"Go ahead," Juke said to her. "Tell us what he done."

Elma stopped rocking.

"Go ahead," he said to Genus, wrestling his arms behind his back. "Tell us that ain't your kin."

Genus looked away from Elma's white breasts.

"This girl and her child ain't done no sin," said Juke. "They'll be spared by the Lord. But the Bible says when a man lies with a girl in the field, his neighbors must rise up and do what's called for."

Genus's boots, still on his feet, squeaked with creek water. The only other sound in the room was the babies' suckling.

"Boss," Genus said, struggling to catch his breath, "I'd lie with your mule before I'd lie with that girl."

Elma gasped, as though bitten by one of her babies. Freddie lunged after Genus, but Juke held him back. She looked from Genus to Freddie to her father, and just for a moment, her eyes filled with tears. Only then, lowering her eyes to the floor, did she offer the smallest of nods.

That was enough for Freddie and Juke. Some of the men waiting outside said they should send for Sheriff Cleave. Some of them didn't. All of them followed Juke with their torches and guns as he ordered Genus onto his swayback mule. They held his hands behind his back while Freddie tied them with a short length of rope. The mule's name was Mamie, and the colored man had been seen atop her back before, ambling up and down the Twelve-Mile Straight when the day's work was done. Now Juke led Mamie and the mob through the yard, over the charred remains of another shack, to the edge of the field. There were plenty of trees to choose from. There were black gum and cottonwood, pecan and pine, oak trees trimmed with silver tinsel, weeping over the road. But it was the gourd tree they settled on—not a real tree at all but a post shooting up over the sorghum cane, four strong wooden beams crisscrossed at the top like the telephone poles in town. From the beams hung a dozen gourds, bleached white from the sun—birdhouses for the purple martins, who were said to keep the mosquitoes away. Elma had carved and dried and hung the gourds herself, close enough to each other to make a dull kind of music, like wind chimes, though there was no wind tonight.

"It's all right, old girl," Genus could be heard to say. "The Lord will take me. The Lord will have me."

Freddie looped another rope over one of the crossbeams and the noose around Genus's neck. Genus didn't struggle, and Mamie didn't have to wait for Juke's tap. Spooked by the dark, or the crowd, she dashed out as soon as she was free of their hands. Genus dropped, his neck snapping like a chicken's, his body falling limp. The martins shot out of the gourds, black as bats, and for a moment formed a single shadow above them.

From the tin in the chest pocket of his overalls, Juke took a grab of loose-leaf chaw and arranged it along his gums. He did this while cradling a shotgun, a Winchester twelve gauge, as easily as the mother on the road had held the baby to her breast. Genus swung in the July night, the moon near full above him. He was tall, and Mamie was not. The toes of his boots hovered but a foot from the ground.

Then one boot, heavy with water, dropped into the dirt. Freddie let go of his rifle and picked up the boot and inspected it. "That real alley-gator?" He slipped the other one off, carefully, as though not to wake a sleeping lover, and then he unlaced his own shoes. They fit the dead man snugly. The boots were loose on Freddie, but they looked fine. "Now we square!" he said, doing a little dance, and the people cheered.

The children threw the first stones. Then some drunk fool with a twenty-two started unloading bullets. It was Tom Henry, or it was Willie Cousins, or it was Willie Cousins's cousin Bill, or it was all three shooting wildly, into the sky, into the empty sockets of the gourds, the post and the body receiving the bullets with the same soft thud. "Ain't no nigger lover now, ain't you, Juke?" The next day, and for weeks afterward, boys would come to the gourd tree to run their fingers over its scars, to collect the stray bullets at its feet.

Excerpted from The Twelve-Mile Straight by Susan Henderson. Copyright © 2017 by Susan Henderson. Excerpted by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.