At Subiaco I cried like the baby I was that first semester, but Mother had the sense not to let me come home. I resented it at the time, but she was right. Was she perhaps right also to discourage Rosa and me from returning to Bear Creek? Why did I want to go back, anyway?

Rosa’s presence would have been a constant reminder to the town that perhaps the rumors about my paternal grandfather’s out-of-wedlock child were true, something that my mother had consistently denied.

“It’s in the Page blood,” they would have said.

“They’re all nigger lovers.”

Coming into the outskirts of Bear Creek on 79 I continue east toward Memphis, and I arrive at the state prison and county jail facility fifteen minutes later. I sign in at the reception desk and then have to get back in my car and drive around to a separate building to see my client, a hassle I’d like to avoid in the future.

Short, round, and balding in his bright orange jumpsuit, Bledsoe does not look like a killer. We sit across from each other in a visitation room in green plastic chairs separated from each other by a clear glass window and steel mesh, and I scribble notes while he talks.

“I liked ole Willie,” he says mildly.

“I felt pretty bad when they told me someone cut him up. He was a hell of a good man. Hardly anybody would be workin’ in Bear Creek at all if it wudn’t for people like him.”

“When did they first start acting like you were a suspect?” I ask, noting how easygoing Class appears. I was afraid he was going to be some hulking monster who looked at home with a butcher knife. Instead, his hands are smaller than mine, and his receding hairline and a squint give him a mild, innocent expression that a jury can’t help but notice.