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didn’t even creak, but a few cans of gasoline, and there it went.”
    I waited for her to tell me the story of the fires that had taken our homes, or at least say what a “reckoning” was, but she turned and started across the yard and the only thing was to go after her. For a second, though, I just kept staring at the house.
    The flowerbeds were choked with weeds, and a dirt lawn wrapped around the front, ending a good hundred feet before the road. The porch roof was strung all the way along the eave with wind chimes and tin cans clanking against each other.
    Standing there at the bottom of the steps, I had a funny kind of double vision, like I could see the shape of the house as it had once stood, big and yellow, three stories against a tick-gray sky, with hollyhocks and sugar-pink peonies growing in the yard. I remembered playing in the shade of the porch, lying in the peony beds, looking at the way little clusters of ants swarmed up the stems, and for a second, it was like coming back to the Blackwood house of my memory, as though I’d never left it.
    Then the picture went fuzzy and I looked away. It didn’t matter what the house had been when it was whole. It wasn’t that anymore.
    I followed Shiny out to the end of the driveway, where the turn-off was marked by a faded board nailed to a post. All it said was BLACKWOOD and then under that, WEEPING ROAD .
    Ordinary folks might be disinclined to call a place
Weeping
, but this was the lowlands, and Myloria’s house was set even closer to the creek than mine had been. In another county, they might call the whole place just that—the lowlands—or else the bottoms. Around here, though, everyone called it the Willows, after the thickets that grew along the creek, and with that in mind,
Weeping
didn’t seem quite so strange or so unlucky.
    Out on the road, the air was damp and hazy. Shiny walked with a purpose, like going into town was nothing, when I’d never even been allowed to walk down past the gate by myself. I followed her, trying to work out if the pale shimmer that hung over the fields was really the air or just my eyes. The day was sticky, and cicadas screamed in the trees.
    We’d only gone a little ways up the road when we came to a house. I knew it, but like everything else, it was changed.
    People down in the Willows tended toward the wild, the headstrong, and sometimes toward the trashy, and Greg Heintz was all three. More than once, my mama and Myloria had stood comfortably in our kitchen, mixing medicines or peeling peaches and talking about Greg and the devilment he went in for—his nasty way of chopping down trees and trapping rabbits and squirrels and all living things.
    The Heintzes’ gate was right up by the ditch, but the house itself was set far back from the road. It was small and narrow, with a covered porch, but even as ramshackle as it was, there were no missing walls or broken windows or burned places. It was hemmed in by trees, not nice ones like Myloria’s beeches, but mostly loblollies and red cedars.
    Greg lived there with his half a dozen mangy dogs and his daughter, Davenport, who was a shade younger than Shiny and a shade older than me. She’d been the kind of girl who always looked blurry and a little bit tangled, and even though she lived directly between my house and Shiny’s, she hadn’t been allowed to play with us. That wasn’t such a remarkable thing, though. To the best of my recollection, Davenport hadn’t really been allowed to play with anyone.
    Now the house looked smaller and shabbier than ever, and under the big cedars near the gate was one of the oddest sights I’d seen in my life. Instead of weeds or grass, the whole yard was just a big dirt patch, filled with a collection of coops and pens and cages.
    There were so many that at first I thought it must be some kind of farm. After all, sometimes farmers did keep rabbits and birds, and there were a fair few in the cages. But there were other things too, and