Eight

“Whatever it is, I don’t want any of it!” This from behind the dull shade of the screen door, far and close at once, as if the distance was not great but the traveling of it would be. The voice sincere, mocking of its own authority, as if calling out to someone not so much known or expected but as if there were no alternative. As if there could be no strangers. And then, in the deadstill end-of-September afternoon heat came the rising scuff of feet pressed forward, hard-working, accompanied by the metronomic offbeat pock of a cane. Through the screen, down the length of hall, a figure made its way up toward the door. Tall and lean, stooped toward his left side where that hand worked the cane for support.

Foster waited in the deep shade of the porch, sweating where he stood, the sleeves of his open-necked shirt rolled over his elbows. The car parked on the street under the live oaks, the small oval leaves dulled with a weight of rust-red dust. The car windows down for the dogs sleeping in the heat on the backseat. Three levels of ruined flower beds and rose arbors fell from the porch steps to the sidewalk. Even the cobbles of the brick walk were twisted up and uneven from the unchecked growth. Long spears of roses gone wild climbed above the clotted honeysuckle spread over the gardens. Here and there the dead spike of some flower or the rough foliage of a tuberous plant lifted out of the honeysuckle canopy in the way some memory of life otherwise gone remains more vivid than the present. Persistent in lone shorn beauty.

It had taken near two weeks to reach this place. In truth he was not sure of the day of the week. He had bought a paraffin-treated canvas pitchtent before leaving Randolph and from there had traveled west in New York State before turning south and so had driven down through the country inland from the seaboard and the cities there but had stayed out in the sparse broken-up land of small farms and woods along the eastern foothills of the eastern mountains, camping overnight and sometimes more than one night where he could find a place to, where the farmers did not care but to warn him of fire, or in the broad upsweeping reaches of woods where there were no farmers or anyone else to ask permission for the land. In the middle of Virginia he’d turned east, away from the mountains and fall and back into summer.

The night before, after a long day on roads that were broader than the mountain roads but also ankle deep in red dust that boiled around the car as he went, on either side of the road long fields stretched out either side and he saw crews of people working in those fields, bent among crops he did not know—the soft dull droop of midday tobacco and the green stippled heavy-as-if-with-snow spread of cotton—at the end of that day he’d stopped in the town of South Hill and rented a room in the railroad hotel and ate a hot meal in the dining room and bathed in a rusted tub. And was up before dawn to walk his dogs in the moist shrouded light that even at that hour was mild, not even cool. And without food from the hotel he drove on. Crossing into North Carolina as the sun hefted itself beyond his left shoulder, a red ball huge in the pale mist that hung between earth and air as if it were a final hope of the night. Then he went down a long gentle swoop of road and up again and the sun was out, no red ball but a blaze of heat coming through his open window. And he could smell the earth then, hot and sweet and fetid. He passed wagons piled with long burlap sacks stuffed full. Other wagons with the tender cradled layers of leaf tobacco. The wagons drawn by mules. Sorrel mules. Some the color of burnt wet wood. He’d never seen a mule before. All driven by Negro men in rough clothes who would not look at him as he drove around them. After he passed each load he’d lift his left hand up above the roof of the Chrysler in greeting and then watch his rearview but no man responded and after a time he just drove. He was hot. He could hear the dogs panting in the backseat even with the windows all the way down. That air churned, gritted with dust. Fouling his mouth and nose. He considered New Hampshire. A man at work there roadside would not pause to greet some passing stranger. So it was. Still, in the gangs working the fields there were children as well as men and women and some of those children close by the road would raise faces in fast dark flashes to stare at the car and he wondered what they saw passing them by, if he was some dream or some other vision altogether unobtainable.

He crossed over a river and then some miles later crossed it again, still driving south and east. The river a deep low dark sullen thing, with none of the bright flash and quick sparkle of the rivers he knew; this one cased between banks of low-hanging trees, its color not out of the air or reflected sky but as if sprung up from the earth, moistened by the wealth of foliage overhanging it. The water oily, without obvious movement. A deceptive stillness.

Tracts of pine woods. Small rises of land capped with hardwoods. Crabbed patches of cotton broken out between the woods. Other fields, larger and more level, of tobacco. Cattle pastures with burned-yellow grass, the cattle bunched up in the shade of a single huge-spread red oak. No barns that he could see but sheds of weathered wood everywhere, high and square and small on rough raised stone foundations. Some just standing on piled stones under each of the four corners. Some chinked tight with the gauzy air of heat over them and the faint tang of woodsmoke where tobacco cured. These sheds always with a colored man close by, lounging on a chunk of firewood or bent down some feet from the building, tending a low fire.

The land was not flat but seemed so. The sun high and spread overhead, the horizons far off. But as the road turned and moved over the land the land also moved, revealing itself to be pockets and small open spreads of space. Briefly it would flatten and the fields would grow larger but there was always a backing flank of woodlot, a stretch of pines, something to crease or fold the land. As he drove on he realized what that thing was: the river, which all the land aimed toward.

He dropped down and followed the river itself for some miles, passing under a railroad trestle, a tower of creosote-blackened crisscrossed matchsticks high over him, and then the road graded up and he passed a metal sign, black letters on white for the Sweetboro city limits, and went on some distance and then came into the town itself. Along a residential street he dropped down in second gear and traveled slowly, the houses set back from the road, smaller than he’d expected but surrounded by land and flanked by trees he did not know. Then into the three-block downtown, mostly brick but some wooden buildings, three and four stories tall. It was very quiet, very small.

He parked in thin shade and found a lunch counter in a drugstore and drank a bottle of soda pop and ate a grilled cheese sandwich and drank another bottle of the pop. Only one other man seated at the counter, reading a newspaper, glanced at Foster once with frank open curiosity and then went back to his paper. The counterman a lank man with a purple birthmark over one side of his face like a burn. Foster paid his bill and left a dime on the counter and stepped into the telephone booth at the far end of the counter and folded shut the door after him and sat with the phone book. It was easier than he thought. Only one Mebane. Alexander: 61 North Main. Telephone 8459. He shut the book and put it back on the shelf.

He drove back out of town the way he had come in and spotted the house and kept on going. He drove as far as the railroad trestle and pulled off underneath where the ground was packed dark and bare. There was a ring of fire-blackened stones and bits of trash: empty soda bottles and pieces of cork painted red for fishing bobbers and tangles of fishing line and several flat-sided pint liquor bottles. He let the dogs out and they went down to the river and drank, wading in up to their bellies. He called Glow back when she started to swim out. He did not like water he couldn’t see into. When the dogs had cooled themselves he put them in the car and without letting himself think about it turned around and drove back into town and parked under shade just down from the house he’d spied out.

