Creath withdrew a big Virginia cigar and made a ceremony of lighting it. He looked at Travis for a time over the glowing tip.

“Don’t think I don’t know what’s happening,” the older man said.

“Sir?”

“Keep your voice down.” He sighed out a plume of smoke. “You think I don’t know. But I do. The heat, the summer—and you look at her—you have feelings. But there will be none of that in this house. Don’t answer me! This is not a conversation. This is the rules. She is way out of your class, Travis Fisher.”

Travis groped for an answer, astonished. But before he could speak Liza had come back from the kitchen with syrupy wedges of blackberry pie laid out on china plates.

“My!” Creath said expansively. “This is a treat.”

* * *

It was round about midnight when Nancy Wilcox walked past the Burack house on DeVille.

She was coming from the open field where the railway trestle crossed the Fresnel River, where Greg Morrow had left her when she refused to let him put his hand up her skirt.

Greg was a pretty rough character, oldest son of a granary worker. He owned a decade-old Tin Lizzie with a blown cylinder in which he squired around whichever female he could talk into a ride. He chewed tobacco and he used what the Baptist Women called “gutter language.” Precisely the kind of date her mother would disapprove of… which was maybe why Nancy had agreed to go with him in the first place. His crudity was kind of fascinating.

Ultimately, however, Greg was not the person Nancy wanted to do it with. If she had had any doubts, the events at the trestle had settled them. She was not a prude; she had read about free love in a book by H. G. Wells before her mother caught her with it (and had the small volume deleted from the town library); she had even done it a couple of times before, with a boy named Marcus whose family had since moved west.