There was comfort in that, in hearing the pigs snuffle and the goats tear and eat, in seeing the chickens peck and scratch. I didn't want him to see me, so I jumped off and ran around the back to the woods. I'd asked Mam once what was wrong with him, why he always smelled like armadillo, and she had frowned and said: He sick in the head, Jojo. But everything else about him was nothing like Pop, was like Pop had been wrung out like a wet rag and then dried up in the wrong shape. Whenever I saw him, I couldn't never make out any sense to anything he said it was like he was speaking a foreign language, even though I knew he was speaking English: he walked all over Bois Sauvage every day, singing, swinging a stick. His clothes looked hard and oily, and he swung that stick like an axe. 'Oh Stag-o-lee, why can't you be true?' It was Stag, Pop's oldest brother, with a long walking stick in hand. Something about being alone in the too-quiet house scared me, so I sat on the porch for a minute, but then I heard a man singing, singing in a high voice that sounded all wrong, singing the same words over and over. Leonie pulled out the driveway, one hand out the window to catch the air or wave, I couldn't tell which, and she was gone. She drove a low maroon Chevy Malibu that Pop and Mam had bought her when she'd graduated from high school. 'Mama and Pop be home soon,' she said as she slammed her car door. You going to leave me here by myself? I wanted to ask her, but the sandwich was a ball in my throat, lodged on the panic bubbling up from my stomach I'd never been home alone. The door slammed and I pushed through it.

She walked out the kitchen into the living room and picked up one of Michael's baseball caps that he'd left on the sofa, before pulling it low over her face.

She dropped her cigarette into the can and pushed it across the table to me where I stood eating. The potatoes were salty and thick, the mayonnaise and ketchup spread too thin, so the potatoes stuck in my throat a little bit. When I was nine, Pop was good at everything. But I liked most of the things Pop did, liked the way he stood when he spoke, like the way he combed his hair back straight from his face and slicked it down so he looked like an Indian in the books we read in school on the Choctaw and Creek, liked the way he let me sit in his lap and drive his tractor around the back, liked the way he ate, even, fast and neat, liked the stories he told me before I went to sleep. I shook my head because it seemed like what she expected from me. She'd wiped her tears from her fight with Michael, but I could still see tracks across her face, dried glossy, from where they'd fallen.

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