“Someone has misled you. You have the wrong house.” The old man stood with his bad arm leaning against the screen door to open it partway. His cane-tip poked out through the opening as a weapon. With his stoop as tall as Foster, in tan trousers and a white shirt, the sleeve of his missing arm folded up square and pinned under the elbow. The pin a little crooked as if done quickly, with long practice. Thin hair ragged over the dome of his skull. He added, “I can’t help you. I don’t know any woman name of Lee. There’s no Lees around here that I know of. No family, that is. Now, there’s plenty of boys called Lee. I wouldn’t know them all. And there might even be a girl called that. It’s a popular name. But I don’t know of any. I can tell you this though. Whatever girl you’re chasing is not here, not at this house. Someone has misled you.”

Foster studied him. The old man was dry and cool in the heat of the day. The hand gripping the cane handle shook slightly with the effort of keeping the tip free for any sudden use. His eyes were wide with a taint of wildness to them, square upon Foster. Those eyes someway at odds with the speech just delivered. His lips were dry, cracked open over broad age-stained teeth. The teeth with gaps between them where the gums had shrunk back.

Foster looked down at the warped porch boards, then back to the old man. He said, “She thought you were dead. She thought she killed you. Brained you with a flatiron, was what she did. I’d guess that little ridge up over your ear there is what’s left of that try. Her name was Leah. Not Lee.”

The man said nothing. Rocking back and forth slightly. Then settled the cane tip and stepped squarely into the door. Not out of the house but with the door pushed open so he stood in it. Resting the cane before him with his one palm flat on the curved handle. Fresh-shaved, the scent of bay rum.

“Tell me your name again.”

“Foster Pelham, sir.”

“How old are you Foster Pelham?”

“I’m sixteen.”

“And where is it you’re from?”

“New Hampshire. Is where I grew up. But I just came down from Vermont.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, how come, Foster Pelham? Leaving aside the question of this woman you’re looking for, asking after, how come now? You, sixteen years old, chasing off across the country. How’d you get here?”

“I drove.”

Alexander Mebane leaned forward a little and peered out onto the street and spied the Chrysler and looked back at Foster. “That’s your automobile out there?”

“Yes sir. It was my father’s.”

“It was your father’s. He’s not with you?”

“I’m alone. My father’s dead. That’s how—I never knew his family. After he died I found two sisters over to Vermont. And it was them told me about things.”

“What things would that have been?”

“That my grandmother was a Negro woman. From here. That her name was Leah and that the people who owned her were called Mebane. That she ran away from here at the tail end of the war. And that something happened and she hurt one of them, left him hurt, her thinking that person was dead. Somebody she called Lex.”

“And you think that might be me.”

“Yes sir, I’m thinking maybe it was. Said you were a one-armed man.”

“Did they? It’s what they call a distinguishing characteristic, isn’t it? I was a boy when I lost it so I can’t hardly recall what it was like to have both. Most days I don’t even think about it. You’re not a boy that takes things for granted, though, are you, Foster Pelham?”

“No sir. I never had the chance to do that.”

“Still, you chased off halfway down the country after something what might have happened almost sixty-five years ago. Why’d you do that? What is it you think you might find? Other than a single old one-armed man?”

“She came back here. Came back down twenty-five years after she left. Came back to try and find the mother she’d left behind. Or find out what happened to her. It would’ve been September of 1890.”

“That was still a long time ago.”

“I think she saw you that time. When she came back.”

“What in the world makes you think a thing like that? You think I keep track of every vagrant Negro that passes through this town? Why boy, on any given day they come and go at numbers I couldn’t even guess at. If I wanted to. And why would I want to?”

“She was your sister. Your half sister.”

Those old eyes slid over Foster, crackling bright, sly and flared at once. “My sister. Is that right? You’re telling me that my daddy, that he laid down with a Negro woman? That he not only laid down with one but had get? My daddy? My old daddy dead these long years and not here to deny or laugh at such a tale. That’s what you come all this way to tell me? That a man had a colored woman in his own house and that he screwed her? Why boy, get in that car of yours and drive around. Every two-three pitchblack faces you see you’ll see at least one watered-down coffee-colored Negro. What you think made them that way? Laundry bleach? They’re not related to anyone but their ownselves, their own kind. Black has all tones, low and high, but there is only one white and make no mistake about that.”

“What about me?”

“What about you?”

“What am I?”

“A Yankee is what you sound like. Other than that, right watered down, I’d say. But listen here.”

“What?”

“Who knows where you are?”

“Nobody. My aunts, I guess. My father’s sisters.”

The old man nodded as if making a point. “And where is it you plan to stay?”

“I don’t know. There’s a hotel I guess.”

Mebane nodded. “All I have to do is step back inside and make a telephone call and you wouldn’t have a place to stay. All I’d have to say is you’re a colored trying to pass as white and you wouldn’t have a room. Or, I make one other call and there’s the law to escort you out of town while they offer up a little lecture about disturbing the peace. You following me all the way through this?”

“I guess I am.”

“It’s a problem though. If you were to go over into Fishtown where all the coloreds live, there wouldn’t be a one would want to talk to you. You wouldn’t find a place to stay over there either. In fact, you poked around enough, made enough people nervous, they’d do you as fine as our sheriff’s men would. Maybe finer. I don’t know what it is about Negroes but they like a knife. Maybe because it doesn’t make any noise. Not like a pistol which would tend to draw attention. But those people, all they’d see is a strange white boy who talks funny and is poking his nose in their business. And it wouldn’t even be you so much they fear as what you might bring with you, what might be traveling behind you, what you might not even know you’d be bringing with you. Because life over there works in different ways than you’ve ever seen life work And so you wouldn’t even know who was watching you and what they might think about you. But those people, those colored people, they’d know.”

Foster put his hands in his pockets. “When she came down here in 1890 she didn’t stay very long. Went right back home—where she wouldn’t talk about what happened, what she learned. But it was something bad. Because they heard her talking to herself about it. When she thought there wasn’t anybody around. Then one day in November of that year she hanged herself.”

