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whispering things to her, I thought, though it was hard to tell over her sobbing. Gospel came back a moment later and took up the other two little glasses, holding one out to me.
    “No thank you, Gospel, no thank you at all,” I snapped, and pushed the glass away.
    “Suit yourself, but I’m betting if Esmeralda Cally herself was here and had heard what we just did, she’d have a plug and call it medicinal.” He nodded at me as he set down the glass I’d rejected, and then tipped his head back to gulp down his own whiskey. Which he then promptly spit out in the sink, coughing and gasping. “That stuff is foul. How’d Papa drink it at all, I wonder?”
    “Reckon you get a taste for it, probably, same as stewed cabbage,” I said, remembering one of my least favorite foods when I was little, though I had kind of gotten to like it before we quit growing many vegetables. That work had become too much trouble for Mama.
    “Well, I don’t expect I’ll get a chance. Shoot. I wanted to be a man who drank.” He was disappointed, I could tell, but not as much as he put on.
    “Do you think we’re really going to die, or go away, or whatever?”
    He looked at me eye to eye and licked his lips, and then he nodded real sharp and looked away, corking up the bottle again.
    “It’s not fair,” I said, quiet, and like a little girl.
    “Life ain’t fair, or Mama wouldn’t’ve gone crazy, and Papa wouldn’t’ve got shot, and you would’ve had little friends to play with and all that. No, it ain’t fair at all.” He reached up way high to put the bottle away.
    And then I heard it, over the click of the bottle settling into place and the murmuring of the Minister and the softer but still-present sobbing of Jenny Gone. The creak of a step, of one of the steps in the cellar, and my head turned and my eyes flew to where the big chair should’ve been but wasn’t.
    “Gospel, did you move the chair?”
    “Sure I did,” he said. “I needed to get down there with the chickens and the goats, hang them up. I’ll cure ’em in a little while, but I wanted to get them in.”
    Another creak of a stair, almost stealthy, but somehow I could hear it. A few feet off in the next room the Minister had fallen silent, but I couldn’t spare a glance to see if it, too, was looking this way. Then I heard the tiniest sound, like a fingernail on wood: tap tap tap . Gospel looked over from the cabinet to the back door, where I suppose he thought it came from, but I knew—oh, I knew. It was the hatch to the cellar.
    “Put the chair back on top of the hatch, Gospel,” I said, trying to stay calm.
    “Move it your own danged self if you want it there,” he barked, and I didn’t even argue. I just hurried past him and picked up the heavy old thing, grunting and straining, and staggered over to the hatch and dropped it there, falling with it just as I swear I saw the blessed thing lifting, the tiniest crack off the floor. Me and the chair slammed it shut, and I plopped onto the seat and shushed Gospel, who was suddenly all interested and full of questions.
    I heard the creak of a stair, but it was farther away, and then another, probably right at the bottom, and then nothing. I got on up to my feet from where I’d been sprawled out over the chair and backed away a foot or two.
    “Do you mind telling me what the heck is going on?” Gospel demanded, sitting down in the big chair, which right then was about the thing I most wanted him to do.
    “You won’t believe me.”
    “Like you didn’t believe me about the fog?” His face was a big smirk that I wanted to slap right off of him, but he had a point.
    I leaned in right to his ear and whispered real soft, “Mama’s up and walking down there.”
    “She’s dead, Merciful.”
    “I know. All the same, though.”
    And I stood up, and he looked at me and he laughed a little, and then was quiet for just a moment. He tried to laugh again, but something in my face told him I meant it, meant