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Part One

IN THE SPRING of that year an epidemic of rabies broke out in Ether County, Georgia. The disease was carried principally by foxes and was reported first by farmers, who, in the months of April and May, shot more than seventy of the animals and turned them in to the county health officer in Cotton Point.

The heads were removed, wrapped in plastic, and sent to the state health department in Atlanta, where eleven were found to be rabid. There is no record of human beings contracting the disease — the victims for the most part were cattle — although two residents of an outlying area of Cotton Point called Damp Bottoms were reportedly bitten.

One of them, an old man known only as Woodrow, was found lying under his house a day later, dead. He was buried by the city in a bare, sun-baked corner of Horn Cemetery without medical tests and without a funeral.

The other was a fourteen-year-old girl named Rosie Sayers, who was bothered by nightmares.

Rosie Sayers was tall and delicately boned, and her front teeth lay cross her lips like sleeping white babies. She was afraid of things she could not see and would not leave the house unless she was forced.

The house was flat-roofed and warped. It had five rooms, and the wallboards that defined them were uneven, so you could see through the walls from any of the rooms into the next.

She lived in this house with her mother and her brothers and sisters. There were fourteen of them in all, but Rosie had never counted the number. She had never thought to.

The brothers and sisters slept through Rosie's screams in the night — it was a part of things, like the whistling in her youngest brother's breathing — but her mother's visitors, unaccustomed to the girl's affliction, would sometimes bolt up in bed at the noise, and sometimes they would stumble into their pants in the dark and leave.

Her mother called the dreams "spells" and from time to time stuck needles in the child's back as an exorcism. Usually after one of her visitors had left in the night. Rosie would stand in front of her, bare-backed, allowing it.

On the day she was bitten by the fox, Rosie Sayers had been sent into town to buy a box of . 22 caliber shells from Mr.

Mr. Trout kept a store on North Main Street. There was a string on the door that tripped a bell when anyone walked in. Colored people stopped just inside the door and waited for him. White people picked out what they wanted for themselves. There was one light inside, a bare bulb, hanging from a cord in the back. He came out of the dark, it reminded her of a ghost. He glowed tall and white. "What is it?" he said.

"Bullets," she said. The word lost itself in the darkness, the sound of the bell was still in the room.

"Speak up, girl. "

"Twenty-two bullets," she said.

He turned and ran a long white finger along the shelf behind, and when he came back to her, he was holding a small box. "That's seventy cent," he said, and she reached into the tuck of her shirt and found the dollar her mother had given her. It was balled-up and damp, and she smoothed it out before she handed it over.