For the first time Alexander Mebane looked away from him. Down through the porch railings into the long shade of afternoon over the ruined gardens, his eyes glazing there as if seeking something, his thin lips working, silent. His hand wrapped around the cane handle. He lifted the cane and thumped the tip hard twice against the porch boards. Then he looked back at Foster.

“Tell me one thing about yourself, Foster Pelham.”

“What’s that?”

“As a man, are you practical? Or romantic? By nature.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what difference you’d make between them.”

“Well now. A practical man would be thinking he might get something out of all this. Might find a way to turn it to his advantage. A romantic man, on the other hand, he wouldn’t care. He’d already know what he wanted out of it. His blood would be up. He’d already have featured it all out and would go along so it fit his plans. Some kind of revenge, some kind of reckoning.”

“I don’t think I’m either one.”

“What is it then you want?”

Now Foster looked away. At the hot car where his dogs waited. Back at the old fierce man with the cane. “I just want to know what happened is all. That’s all I’m after.”

“I see. A poet.”

“No sir. I’m just after the truth.”

Alexander Mebane smiled at him then. He twisted the cane handle in his hand and the cane rose up in an elaborate loop, then back down. Foster did not smile back; there was a tremble in him that he was breathing over. Mebane lost his smile and ran his eyes up and down over Foster. The way a woman would. Or someone seeking some own lost self. Then he kicked the screen door back and stepped out to hold it open. He said, “Pawn captures bishop. I can’t stand like this. Come inside.”

Foster behind him, Alexander Mebane turned off the hall into what had once been a dining room, the table still there and the sideboards and the chairs lined against the wall but also bookcases built in between the sideboards and a pair of castered spring-backed captain’s chairs pulled up to the table which was covered but for a small bare space with stacks of books and magazines and newspapers; also a green blotter on a leather pad and a stack of ledgers. The bare space held a linen place mat and a blackened silver napkin ring with a piece of dirty fabric stuffed through it. The mat and the smudged surface of the table littered with crumbs of food.

Mebane said, “There’s no peace in this life is what it is. It’s why we stretch out our hands toward heaven. But all the same, a man can’t stop. Well now that’s not right—plenty do. But it’s not those ones we’re concerned with here, is it Foster Pelham? It’s the rest of you, that keep always hauling your way ahead, thinking if you get one more thing, one more bit of understanding, one more question answered, one more confusion cleared up, then maybe you’ll get it here on earth—that peace, I mean.”

And he turned sudden, quick, spinning the cane tip before him. Foster was close behind him to follow what he was saying. He stopped short, stepping back. Mebane smiled again at him, used the cane tip to prod back one of the rolling chairs and sank into it. He pointed the cane at the other chair. “Sit,” he said.

The walls an ancient faded mustard with the teardrops of waterstains. A persian carpet worn down to a heavy corduroy crisscross of threads lay over wide heart-pine plank flooring. Thick drapes the color of moss pulled partway back to let in some light of the afternoon, the windows behind them shut tight, the glass discolored. A crane-necked electric lamp was lit on the table. The air in the room unmoving, smothered with so many layers of odor over so many years that it had become its own thing—soft not sour, near fragrant.

As if seeing the room as Foster would Alexander Mebane said, “For years and years I had a woman in every day but Sunday to cook and clean. Then one evening I was eating the dinner she’d laid out for me and her in the kitchen waiting for me to finish so she could clean up after me and I stopped eating, put my fork right down and got up and went into the kitchen and I asked her, ‘Millie do you need this job?’ She looked right at me and told me someone had to look after me. I told her it wasn’t so. That I wasn’t about to starve to death and the rest of it could fall down around me for all I cared but it seemed ignorant to be sitting in there at more dinner than I’d eat in three days while a woman ten years older than I sat waiting in the kitchen. She sat there looking at me while I said all that, not agreeing but not looking away either. So I asked her again if she needed the job. If she needed the money. And she told me she didn’t. Since then I’ve done on my own, looked after myself. It may look poor and sad to you as it does to some others but I’m happy with it.”

“Wouldn’t she already have quit,” Foster said, “if she didn’t need the job?”

“The money you mean.”

“Yes, sir.”

“No, I don’t believe so. Some people would have. But with her it was something else also. More than habit or pride too. Some part of her had come to know herself as the woman who worked for me. Of course she took the money home with her, spent some part of it too I’d guess. Most everybody needs more money than what they have. But that wasn’t the point that night in the kitchen and she knew it too. All I was asking was did she want her time all for herself. And she did. I sent an envelope of cash over there every year at Christmas until she died three years ago but that isn’t the point. It wasn’t for me and it wasn’t for her. And we both knew that.”

Foster sat with his hands folded together in his lap. “You’re saying she felt bound to you someway and you set her loose from that.”

“See now, you’re making a leap all the way from one end to the other. It’s true that if I hadn’t done that she’d most surely kept on working for me until she died or grew too sick to work. But all I can tell you is she realized I’d had enough. What she said that night when the dishes were done and she had on her coat and shawl for the walk home, was, ‘You get sick of it, don’t call on me.’ She’d seen the mess a man can make sinking into his own self. Which is what I wanted and intended and she knew it. So don’t confuse that with either meanness or bigheartedness on my part. It wasn’t neither one.”

“I don’t know why you’re telling me all this,” Foster said. “Unless it’s part of some complicated excuse for something else you’ve got to tell me.”

Mebane looked at him, his old-man’s mouth a dry purse. The amusement in his eyes dry also. He said, as if trying it out or as if it might even be humorous, “A man is the sum of his parts.”

“Maybe,” said Foster. “I don’t know. Seems to me though, the last one who could do that sum would be the one involved.”

“Who else? Who else would know?”

“I don’t know. The ones around you maybe.”

“No. Because every man is at least two men. One of those known only to himself.”

“Maybe.”

“Listen: The same time as Millie I had a yardboy. Great big man over six feet but he could work his way weeding through a flower bed as if he floated over it. Now, he was a young man, in his thirties. With a wife and family. So it was very much the money to him. Good lord, Fred Fox, hands on him like a set of hams and black as Piney Woods pitch. And he stood pleading with me when I let him go. But all that first season, an evening or two a week he’d come by and work on the flowers out front. Push the little lawn mower out back. Trying to keep things up, keep them right. Because he knew that was how they were supposed to be. I’d go out and tell him, ‘Fred, if you keep working here then I have to keep paying you and I don’t want to keep paying you so you have to stop working here.’ He’d tell me he didn’t want the money, just keeping things up. I told him I didn’t want things kept up. Finally I warned him I’d call the police and have him picked up for a trespass. He just stood looking at me, brushed the dirt off his hands onto the front of his pants and told me have a good evening. That was the end of that.”

