he'd keep it until he found another homeless mongrel that looked at him with appealing eyes and wagged a drab little tail.
On warm summer nights when the yellow moon was riding the deep billows of the sky, Enoch liked to sit with his mother on the porch of the house. Those nights carried her back in memory to her father's home. When the night shadows hid the countryside so that nothing stood out except vaguely and in silhouette it was not hard to imagine that she was back in the Carolina low country once more. And she would tell Enoch all sorts of preposterous tales of haunts and conjures, of the vast swamp that spread out before her father's door and why no one would enter it after the moon rose. Despite her self-education Linda could not banish superstition from her mind. Nor did she try. She believed in spirits and ghosts. The unseen spiritual world was as real to her as the material. If you burned certain spices in your fireplace it brought happiness to your home. Whether there was any truth in
it, doesn't matter. It made the room fragrant
