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over.”
    “You
might
could?” Vera said, sounding a good bit like a kitten.
    “Yeah, I think I can. I think I can.”
    And Vera said, “You’re the little engine that could, Kent.”

TWELVE

    A SHORT, neat-looking fellow who always wore clean clothes, even in the field, and liked to keep a good hat, John Burns lived over on the Young place. He’d never been out of Loring County, except for one time when old Walter Young carried him over to Sunflower to pick up a tractor.
    The Saturday-night dances were held at Burns’s. Four or five men would seine bait before sunup, then get out there on the banks of Lake Loring with those cane poles and catch as many fish as they could before they had to hit the field. That evening, the women would fry the fish in iron skillets over an open fire, using last winter’s hog lard. They’d make corn bread, too, and mix up some cabbage slaw. They did the cooking out behind the house, so that old man Young wouldn’t see them if he happened to take a notion to drive down the road.
    “White folks know the nigger’s got to eat,” John Burns always said, “but they hates to see him having a good time doing it.” About the only thing they disliked more than seeing colored people having a good time, he claimed, was hearing them having it. So he never let the music start till people had eaten their fill and downed a few drinks, and that was past the white folks’ bedtime.
    L.C. was sitting in the dark on an overturned washtub, a tin plate in his lap and a tin cup in his hand, a warm feeling spreading from his stomach into his arms and legs. He’d eaten a mess of fish already and meant to eat more, so he stood up and walked past the fire.
    They’d pulled the back door off Burns’s cabin, propping it on a couple of spindle oil drums and laying out the food. He picked at a piece of fish, pulling a hunk loose to see whether or not the flesh had a yellow tinge.
    “What you doing, L.C, looking for the hook?” The woman who’d spoken, a big dark-skinned lady named Doll, had her arm around John Burns, who was a good six or seven inches shorter than she was.
    “He ain’t looking for no fishhook,” Burns said. “He trying to see is that one of them gasper gools.”
    “Scared of ’em, is you, honey?”
    The flesh was white and flaky, most likely striped bass, and L.C. dropped it onto his plate. “Ain’t a question of being scared of ’em,” he said. “I just don’t like the taste.” What he didn’t say, because Burns would have laughed at him, was that he didn’t believe in catching gasper gools to begin with. When a boat passed over them in shallow water, they’d rub those little horny knots on their foreheads together, making
gooling
sounds, like they were trying to tell you something.
    He often felt like animals or trees were speaking to him, sometimes even a place. When he was little, old folks’d talked about something bad happening in a patch of low ground out by Payne’s Deadening, sixty or seventy years ago. Nobody ever told him exactly what it was, but he’d been over there many times, and though he’d never seen anybody, hadn’t seen anything alive except a few hundred mosquitoes, he never felt alone when he stood on that ground.
    Wherever he was, he couldn’t help wondering who’d stood there before him. Once, when he was a little boy and they lived on the Stancill place, his momma’d found him barefoot in a cotton field, staring down at his feet as they disappeared in the rich black gumbo; he felt as if he’d grown right out of the dirt itself, as if the land, rather than a man whose face he’d never seen, had fathered him, so he asked his momma to name everybody she’d ever noticed picking cotton in that field.
    “Don’t get dreamy,” she scolded. “Folks gone think you just lazy. They don’t know you got nothing to dream with.”
    He had plenty to dream with. What he lacked was the means to turn the dream into a fact. He thought his hands might