“So letting those people worked for you go, that was just some way of making a change for yourself. Is that it?”

“Maybe.” Alexander Mebane grinned at him, the same sly grin as earlier on the porch. “Maybe I was just running out of money.”

“I told you I wasn’t after anything like that.”

“They’s not any Mebanes left to speak of,” the old man went on as if answering a question. “Now you get down around Wilmington, below on the Cape Fear, there’s plenty of second and third cousins three and four times removed that have the name but they’re nothing to me. They’d be as much a stranger if one walked in the door as you are. I haven’t been down there since I was a boy, since before the war, and don’t expect or want to go back there, not in this lifetime. My one brother was killed at Petersburg and both my sisters are dead too; one went to Raleigh and married there and raised up a boy and three girls but not one of them’s a Mebane by name or nature and the other sister stayed right here and married a farmer called Pettigrew and there’s children from that and children of those children but except for the one crazy one I don’t see much of them either. It’s a drifting falling-apart end of the line is what it is, here. My daddy somehow picked this little plot of nowhere to hang his shingle and drag along my mother who was from Raleigh and thought she was getting better than what she got. He snuggled in tight with the government during the war and was doing fine for himself but he was a man couldn’t see around a corner that wasn’t even there. When Lee quit and then Johnston my daddy had near ever cent of his money tied up in Jeff Davis bonds that went from being a wild hope to something you could light a cigar with if you was fortunate enough to afford a cigar which he was less and less able to do. After the war, men—and men with less connections and ability than my daddy—they had to make themselves all over again. When the Yankees and coloreds was running things just after the war he threw his luck in with what was left of the old ways and it went against him and then when the Yankees pulled out and left us to sort things out ourselves he made a stab at sidling up to the Negroes but by then it had all shifted around and his old cronies were on the rise again, except they’d watched him spin and they left him right out there. Dangling. Where he’d got himself. It wasn’t anything he didn’t deserve but it was hard on my mother. There was her house in Raleigh and this place here and that was pretty much it. After she died it took everything I could do to hold on to this place, settling old debts and such. There was more than one banker who looked the other way on her account. Out of pity for her, out of contempt for my daddy. Who of course in his sensible selfish way managed to die a good ten years before her. There was still a cigarbox of those old useless bonds in his desk we found after the funeral. But that was about it.

“Not that I’ve done much better. I read a little law too and did my best, as a young man. But my heart was never in it. The law is an ideal superseded by a structure. I just have never been much of one for finding my way around a structure. No sir, I was not much of a hand at being a lawyer. I was the one always taking on the cases without a prayer or a dime, those I couldn’t win. Especially of course those are the ones can’t be won. It doesn’t matter if they should be or not. The law is not about should-be’s. I counted up my pennies and spent two years writing letters pursuing a war pension. I had the luck to have an arm gone and even more luck that there was a hospital record someone finally found in Virginia and so after those two years I got that pension. Which I can’t tell you in all honesty arm or no arm that I deserve. But money comes each month out of Washington D.C. and I take a small pleasure in that. As if it’s some balance against my dead brother. Or it could even be nothing more than plain old everyday greed. Getting what I can get. I truly don’t care, either way. But there. Just so you know. In case you were sitting up there in New Hampshire with dreams of some fine plantation, some life waiting for you. All it is, is a old bitter man in a falling-down house.”

“I told you. All I want’s to find out what happened here.”

Alexander Mebane leaned forward, the mechanism of the captain’s chair crying for oil. “What’s the matter with you,” he asked. “Don’t you have any imagination?”

“No sir. Not the way you’re thinking. All I know is, back behind my own father, and his two sisters, what happened in their lives all comes someway out of what happened to their mother. And nobody knows what that was. At least not much about it. Because it happened here. Not there.”

“What kind of man was your grandfather?”

“I did not know him. My father left there young and never went back. I don’t know if there was a problem with him and his father; I don’t think so. I think his problem was his mother hanging herself. He was just a little boy. His sisters, my aunts, they admired their father. What I can tell, he was a good man. I know he loved my grandmother something fierce.”

“Did he?”

“Yes sir, he did.”

“There you go.” Alexander Mebane paused and looked away from Foster. After a time looked back. “I remember your grandmother.”

“Yes sir.”

“Both from when she went away the first time and the time you mentioned. When she came back but did not stay.”

Foster sat quiet. Mebane studied him, the thin eyebrows almost invisible above his large eyes, eyes set out in the tight shining skin of his head. The room was grown hot as the quickened early autumn westering sun slid down the outside of the house beyond the filmed windows. Pale bars, unsteady, aqueous, slid over the threadbare carpet, a deep glow on the old heartpine planks. Foster was tired, hot, his eyes and throat sore. He watched the old man across from him as if watching some new species rise up before him. Attractive and repulsive at once, a dense and self-laid pattern of traps, some set, some perhaps already sprung. Thinking this, he took his eyes away from the old man. He wondered what was in the stack of ledgers, the pens laid out in a stand, the ink capped tight. As if they were the only valued things in the room.

Mebane gripped his cane in a sharp sudden gesture and came upright, the chair rolling back some inches as he stood. As if the man and two objects were conducting practiced ritual. “Come follow me,” he said and did not wait but crossed the room not to the hall but to a single door with no handle but a brass plate turned black against the heavy old wood. With Foster behind him Mebane turned his shoulder against the door to nudge it open and it floated back on old hinges and stuck open and Foster passed through and saw the door would open in either direction where the spring-loaded hinges would hold it open for a moment before it would slip silently shut again. They were in the kitchen. The door so people could go silent from the kitchen into the dining room and back into the kitchen again, leaving behind plates and bowls of food and then be gone.

They went through the kitchen. A big double-oven range, its cold top heavy with dust and stacked up with utensils and baskets and iron cookware and other objects. There was a square thick-planked table in the center of the room. This table was empty, discolored in places, scarred. On a counter by a sink was a small steel portable cooker with a pair of electric coils. The drainboard by the sink held a single glass, a single plate. An electric toaster was also on the counter circled by crumbs of darkened bread.

