AFTER the State of North Carolina electrocuted their brother, the Vine sisters drew their curtains. They lived behind them the remainder of their lives, stepping outside only to sweep their yard or buy what was necessary to keep them as they were, and then very early in the day, when few villagers and no marketers from the countryside were about. Persons who called were received by them in an atmosphere of mourning and despair.

Sometimes, passing from one grandmother's house to the other's in the summers I visited there, I would spy the sisters. I cannot remember the two separately, only in composite: a pale, bleached-out face, unrevealing and uninquiring, beneath a pompadour that must have been auburn but had turned dull and shadowy; a long skirt of some dark material, a high-necked shirtwaist, and roundtoed, flat-heeled slippers; a spare and angular figure, frail but erect. My grandmothers said that the Misses Vine nurtured their shame and kept their pride.

I know nothing of the brother except that he had been convicted of murder and delivered to the state, which in 1910, in his youth, had installed an electric chair in Raleigh and relieved the counties of hanging capital offenders. The particulars of his crime were never recited in my presence. I suppose he grew up where his sisters lived, in the narrow, two-storied white house with latticework columns in a row of residences that balanced, across the village's principal street, the store, the livery stable, and the bank. He likely attended the Lutheran or Presbyterian church, at the village's opposite edges, depending on whether the Germans or Scotch-Irish among his ancestry prevailed in religious preference. Perhaps, as a scholar at my great-grandfather's Latin school, he had come to despise authority and discipline. I can only guess at the experiences and influences of his doomed life. But of this I am reasonably certain—that for the meanness, or mania, or miscalculation, or whatever excited or tripped him into taking another's life, he paid considerably less than his maiden sisters were constrained to suffer. I have not used their real name.