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his mouth with a pair of tongs, said, “We’ll see.”
    We did. You could see those pigs turning the greensward to filthy froth from the room where Linus Lancaster kept his bed. He liked to sing a little after he’d been in at me. He didn’t sing loud enough but what you could still hear those pigs snuffling and snoring in their pens. In the morning, maybe after he’d been at me again, he liked to go out and stand at the fences and sing and consider them.

They don’t all call me Scary here. That’s just the younger ones. The name I gave when I came up out of Kentucky and floated my sorry way north was just Sue. I gave them that name, which had been the name of that schoolteacher who had let me lead the lesson, because it was the first thing that came into my head when they asked me what I was called. I had not made any plan. I had not thought it through. My own old name had not come to me when I was asked, and after a minute the other one had. So it was Sue this and Sue that for my first years here, and then one of the little ones had come up on me when I was on my knees scrubbing and had my skirts lifted up over my ankles and saw the dark red ring just above my ankle bone. She saw it and said, “What is that?”
    “That is what you call a scar,” I said.
    “It looks all scarry,” she said.
    “That’s just right, it is all scarry,” I said.
    And I thought we had left it there. Only the next time I saw her she called me Scarry Sue, and some other of my employer Lucious Wilson’s children heard it and thought his sister had said Scary or liked it better that way, and then they were all calling me that.
    “Tell us a story, Scary Sue,” they would say. “Scary Sue, fetch us some of that popcorn. Scary Sue, give us our bath.”
    Lucious Wilson would have put a stop to it, but after the second or third time I heard him scolding I told him it didn’t matter and that I wasn’t hurt by it. He ought to let them call me what they wanted—they didn’t mean any harm. I told him I knew something about what harm was, and it didn’t have anything to do with his children and some name.
    He didn’t argue. He knew about the scar on my ankle and he knew that whenever it started to settle I would give it a few fresh licks. He had walked in on me going after it one sunny Saturday not long after I had arrived. Had stood watching me let it bleed into my sock. Stain the bedsheets. Feed the floors. Drip through the tunnels. Head to the underparts of Kentucky. Talk to the worms.
    “What are you doing, Sue?” he had asked.
    “Traveling, Mr. Lucious Wilson,” I had answered.
    “All right,” he had said.
    Scary wasn’t wrong.

2.

IT WAS OF A MORNING that Linus Lancaster was singing and conducting his considerations out by the pigpens in nothing but his work britches that my mother and my father came rolling over the stone bridge in the old cart they’d driven down the long road from Indiana. They rolled slow down the lane and took the look of the place and then a look at Linus Lancaster in his work britches standing barefoot beside the pens. I was in the kitchen with the girls and came out and watched Linus Lancaster pull his hands out of his pockets and approach the cart and call out a greeting and help my mother, his second cousin, down. You would have thought by the way he offered his bare arm to my mother and the way she took it that he was leading her to the big house he’d bragged about to her. My father came crippling on along behind them, and you didn’t have to squint to see what he thought of where the road and river crossing down from Indiana had taken him.
    They had come for a look-see and a visit with their son-in-law and his wife, my mother said when Linus Lancaster had conducted them through the door and sequestered them at the table in the kitchen.
    “You have apprehended me in my morning wear,” Linus Lancaster said.
    He had sat down with them at the table in his bare feet and britches. He was nothing