They went through an outside door and down short steps into the backyard. Ahead to the left was a square-timbered mud-chinked one-story building with a rock chimney at one end and a single window offset from the door let into the center of the building. There were no steps up but a single flat stone before the shut door. The building was raised on foundation ranks of stones at the corners. The other end of the yard stood a small two-story barn. The yard was flat here, not terraced like the front. A small garden patch with burned-out vegetables grown up with weeds. A rotting plank fence enclosed the yard, the fence overgrown with honeysuckle. As if the woven vines held the punked planks in place.

The sun a watery red egg huge in dull haze coming through the live oaks beyond the yard.

Mebane strode through the spindle grass, sweeping the cane before him, the stalks cracking as the cane-tip smote them. His gait rocking and steady at once. As if he moved in gravity unlike other men. Foster followed him up to the low cabin, the whitewash peeling off the timbers in curls and blisters. Mebane stopped before the door and lifted his cane and brought it down upon the door, right above where a hole was cut through the door, the hole worn into a teardrop from years of working a leather latchstring. The string was gone. Mebane prodded with the cane and the door swung in.

“Right here is where she was born: your grandmother. Right here is where she lived until she was sixteen years old. With her mother and another old colored woman. The three of them stuffed inside of here. Summer days it must’ve been a little on the close side. You think about it. My daddy coming out here time to time after his pleasure. Nights I’d guess. Summer nights. Hot and rank in these nigger cabins. It makes you think. He must’ve someway liked the smell. Can you imagine that?”

Foster off to one side, the old man turned at the waist to glare at him. His eyebrows working, a writhe on his forehead. His mouth twitching, some disgust fighting a smile. As a mock at his words, the situation laid out before them. Or only a pleasant hatred, extruded slowly as if long awaited. Foster did not know. The sunlight spread down the side of the whitewashed walls; the open door was a bare oblong of dark.

Foster said, “Can I go inside?”

Mebane took his cane-tip away from the stone below the door. Stepped back, rocking unsteady in retreat. As if what he could not see left him without balance. “Go ahead,” he said. “Help yourself. The ancestral home.”

The cabin was dark inside, empty, the air dull, smelling of mice and little else. The inside walls were not whitewashed but the timbers were dark with soot and old lives. The fireplace small, swept clean. The pale rectangles of a snakeskin on the rough stone hearth. A rough plank platform built into one corner, what had once been a bed. That was all. He stepped up to the fireplace and stood looking at the old rough-laid stones, the crumbling clay mortar. There was fire-stain and soot on the chimney stones above the fireplace. He stood like that, trying to close off the summer day and his own fatigue and the old man wavering outside, stood to allow the lives fallow in the old walls come out, to announce themselves if they would.

“She had that pretty bred-down skin like new saddle leather and the same green eyes as my daddy had,” the old man called. Foster turned and standing back in the shadow looked out at him. “But what you haven’t asked, is how her own mother looked. What she came out of. Where you’ve failed, boy, is thinking back far enough. There is no simple answer otherwise.”

Foster came to the door and looked down at Mebane. The old man standing now with his feet apart, the cane planted between them. His head tilted back to look at Foster.

Foster said, “What happened to her?”

“Who?”

“Her mother. After my grandmother left here. After the war was over. What happened to her mother?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“She left here is all I know.”

“Then what were you talking about?”

“Before. I was talking about before. Before any of what you even have thought of.”

Foster ran his hand over his face. He said, “I tell you what, Mr. Alexander Mebane. All this is too much for me. I’m beat to pieces from the road. You’re talking riddles around me. I got two dogs in the car likely near dead from the heat. I need to get them some water and find them a place to run. Then I need to get a place to stay and sleep. Think about all this some. All this is brand new to me and I’m trying to sort it out as I go along. You been sitting here sixty-some years waiting for someone to tell all this to. And I’m the one to do it to I guess. But right now, I’m about dead.”

Mebane looked at him. There was no disappointment in the look. He said, “Pret much everbody calls me Lex. Or Mister Lex.”

Foster nodded. “I’ll call you whatever you want. I just need to take care of myself now. Maybe I can see you tomorrow.”

“What sort of dogs are they?”

“Sir?”

“Your dogs.”

“Bird dogs. English setters.”

“Is that so?”

“Yuht. A mother and daughter. Good dogs. The one solid and the other started on partridge and woodcock. I thought, long as I’m coming down here, maybe I can find them some quail to work. Give them something new.”

From the trunk of the car he lifted a tin can of water and poured out what was left into a lard pail and let the dogs out to drink. The lard pail was half full when they started and they might have wanted more but they left a half inch of water sudsy with drool that neither dog would take. They did not want to get back in the car but he coaxed them up onto the backseat. They drove out of town into the country, under the railroad trestle and then turning where Alexander Mebane told him to, onto a narrow road, a wash of red clay dust rising around them, Mebane sitting up square and straight talking as they went.

“My brother Spencer and I hunted birds all out through here when I was a boy. Little boy too because that was before the war. In most ways my childhood stopped when I was twelve and the war came and Spence went off. At least it seemed like it stopped, like it was something just hanging there waiting for when he’d come back. There would be those short sweet times when he’d get a leave and be home a week or two and we’d try and pick things up but it was all changed and we both knew it. So what I have are those sweet sweet memories of the two of us, Spence old enough to be good at what he was doing and so serious about it and because he was that way I tried to be too. We didn’t have a dog because my mother wouldn’t have a dog around the place on account of the fleas and ticks but some one or another of the boys Spencer hunted with always had a dog. Mostly big old hammerheaded pointers is what I recall. It’s mostly still what you see around here. They’s some setters but not many. They can’t stand up to the heat as well as the pointers plus they get all wrapped up with burrs and thorns and such like that. But oh yes those fine days. Seems like most fine memories come out of dawn or evening, I don’t know if that’s just me or not. But some way even cleaner than the moment right in front of me I can see old Spencer in a stand of big pines with a covey of quail going off before him and what I recall is how he always took a little pause as the birds went up to watch them before he’d single out the one he wanted and then that gun would come up and go off at the same time like he wasn’t even thinking about it.”

“Yes,” said Foster. “That’s how it works.”

“I was never that good at it. I was all right and if I’d kept on I probably would’ve gotten better. Although there were men, still a few here and there, lost arms like I did but kept on in the woods and fields like I did not and learned how to shoot one-handed. Always got their deer. Some birds. But it was not like that for me. I lost all taste for it. Wasn’t the war so much because the truth is I didn’t see much of that business. I can’t even say it was some kind of grieving for my brother although if he’d made it back we would likely have picked up where we’d left off—but it wasn’t just him either. It was both those things and more than that. Some men are on a clear course from day one; others make themselves as they go. Then there are those few others who drift along. In the world but just barely. Who kind of nudge their way.”

