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than it should have, as though time had slowed to molasses. She watched on, removed and dispassionate, as the remaining men succumbed to panic. Sam Jessel jumped away from the bouncing head only to bump up against the cross and set fire to his robes. He flailed around screaming, calling for help, but there was no help to come. Lucille turned away from the sight.
    Lucille deafened her ears to the sound of Jessel’s cries. She felt the power that had held her here begin to loosen its grip. She started walking toward her house, for the first time favoring her wounded foot.
    She ignored the sound of Wayne Sleiger as he screamed the Lord’s Prayer. His words were cut off after “thy will,” anyway. If Wayne called out for mercy before his death, Lucille didn’t hear it.
    She went inside her house and pulled out the cardboard suitcase she’d used for her honeymoon. She didn’t have a car, and the stationmaster knew better than to sell her a ticket. A powerful man, a man who believed he owned her, Ruby’s own father had forbidden her to leave town. But while Lucille knew she’d never make it out of Conroy, Mississippi, she’d be damned if her babies lived and died here.

TWO
    Willy shifted his weight, trying to find a place on Mrs. Jones’s lap where her bony knees wouldn’t poke him.
    “Stop squirming,” the beanpole of a woman complained.
    Willy’s mama looked back over her shoulder at him. “You sit still,” she said, her voice quiet and tired, but still firm enough to make him settle.
    Pastor Williams’s Nash Suburban was built to provide a comfortable ride for five, maybe six if those passengers didn’t like pie.
    Most mornings, other than Sunday, the car was already filled to its limits, its wood sides straining to contain the pastor’s wife, Willy’s mama, and four other ladies, three of them widows like his mama, one of whom liked to say she was a good as widowed, what with a bone-idle husband like the good Lord had given her. These women, like his mama, lived outside Conroy, but worked as maids in town. There was no bus that ran out that far, so Pastor Williams took it upon himself to make sure they would have transportation from their homes, some as far as five miles from Conroy, into town where they earned their living. Mrs. Williams, the pastor’s pleasant but ample wife, always rode along for propriety’s sake, sitting between the preacher and whichever of the women he picked up last that day.
    “It’s too hot for my jacket,” Willy grumbled. His mama had dressed him and Joy in their best, Willy in a suit and tie, Joy in a frilly white dress with a blue cardigan. They’d worn the same outfits to Sunday school just yesterday. At church, he’d been roughhousing with Joe Turner till Mrs. Wiley, their Sunday school teacher, threatened to make them go out and cut a switch. They settled down right fast then.
    Yesterday, he never imagined that today he’d be leaving home.
    “You keep that jacket on,” his mama said. “Don’t you take that thing off till you up with your auntie, you hear me?”
    “Yes’m,” he said. Last night, after she joined them at the pastor’s house, he’d watched as she undid the lining and slid an envelope inside before repairing the jacket. She’d told him the envelope held a letter for his auntie, and what money she had to help take care of them till she could send more. His mama said they’d only be away a couple of weeks, but he knew full well she’d put everything she’d set aside in that envelope.
    Most mornings this time of year—at least since his daddy had been gone—Willy and Joy said good-bye to their mama, and waited for the pastor and his wife to come back and carry Willy to school, and then bring Joy back home with them. Willy wouldn’t be going to school today. He wouldn’t be going to school for a little while, his mama said, at least round here.
    A bump in the road caused him to bounce on Mrs. Jones’s knee and hit his head on the roof.