Moonlight fell heavily on my bedroom wall. Blue and white —— like the porch light over the kitchen step at home as it went pouring through the door screen, with little dark rectangles cut out of it where the screen was patched.

Andy had made holes in the door with his Red Ryder once. He had scarcely missed Latitia as she stood drying dishes.

I imagined cicadas and cricket song, crackling with Daddy’s radio as he listened to a baseball game. The crackling of Mama’s voice when she told me that it wasn’t lady-like to go walking down the street after dark, or to go with the boys to a dead Mulberry tree at the edge of town, looking for ghosts.

Daddy clicked the radio dial to “OFF” and sat smiling at our adventures. The Mulberry’s twisted roots had caught on my sneakers, leaving long bleeding scrapes up my shins. He marveled at my bruises and cuts the same as he would’ve any boy’s, and I remember that I was very proud.

Most of all I remember the sweat.

How it made swelling half-circles under Titia’s arms as she plastered on a grin and shakingly parted Andy’s fingers, laying the pellet rifle on a high shelf next to the cooking sherry.

“Gentlemen don’t shoot folks, Andrew.” She had said, twisting the dishrag tight between her hands.

I remember how the sweat formed a shadow under the Baptist preacher’s heavy silk tie as he folded his hands at his waist, remonstrating the assembled wives to obey their husbands. Beads of it danced over my mother’s pretty long lashes, melting the powder around her left eye and hinting at the purple swelling underneath.

That the sweat on my fingertips left damp spots on my daddy’s klan robe when I found it in their closet. I remember the sweep of relief when I saw it hanging there, between his summer go-to-meeting suit and Mama’s flowered housecoat. I had seen it in the blue-white porch light the night before and been terrified.

I had thought he was a ghost.