. Retired from the railroad. He was a porter, and later a conductor on a train that ran from New Orleans to Chicago. The City of New Orleans, it’s called. He once got a hundred-dollar tip from Elvis Presley.’ He was oddly pleased with the Elvis scrap of Henry’s history.

‘A porter was a fine thing to be back then. A society of gentlemen, is what my gran’ma said.’

‘He didn’t have enough red blood cells, he would have died without a transfusion of cells, so I gave him some of mine.’ Tears sprang to his eyes; Holly Springs and all that came with it had been a time of tearing apart and putting back together, and then Ireland with its own riving and mending, and now home to try and find his center again.

‘He gon’ make it?’

‘We believe so, we pray so.’

She patted the arm of the recliner. ‘This th’ prayer chair, you know.’

‘His name’s Henry. Henry Winchester.’

‘A fine name,’ she said. ‘I’ll pray for Henry an’ Peggy and you th’ same. I’m glad you got a brother, honey, real glad.’

‘Thank you.’ He had hung on to Miss Sadie; he was hanging on to Louella. All that they were he would never have again. He remembered what Peggy told him her mother had said after the cruel loss of her young son. All us got is us.

‘This is the prayer stool,’ he said, taking her hand. ‘We need to talk about you now.’

•   •   •

HE MADE A RIGHT off the elevator, hoping to connect with Dooley’s mother, Pauline. She was dining room coordinator at Hope House, and a darned good one.

Pauline’s years of alcohol addiction had been damaging in the extreme. Sammy was probably six or seven when she deserted four of her five children, taking only her son Pooh with her. Her husband, Clyde, in many ways more dysfunctional than Pauline, had taken Sammy. Kenny had been traded by his mother to a complete stranger for a gallon of whisky, a move which, in the end, was a very good thing. Jessie, the youngest, had been abducted by a psycho cousin of Pauline’s, and Dooley ended up on the rectory doorstep at age eleven. He had driven to Lakeland with Cynthia and Pauline a few years back to recover Jessie, and thus most of the worst scenarios, he hoped, had played out for the Barlowes. And thank God, there had been healing in Pauline’s new life as a believer—she had married Buck Leeper, also a recovering alcoholic, and they seemed to be coming along better than expected, with Jessie and Pooh doing well in Mitford School. Dooley would see his mother on occasion, but was reserved; Kenny and Sammy refused to see her at all.

‘Father!’ she said, standing from her desk in the small office. The tears began. There were nearly always tears when they met. He gave her a hug and handed over his handkerchief.

‘How are you?’ he said.

She smiled a little, nodded. ‘God is good.’

‘I’ve noticed that myself. And Buck?’

‘The best. He’s doing well.’

‘Any work?’

‘Comes and goes.’

‘Feast or famine,’ he said of the construction business in general.

‘How is Sammy?’

‘Hurting.’ He never veiled the truth with her if he could help it.

She nodded, wiped her eyes with the handkerchief.

‘And Kenny is a wonderful young man. The couple he ended up with—it was a blessing, as you know.’

‘So thankful.’

‘Dooley will be home toward the end of October, I’m hoping we can arrange something, break bread together.’