I was laying across the bed Saturday evening when I heard somebody coming up on the gallery. I had been thinking about Marcus. Aunt Margaret had already told me what Marcus and Louise had been talking about Wednesday night. He had left the house the following night to go up the quarter, and I was wondering if he had gone to Marshall Hebert. I hadn’t heard anything from Aunt Margaret about it, and I hadn’t said anything to Marcus about it, either. But I couldn’t believe that he would go to Marshall and tell him that he and Louise wanted to leave from here together. I knew Marcus was bold (or crazy), but I didn’t think he was bold (or crazy) enough to take a chance like that. This is what I was thinking about when I heard somebody coming up on the gallery. When I turned my head, I saw Aunt Margaret coming in the room. She didn’t knock. She had been coming there so much lately, she didn’t think she had to knock any more. A step or two behind her was Bishop. I didn’t know who he was at first. I had never seen him this far in the quarter before. I had seen him far as the church, but I couldn’t remember seeing him on this side of the church ever since I had been on the plantation. He was a little man with a shining bald head. He wore steel-rim glasses with thick lenses. He always had on a seersucker suit or a plain white suit. Today he had on the white suit. He had taken off his white straw hat and closed up his umbrella, and now he was carrying both of them in the same hand. He had a folded pocket handkerchief in the other hand. As he came in the door, he passed the handkerchief over his bald head. I stood up when I saw him and Aunt Margaret coming inside.
“James, you know Brother Bishop,” Aunt Margaret said.
I nodded to him. I didn’t speak his name because I didn’t think it would have been right for me to just come out and call him Bishop. At the same time, I had never heard anybody call him Mister, and it would have sounded funny to me if I said it now.
“Take these things from you?” I said.
I took his hat and umbrella and laid them on the bed. I asked Aunt Margaret if she wanted me to rest her hat, but she didn’t give it to me. She didn’t answer me, either, she just started fanning with it.
“Would you people care to sit down?”
Aunt Margaret started back in the kitchen. Bishop was a step behind her, wiping his face and neck with the pocket handkerchief. The pocket handkerchief was wet and dirty, and it was more gray than it was white. I followed them in the kitchen and offered them a glass of lemonade. I wanted a beer instead of lemonade, but I changed my mind and took lemonade, too. I didn’t think drinking a beer around them would have looked right.
“Brother Bishop say that boy went up there,” Aunt Margaret said. I thought Aunt Margaret looked mad when she first came inside the house, and now I was sure she was. She was sitting on one side of the table, and Bishop was sitting on the other side. I sat in a chair in the middle door. Both the back door and the window were wide open to let air through the house.
“Yes,” Bishop said, wiping his face and neck. “He came there Thursday night.”
Then he told me everything. He told me about him shelling beans, he told me about Marshall walking across the floor drinking. He told how Marshall had gone in the yard and come back inside; how he had heard the gate slamming and thought that Marcus was Marshall at first, then how he thought it might be Bonbon. All the time he was talking he was wiping his face and neck with the handkerchief.
“He just pushed his foot in there,” Bishop said, looking at me. Bishop’s eyes looked big behind the thick glasses. “The house his great-grandparents built. The house slavery built. He pushed his foot in that door.”
Aunt Margaret sat on the other side of the table fanning with her big yellow straw hat. She was looking toward the window, not at me or Bishop. But Bishop was still looking at me. He wanted me to know what it meant for Marcus to push his foot through a door that slavery had built.
“And then?” I said.
“Mr. Marshall invited him to his library.”
“He did what?” I said.
Bishop nodded, wiping his face and neck.
“Then?” I said.
“I don’t know,” Bishop said. “I was too put out. A few minutes later the boy left the house. I don’t know anything else.”
“You didn’t hear them?”
“No sir, they was in the library,” Bishop said. “But I’m sure it was something to do with that Cajun. I’m sure of that.”
I looked at Aunt Margaret. She was fanning with the straw hat and looking toward the window. She looked like she had given up hope on everything.
“You said they had some kind of proposition?” I asked her.
“That’s what they say,” she said, not looking at me.
Aunt Margaret acted like she didn’t want to talk, so I looked at Bishop again.
“I’m scared, Mr. Kelly,” he said.
“I’m sure Marcus’s not that crazy,” I said.
“No?” Bishop said. “He stuck his foot in that door. That was the house that slavery built.”
Bishop wanted me to understand that any black person who would stick his foot in a door that slavery built would do almost anything.