The girl slept. The old woman sat holding the baby until the rawboned man got up from the hearth and strode toward her. She watched him with a growing apprehension.

He held his arms out for the baby, but something did not look right to Mayfield. He knew intuitively the scene was darkly parodic, not what it seemed. The man said something short and guttural, a curse or an invocation. She reached the child up to— what? Mayfield wondered. Grandfather? Father? Then he dropped the pan of water he was holding and screamed, for the man had turned and thrown the baby into the fire.

Mayfield’s scream was the inchoate, anguished scream of an animal, outraged, an appalled venting of sound bordering on madness. He crossed the room in two strides but the bearded man blocked his path. He seized the man by his face, his features going utterly vacuous with pain when Mayfield hit his cheeks, the eyes rolling upward and his breath wheezing with an audible hiss.

Mayfield had his thumbs locked in the soft depression of the man’s throat when the door opened behind them. The black man leapt upon Mayfield, fairly swinging on the thick arms to disengage them. The man with the muttonchop whiskers stumbled backward wildeyed, arms flailing, ceased when he remembered the knife.

He stepped forward, instinctively positioned his feet just as the gangling black’s arms encircled Mayfield’s chest. The hawkbilled knife flashed in an arc above them, hooked the point of Mayfield’s jaw, and ripped open his throat, forming there momentarily a grotesque second mouth that vanished abruptly in a gout of blood that spewed down his white shirtfront and over the black man’s arms, and when the black released him he dropped slack and resistless to the floor.

Tennessee, 1956-1965

The logistics of chance had always fascinated David Binder, the curious inevitability of coincidence prevailing over the odds. Jung called it synchronicity, and after Binder read Jung’s book he was wont to call it synchronicity too. He was fascinated as well by the little incidents in life that appear wearing masks, disguised as other incidents; years later their significance surfaces, and sometimes you remember, with a sense of déjà vu, the keystone event that triggered the sequence. More often you don’t.

If you had asked David Binder to name the events that led him to the Beale farm in southwestern Tennessee in the summer of 1982 he might have named any but these:

In 1956, when Binder was six years old, he came in from school and went into his living room and there was a strange woman in his father’s rocking chair. The woman was old, seventy-something perhaps, and it was obvious even to a six-year-old that something was amiss. Her clothing was oldfashioned, years out of date. She was a heavyset woman in a black bonnet that tied beneath her chin, a long dress of some thick dark fabric he wasn’t familiar with, and he noted dispassionately that her hightopped shoes buttoned instead of tied. All in all she looked like some old yellowed daguerreotype from the bottom of the picture box.

It was a moment curiously electric, and he was simultaneously aware of a myriad of conflicting images. The woman’s face, unaware of him, was highly colored, almost florid, and she had rheumy blue eyes. A wisp of irongray hair peeked from beneath the bonnet. He turned. Through the open window he could see his mother in the garden, the rhythmic swing of the hoe, hear its metallic chink against the earth. The old woman motionless in the motionless chair, and the hot July day itself suddenly frozen, as if time had paused a moment to catch its breath.

When he turned from the window she was gone.

Binder was already known as an imaginative child. Nobody believed for a moment that he had seen a woman in the living room. Nothing happened to call it to mind later: no telegram, no phone call in the night, no longdistant relative unexpectedly dead. It was random, insignificant, purposeless. In a few hours’ time his parents had forgotten it; within the week he had forgotten it himself.

It was nine years before the next incident. He’d had a bitter argument with his father, both of them shouting themselves into a rage for neither the first time nor the last. All the same there was something different about it.