There was talk that maybe he might soon be in a position to employ others like him, to train them and pass on his skills to them. And he was a good-looking man, too, a “nigger buck” as Little Tom had once described him, except that, when he said it, Little Tom had been cradling the hunting rifle that used to hang above his bar, and it was clear what being a buck implied in Little Tom’s world.

So they hadn’t needed much of an excuse to move against Errol Rich, but he had given them one nonetheless, and before the week was out, they had doused him in gasoline, hanged him from a tree, and set him alight.

And that was how Errol Rich became the Burning Man.

Errol Rich had a wife in a city a hundred miles to the north. He’d fathered a child with her, and once each month he would drive up to see them and make sure that they had what they needed. Errol Rich’s wife had a job in a big hotel. Errol used to work in that hotel, too, as a handyman, but something had happened-that temper again, it was whispered-and he had to leave his wife and child and find work elsewhere. On those other weekend nights when he was not seeing to his family, Errol could be found drinking quietly in the little lean-to out in the swamps that served as a bar and social hub for the coloreds, tolerated by the local law as long as there was no trouble and no whoring, or none that was too obvious. Louis’s momma would sometimes go there with her friends, even though Grandma Lucy didn’t approve. There was music, and often Louis’s momma and Errol Rich would dance together, but there was a sadness and a regret to their rhythms, as though this was now all that they had, and all that they would ever have. While others drank rotgut, or “jitter juice” as Grandma Lucy still called it, Louis’s momma sipped on a soda and Errol stuck to beer. Just one or two, though. He never was much for drinking, he used to say, and he didn’t like to smell it on others first thing in the morning, especially not on a working man, although he wasn’t about to police another’s pleasures, no sir.