What they called a church was a room added onto a small house and you could see into the kitchen from the front door. The young pastor the oldest son of the family that built it. In that morning's congregation sat two women whom he slept with and he stood in the doorway of the church and smoked and thought about the women. He lit his second cigarette on the first and turned his face to the firmament and filled his vision of it with pale smoke. He was a thinly mustached and impatient man who had to be talked out of absconding the town regularly. He looked out over the country that abided his ambitions and wondered if his first child would change him. Finally he placed a kerchief over his face and went inside.

In a back bedroom of the house, Joe cut the boot from the man's swollen and gangrenous foot. They had tried to pull it off, but the man's screaming was too much, and now Joe took a pair of iron shears to the thick hide