“Where’re we going here?” Foster said.

“Why, along a bit, just along a little bit. This is all Pettigrews’ anyhow. My sister’s boys’ land. See that there, that stand of pine, it used to be real good in there when it was young but grown up like it is and choked out a man and dog couldn’t hardly get through it. They get around to logging it out and it’ll be some kind of good again though. Those birds they love that new young growth. There now, there’s the house. No, no, don’t pull in there, we don’t need to see those people. Just go on. It’s not far, the place I’ve got in mind. It’s a cornfield and a beanfield with a little bottom between them, little creek there in the bottom. This time of day, that’s where you’ll find the birds.”

The house they passed was set up away from the road under a pair of red oaks with low sheds and barns scattered around it. The house two stories four-square with a deep porch the length of the front, a stamped tin roof painted silver. An older hard-used Ford up under one of the trees. Fields of tobacco spread out either side of the farmyard with a scrub pasture running down to the road. All under the thin pale red-hazed sunlight, the land a muted charcoal with the light over it.

They went on past more fields either side of the road broken by pieces of woodlot; some hardwood bottoms and others pine plantations on the rising land between the fields. They went through a crossroads with a handful of unpainted rough houses with pumps in the bare dirt yards and dull-colored laundry on lines, dust rising up from the passing car to settle down over the clothes. A meager store with cracked yellow blinds pulled against sun. Opposite the store was a one-story-long building not much different from the shack houses but for its coat of white paint and the bright blue painted door set in the center of the front. From the peak rose a simple small cross of painted two-by-four. A handpainted sign: MOUNT OLIVE METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH. Negro children stopped play to watch the car pass. A man in overalls stood at the roadside, watching the children until the car was past, and then turned to watch until it was gone from sight.

“What’s that called?”

“What?”

“That place we just went through.”

Mebane glanced over at him. Looked back ahead. Straight into the spreading diffuse sun. “Crossroads. Pettigrew Crossroads.”

“What I could see. They all are colored.”

Mebane shrugged, a small gesture of head and one shoulder. “It’s all Pettigrews.”

They went off the road over a culvert into the head of a beanfield and parked there, the rows of beans stretching down the fall of land before them, the hedges of the beanplants stricken with the light and the rows between dark shadow. What was left of the sunlight came filtered through the poplars and locusts and sweetgum growing up along the bottom. Foster took the silver whistle from the glove box and let the dogs out and the three of them went down through the beanfield, leaving Alexander Mebane sitting up in the car. The dogs raced quickly, leaping the rows of beans and then calmed and began to quarter, their heads up high in the still air for any feather of scent riding along there. Foster walked slow, his legs sore from the long sitting of the drive and the afternoon with the old man. He felt awkward and stiff, the man sitting up there watching him. He wished he’d saved some of the water for himself. He guessed whatever they’d find down in the bottom it would be no brook he’d want to dip water up from.

The dogs were working the beanfield now and he let them, although he guessed Mebane was right and the birds would be over at the edges or even down in the cover of the woods as dusk came on. Maybe even along the little creek down in there. But he wanted the dogs to learn something about where they were before they ran right into birds.

He did not like Mebane. And as he walked and loosened he understood it was at least part that he felt dependent where he had not expected or wanted to. And realized this was more than the vague threat the man had offered up to him earlier but was also some threat he felt from the place itself. As if he did not know exactly who he was or how to explain himself. In a place where clearly he would be expected to do so. And walking out then in that strange soft dusk that felt as if it rose right up out of the ground he felt lost, for the first time felt truly alone, missing everything he knew. He kicked his way through the rows of beans toward the trees with his throat and chest tight and he brought up the whistle and blew two short bleats and when the dogs turned, their heads popped up high over the beans as they arrested, he lifted his arm and signaled them down toward the woods and for a moment they both turned their heads to look where he directed and then they were gone, bounding over the rows to cut across in front of him and down into the woods and he loved them so.

The woodsfloor was strewn with thickets of berry canes and ropes of vines and twisted black-barked trees with spiked thorns and he made his way down to the bottom with the dogs around him, the white of their coats and their speed a flaring brightness in the ocher of the woods. Then he untangled himself from a last vine and stepped down a short bank and knelt by the small stream, the water unmoving but clear and he dipped up handfuls of it. It was warm and faintly brackish but tasted good, tasted of the place, and this simple thing, that he could find water to drink, made him feel better. As if he might be able to find his way around more than just the woods. He looked up then, still crouching by the water, and saw both dogs locked up with their tails flagged at the edge of the cornfield above him. He called out a low whoa to them and stepped up the bank and went through the last of the trees, learning how to part the brush with his shoulders and backside rather than his hands and came out behind the dogs and paused a moment. Both of them steady. Glow rolling her eyes back to try and see him, to urge him along. Her quivering. The sun over the cornfield was gone into beetroot haze. He stepped past the dogs into the low hummocks of grass that lay between them and the corn. The quail went up then, whistling and bursting into the air, coming up everywhere it seemed in a cluster and then breaking off into long gliding separate planes.

Glow broke and went off into the corn after the mass of birds. Foster too flushed to care, not wanting to call her back. Old Lovey still on point, waiting for him. Her whole body shivering. He went up to her and stood with her between his legs and bent down to run his hands along her sides.

They went out through the cornfield after the singles and Lovey found three and Glow one or perhaps others that she’d flushed but not pointed and Foster flushed one just walking by. They could have gone on from there but the dusk was fast and deep, the woods line already forming up into a solid thing. And he was aware of the old man sitting waiting up in the car. Who had brought them to this place, had given them this thing. And whom Foster would now understand he had no choice but to trust. Not greatly, not overmuch, but some little bit. So he walked the dogs along the edge of the cornfield to the road rather than fight back through the woods and stopped and waited in the dust where the stream ran under the road while the dogs went down to drink and then they went up the short hill where he could see the Chrysler sitting out among the beans. A shape up against the blueblack sky.

They rode back in silence but for Mebane giving directions. Still, Foster did not mind—he knew the old man had not run out of words and so knew the silence was for him, some small token. He decided he needed to pay attention to such things.

Coming into town Mebane spoke up. “What I was thinking was you should eat some dinner with me. There’s not a place open to eat this time of day as it is. At least, no place you’d want to eat at.”

