In a driving rainstorm, Sheriff Vick Iscoe marches Cleo Allfrey back through the muddy field toward Antonina Rossi (the Antidote), Dell, and the concussed Harp. Cleo skirts the wreckage of her shattered camera. When Vick stumbles in a water-filled rut, the pregnant tabby cat—his family's former pet—springs from the wheat at him. He fires and clips her ear, but the cat astonishes Antonina by charging him a second time, smearing blood across his Founder's Day trousers before escaping into the wheat with her unborn kittens.

Antonina notices the scarecrow on its stake in the fallowland; for a flickering instant its sackcloth face turns translucent, revealing something luminous and Other inside it. There is no time to dwell on the vision. Vick, humiliated by the Grange Hall exposures, motions Antonina forward at gunpoint. Soaked in Ania Oletsky's heavy yellow dress, she walks toward him while flashes of memory rise: the Milford Home, the straitjacket, the silenced mothers and babies, Red's freckled face, and small Gladys—Vick's daughter—whose forgiveness she silently begs as she resolves to try to kill her father.

Vick offers Antonina a deal: resume her work as the Antidote, sit in the jailhouse with her earhorn, and absorb the memories of townspeople who need to unhear what was revealed. Antonina refuses, telling him too many have seen and heard, and warns him to flee Uz. Vick threatens that the mob will tear her apart and hunt down any tall, mousy-haired spinster who resembles her, dismissing Cleo's photographs as inadmissible hoaxes.

Antonina counters that the case against Clemson Louis Dew is collapsing—Vick's deputy Percy witnessed the disposal of Mink's body, the Gordon shopkeeper can identify Vick as the buyer of the rabbit feet, and the truth is unraveling. She urges him again to run while the storm covers him. Vick refuses, confident he will still win the election, and declares she leaves him no choice. He prepares to shoot, telling her goodbye.