Delta Heat

An old man sits behind a desk in a white house on the highest ground in the county and watches a lamp burn in a window three miles down the river road. He has been watching that lamp for forty years. Tonight, he puts it out.

He owns the bank. He owns the soybean to the east through three shell companies. He owns the judge's exhaustion and most of the men in the bottom and, by way of a called note coming due on Friday, the brother of the woman whose lamp is burning. He has, with the patience of a man who has never once lost, arranged for everything but the river.

Down the river road, in the gray house, a woman who left Mississippi at twenty and built a life out west on cold rooms and billable hours has come home to bury her grandmother. She does not know yet that her grandmother's last breath was a warning. She does not know yet about the card under the river stone at the grave. She does not know yet that the man up the river has been waiting for her since the night she fled.

She is going to find out by Friday.