Page 56 of Blood Hymn

The ninth one is right.

I know it the moment I step back from the easel. I've been sure before, eight times this year, and been wrong every time. The first had her mouth too hard. The fourth had her staring straight at me, and Dee never looked anybody in the eye when she was thinking. I painted over the seventh at two in the morning because I'd given her our mother's chin instead of her own.

This one is Dee. Eleven years old, sitting sideways at our kitchen table with a hank of my hair between her fingers and the tip of her tongue caught in the corner of her mouth, concentrating on a braid. The light falls across her from a window behind her that isn't in the picture. I don't know how I managed that. I don't know how I managed any of it.

I set the brush in the jar of turpentine, wipe my hands on my jeans, and stand in the back room that used to be somebody's sleeping porch until the daylight goes and she fades into the dark with it.

The house sits at the end of a gravel road that stops at our gate. Pine woods on three sides and a creek on the fourth, and the nearest neighbor is an old man a mile off who keeps goats, lifts two fingers off his steering wheel when we pass on the road, and has never once asked our names. We're four hundred miles from the nearest bayou. The rain falls differently here, straight and thin instead of sideways. In January the water trough froze solid, and the first time it snowed, Silas walked out into the yard in his shirtsleeves, turned his face up to it, and didn't move for twenty minutes.

Our names on the mailbox aren't ours. They came out of the ammo can under the johnboat seat, printed on papers a man in Lake Charles sold Silas seven years ago. Mine says I'm Anna. It took me until spring to answer to it without a pause. His says he's Samuel, and nobody in town has ever called him anything but Sam.

I paint signs now. That's how it started. The hardware store on the square in town needed its window lettered, and I walked in and asked, and the owner watched me do the S freehand and hired me for the feed store sign next door before I'd finished. Then the café. Then the high school's football scoreboard. In August the library asked for a mural along the wall of the children's room, and I painted a creek through a pine forest with a heron standing in it and deer drinking and a little girl in a yellow dress sitting on a rock with her feet in the water. The librarian cried when she saw it. She asked me who the girl was. I told her nobody. Just a girl.

The paintings I don't show anybody hang in the back room. Fire over water. A steeple in a spiral of sparks. A stone wall scratched full of names, in black and gray and red. My mother at a kitchen sink with a dish towel tied over her hair, singing. They aren't for anyone. Some nights I think they're the only true things I've ever made.

Through the window I can see Silas building the fire, a dark shape against the dusk, stacking split oak in the ring of creek stones he laid in the side yard in August. He moves carefully. He always will, a little. The scar down his left side runs from his ribs to his hip, puckered and crooked where I stitched it under a vet's lamp with shaking hands, and on cold mornings he gets out of bed slowly and sits on the edge of the mattress a moment before he stands.

He fixes things for people now. Lawn mowers, chainsaws, the old man's goat fence, a church's air conditioner, once a school bus. He's good at it. He's good at anything that needs patience and his hands. He hunts in the fall, deer and turkey, and keeps a garden he pretends he doesn't care about, and last spring he found a nest of abandoned baby rabbits under the porch and fed them with an eyedropper every two hours for three weeks. I caught him at four in the morning, sitting on the kitchen floor with a rabbit the size of his thumb in his palm, and he looked up at me like I'd caught him robbing a bank.

His mother hangs over our mantel in her tin frame, squinting in a strawberry field. Beside her, in a frame from the Dollar General in town, is a torn page from a veterinary prescription pad with a burning church drawn on it in ballpoint.

It's Halloween. Nobody is coming up our road for candy. There will be no masks here, no hymns, and no water rising in the dark. There's a fire in a stone ring and a man feeding it, and the pines going black against a sky the color of a ripe peach.

I take two beers out of the refrigerator and go out to him.

The oak has caught by the time I reach the ring. He takes the bottle without looking, slides his arm around my waist, draws me in against his good side, and we stand together watching the flames climb.

"The Little Rock station ran it again at six," I tell him.

"How long?"

"Six minutes this year. The anniversary." I drink. "They had helicopter footage of the parish. You can see the foundations where the courthouse stood. The Harlowe place is just chimneys. Somebody's bought the land and is going to plant it in soybeans."

He makes a sound low in his throat that might be a laugh.

"The basin's drained," I go on. "They put the dead back. Every grave that washed out, the state reburied. And last night there was a vigil at the cemetery, on the rim where the long tables used to be. A couple hundred people with candles. They read the names."

"All of them?"

"All of them. It took almost four hours. They showed some of it." I look at the fire. "I heard them read my mother's. And Dee's. And Rose Harlowe's."

His arm tightens around me. He doesn't say anything. After a while, I feel him breathe out, long, like something coming loose.

"The indictments?"

"Two more this week. A retired state judge in Alexandria who signed off on every one of Marsh's certificates for years. And a state trooper who worked the roadblocks. The ledger has his daddy handling in 1998 and him witnessing twice." I pull at the label on my bottle. "They've charged forty-one people. Deacons, deputies, a school board member, three women from the Missionary Union. Ardis Fontenot testified that she never knew anything but supper and a candle service. I believe her."

"And the Price girl?"

"Still a person of interest. Still at large. They ran the sketch again." I lean against him. "One of the cable shows had a psychologist on who said I was probably dead in a ditch in Texas."

"I like that one."

"I figured you would."

We're quiet a while. The fire pops and throws a knot of sparks up toward the stars coming out over the pines.

"There's more," I tell him.