Foster said, “I’m all right.”

“No you’re not. I know a hungry boy when I see one. And more than that, I think you should stay at the house as long as you’re here. It’s not like there’s not room.”

Foster had let the car slow way down. It was full dark, the windows still open, the air still warm. He said, “Well, sir. I appreciate it. But it’d be better, I think, I was to stay elsewhere.”

Mebane had the cane planted on the floorboards, his hand capped over it. He twisted it a little bit but did not look over. “You’re sixteen years old, is that right?”

“Yes sir.”

Mebane nodded. “What you think, some boy like yourself he tries to get hisself a room? What you think those people going to do? With this great old fancy car? And that Yankee speech of yours. You think they’re just going to leave you be? You think that?”

“I’ve got the money to pay. So far that’s been enough.”

“What about those dogs? You going to turn this car into a kennel?”

Foster let the car drift slow along the curb to a stop under the live oaks. Small electric streetlights at great distances threw poor pods of sifted light. He looked over at Mebane. Who was looking at him now. Foster said, “They’re happy enough in the car.”

Mebane said nothing.

The cicadas were up singing. There was no other place to go. After a time Foster said, “I’d be grateful for some supper. As far as spending the night, what I’d be comfortable with, is if me and the dogs were to stay out in that little cabin. Be out of your way.”

“The slave cabin.”

“Yes sir.”

“We’d have to haul out a mattress for you. There’s a feather tick or two could be spared. And you’d want a pillow.”

“I don’t need anything. There’s a bedroll in the trunk of the car. And a pillow too. I camped my way down here.”

Mebane nodded. “You’ll need light. A lantern at least. Go on then, pull off from here. I’m about starved I don’t know about you. What you want to do is go all the way past the house until there’s a little opening off to the right, a little alley. You want to pull up there and that’ll put us right behind the house. Now, that’s a good place to park.”

They sat squeezed by the stacks of papers and ledgers at the dining room table to eat a supper of tinned soup and saltines. Mebane had opened two cans of the soup and heated it in a rinsed pot on the electric coil of the hotplate and then just poured off a skim of soup into his own bowl and filled the one set out for Foster so that Foster had to use both hands and a slow stride to carry it without spilling in to where they would eat. A box of saltines under his arm. Mebane behind him, the cane hooked over his elbow as he carried his own bowl. Then they sat and ate. Tomato soup made with water because there was no milk but delicious. He made himself slow down for the last third so it would be enough. Mebane broke crackers into his bowl and stirred them and Foster waited a spoonful or two and then did the same. It was awful good.

Mebane said, “It’s not much but it’s what I have.”

“It’s just fine. It’s good.”

“I know how sad and thin most things are compared to what you expect them to be. I haven’t answered the first question that you had. What answers I do have may not bring any satisfaction at all either. The thing is, what answers I have are my own. They’re what you get. Anything beyond that, you’ll have to look elsewhere.”

Foster took up the last soaked cracker piece with his spoon and ate it. Put the spoon down in the empty bowl and looked at the old man. “I can tell you this. Time comes you’re talking and I feel like you’re holding back, I’ll tell you.”

Mebane said, “I guess you will. I guess most certainly you will.”

He took the lighted lantern and tick mattress to the cabin and then went out to the car. He released the dogs and opened the trunk for the bedroll and blankets and his old withered valise. He went back across the dark yard into the cabin and set the lantern on the floor where it spread a small low pillage of light up the walls. He dumped his belongings on the sleeping platform and went to the open door where he could see the dogs, out roaming in the fenced yard, pale shades in the dark. There was an upstairs light on in the house and that was all. He wondered how the old man would sleep and wondered the same for himself. He turned back into the cabin and took the valise off the bed and spread out the bedroll and the blankets. And turned then to regard the snakeskin on the hearth. He only knew grass-snakes. This was bigger than he wanted to think about. He didn’t want to pick it up, to touch it. He called the dogs in and shut the door. There was a latch, a bar on the inside to drop into a worn piece of angle-wood set into the timbered wall. He slid it to. The wood was dry and smooth under his fingers. He wondered if there had been nights it had been left off. Or how easily a penknife could slip in to lift it up.

The dogs circled the room, both inhaling deep at the snakeskin. They climbed onto the platform where he’d spread his bedroll and blankets. Where they could smell him. He undressed and folded his clothes over the valise parked beside the bed, a hand reach away. Then knelt naked to blow out the lantern. And when it was out wished he’d thought beforehand to check his pockets for matches. He had some. Somewhere. He felt along in the dark and got into the bedroll, pushing his feet and legs down past the crunched-in dogs who only shifted enough to let him in. Once in, he stretched and turned and the dogs turned with him.

“Hey. Hey!” The voice low, urgent, a whisper articulated into the night so it became a thing of the night itself. The words again repeated, calling out: “Hey in there. Hey!” A woman, a girl, the voice low in her throat but quick, breath filling the words, as if she spoke from some distance direct into his ear, as if she knew him and were calling him out as he turned waking, the dogs already alert, sitting up beside him, a low-throated growl rising from Lovey. Glow barked once and stopped when he placed his hand on her back. Then both dogs quiet. As if they did not know what to make of this new place. Foster sat up in the bedroll. The girl outside was rapping on the door as she called again, then rapping on the window, then back to the door. Silent he cursed himself for not having matches, for not knowing where they were, and writhed off the plank platform with the sleeping bag held up under his arms and hopped two-footed to the door. He leaned at the door, one hand sliding up the wall to find the wood latch. He didn’t lift it but kept his hand there and bent his head close to the door and matched her own whisper.

“Who is it?”

“Who is it? You don’t know who I am. I could tell you anything and it wouldn’t make a difference to you. Open the damn door.”

“What do you want?”

“Shoot. You going to play twenty questions or you going to open the door?”

He was silent, his hand on the latch. He felt he could feel her breathing, thought she must be leaned up against the door on the other side the same as he was.

“It’s Daphne. There. Does that help?”

“I don’t know any Daphne.”

“Of course you don’t. You don’t know anything. But you opened the door, you’d know something. That’d be a start, don’t you think?”

“I don’t have any clothes on.”

He heard her laughing. She said, “I don’t recall asking you to get naked.”

“I was asleep.”

“Well, get dressed.”

“It’s dark in here. Do you have any matches?”

“To see you with?”

“So I can find my clothes.”

