“Just before Christmas too,” said the fat one, voice somber, reproachful, seeking to elicit guilt even as the demeanor of his partner threatened. Good cop, bad cop, I could not help thinking.

The angular deputy passed by me, peering searchingly, meaningfully, into my face, and I cast down my eyes with a humble nod so as to appear in full compliance.

“Y’all best tell us where that Jesus is at,” he repeated, moving on, addressing no one in particular.

It was in that same moment, as if in answer to this incessant line of questioning, that the house itself responded—or seemed to—for all the lights in the place died simultaneously, sentencing everyone en masse to a blind placelessness that rendered us at once equals and strangers to one another.

An anonymous, democratic orchestra of stumbling, crashing, and curses filled the dark as young suspects made for hastily imagined exits while the deputies likely fumbled for their flashlights.

My proximity to the window made my own departure perhaps the most convenient of any in the place. Having located its sill, I stepped up onto it and then hopped out into the external lesser darkness, hitting the ground—some ten feet below, I’d guess—without so much as a stumble.

I landed in back of the house where a dim stretch of yard lay before me, framed on three sides by the deeper darkness of woods. It was the darkest patch of trees off to the left I made for, which, had there been more light, I would have recognized as the thick grove of old Virginia pines and cedars Willy Mann’s Uncle’s Woman had refused to have cut. Yet I knew it as such when sticky pine resin and cedar burrs greeted my hands and face as I entered the stand, slowing my progress and dissuading me from venturing too far in.

I turned to look back at the house, mist from my mouth floating across my field of vision. Noting that I hadn’t been followed and that the structure was still possessed of a yawning blackness, I resolved to have a seat at the base of one of the cedars, head just below its bushy, prickly lower limbs. Hardened as they were from farm labor, my palms nonetheless gathered more burrs when I placed them on the ground so as to scoot to a slightly more suitable position, back against the trunk.

I have to say I was not uncomfortable then, sitting in the cold, dark, venerable grove Willy Mann’s Uncle’s Woman had found unable to timber—whose solemn silent presence had ushered her away—waiting to see what would happen next.

Eyes having adjusted to the dimness of a post-midnight quarter moon hindered by periodic cloud cover, I watched as thin shafts of light began to dart about inside the house, the deputies, I assumed, having located and ignited their flashlights at last. There was the sound too, from in front of the house, of slammed vehicular doors, awakening engines, and a barely audible fragment of voice here and there as my peers effected their getaways.

At last the irregular light show inside ceased and there occurred a final slamming of doors and starting of engines, before all was abandoned to darkness and silence. I kept as still as I could beneath the cedar, barely breathing, eyes fixed on the hulking blackness of the house. It was very cold—probably in the lower teens—and I had left my jacket inside, but I smiled in the dark, not knowing why I was happy, just knowing that I was. I sat there for a long time beneath those elder evergreen trees which had driven away Willy Mann’s Uncle’s Woman, alternately studying the house and the sky, enjoying myself in a way that was all mine. I tell you, I could have sat there the whole night and cannot recall anymore what drove me to elect not to. Cold has never much troubled me.

***