“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “Why don’t you open the door and for the two minutes it takes you to get dressed we can be grown up about it. How’s that sound to you, Foster Pelham?”

He rubbed his hand over his face. Tried to scrub through his hair to flatten it down into a single piece. He could feel the silent dogs behind him. He said, “How’d you know my name?”

It was quiet a moment and then when her voice came back it was still low but for a moment all the humor was gone from it. “What do you think? I just fell out of the sky?”

“I drove by three or four times this evening and that big fancy car I’d never seen before was parked out front and then when I came by again and it was finally gone he was gone too and I didn’t know what to think but it had caught my attention I can tell you that. So I rode around some more and went out to the house and had some supper and was on the porch and what did I see go by but that very car and I could see him setting up there beside you, him that never goes anywhere unless he’s dragged and then not very far or for very long. So there wasn’t anything for it but to come back over here and see what kind of business he was wrapped up in. I went up to the windows and watched the two of you eating one of his famous soup suppers, now that’s something you don’t want to get involved with more times than you have to, not if you value variety in your diet. Or meat. I’ve not yet seen that man eat a piece of meat. So I waited until he bundled you off out here to bed and let myself in and had a little talk with him. Uncle Lex, he can’t keep much from me I tell you that right up front. To most folks he’s a zipper-mouth but I can wheedle about anything out of him. I call him Uncle Lex but he’s my great-uncle which I’m not about to call him because it would swell his head and seeing how he’s already tilted off some little bit it would do neither one of us any good. He’s a regular squirrel I tell you, the same as me. The only difference is he’s a man and a old one too so people let him be instead of fussing after him like they do me, behind my back and to my face too, how I should be carted off I guess for a rest cure somewhere. Up to the mountains, to Asheville where there’s sanitariums thick as ticks although I don’t even like the sound of that word. Sanitarium. It sounds like I’m not clean enough. Or what they really want is to marry me off so I can get stuck out on some dirt farm somewhere and be as loopy as I want and only have a husband to inflict myself on but I don’t want any of that either. The only husbands I’ve seen so far I’d probably have to do in with a axe, that’s how tedious they seem to me, and the only other ones would probably take the same axe to me, which doesn’t strike me as much fun either. There’s boys that can be fun but they all turn into husbands sooner or later too. Not that I rule anything out. I can tell you this though, I’m not one of those brainless little girls who wants to run off to California and be in the pictures. There is some kind of evil in that notion, some pure evil is what I think. So what do you want to do?”

“Me? You’re the one woke me up.”

They were standing in the alley beside the Chrysler. As soon as he’d gotten dressed she’d taken him by the hand and led him silent out through the yard, her hand hot wrapped around his, he following her, still barefooted, following the white of her sleeveless dress through the dark, her bare arms darker than the cloth, long slender sweeps of arm down from her shoulderblades, the collar of the dress low enough behind to show her nape below the bob of thick soft blond hair white in the moonlight. As soon as they went through the gate into the alley she dropped his hand as if all she wanted was to get him away from the house, beyond earshot of sleepless old men. Foster looked back. The upstairs light was out. His hand she’d held was moist and cooling in the night.

“You want to waste a perfectly good night, is that what you’re telling me?”

“I’d thought I’d get some sleep is all. I been on the road some days.”

“God, I could just stand here and listen to you. That funny accent.”

“It’s you that talks funny.” Gawky and awkward immediately. She was not short but he felt himself a loose-limbed clamor just standing beside her. Facing her, her face tilted up, lips parted. She was older. Nineteen.

She tilted her head a little. “Don’t sleep. Let’s go ride around. The nighttime, the nighttime is the only time I can really stand being alive. Everything goes away and the world’s made just the way you want it to be. There’s this piece of time where even the hours are gone. You know what I mean?”

And he recalled those nights riding with his father and knew well what she meant and had even seen enough dawns murder those nights to know how they all ended. And he would not admit it but she was standing two feet away from him, crushing him.

“You should let me drive.”

“Why should I do that?”

“Because you’re barefoot and I know my way around and you don’t.”

“Well let’s take your car then. You didn’t walk here, did you?”

“I don’t want to take my car. It’s just a ruint wore-out old flivver that Daddy wouldn’t even let me drive except I told him if I couldn’t use the car I’d just walk out the road and thumb down a ride with the first criminal that came along. But I knew he wasn’t worried at all about criminals but that some neighbor would happen along and see that crazy Pettigrew girl out thumbing like some plain country hussy. I want to drive this car. This car looks like fun.”

He stood silent, rubbing one bare foot against the hard clay of the alley. Wondering if he should go back and get his boots. Wondering if the dogs would howl if he left them. Wondering how far this girl would run circles around him and if she even knew.

“Well, Foster Pelham,” she said, “don’t you trust me?”

“No.”

She laughed then and he liked her laugh. Heard the sadness in it and liked that too. She said, “It’s not many boys are honest.” Her voice dropped down. “You just keep it like that.”

She drove through the downtown with a smoothness and precision that calmed him. The town was silent in the warm night but for the cicadas ringing off in the trees. Past the spare downtown blocks she turned off and they were in the night then, leaving the pale tangerine streetlamps behind. They crossed the river over a low bridge of heavy uneven planks with railroad tie railings, the whole bridge heaving piece by piece under the motion of the automobile. Then twisted up through tight uncobbled pitted streets past shack houses set tight one against the other, random with the uneven fall of land. Daphne twisting the wheel with an expert slide of open lank wrist. Some of the houses dark and others showing the glimmer of lantern light behind pulled shades. But people on the street. Children and adults, men and women both, all throwing tilted glances at the slow-moving churn of the automobile. All colored. The children in rag shirts and pull-over dresses. Long naked legs moving like shadows against shadows in the dark. The eclipse of headlight-caught eyes turning away. The men some in suits and some in overalls, some of each bareheaded and some in porkpies or even hats of a finer block. The women also some fine and some in everyday wear. But all tilted back along the side of the street as the car passed. Watching it pass by averting their heads. Looking away, off to the other side. But he could feel them. Not their eyes so much as their minds, tightly focused on the Chrysler as it came abreast of them and moved on.

“Fishtown,” she announced. “What we’re after is a man what will sell me some bottles of beer. A little liquor. It’s corn liquor clean as a whistle, I swear. Can you take a drink of liquor, Foster?”

“I can.” Thinking he could twist around in his seat and reach back under the backseat and lift out a bottle of bonded scotch probably better than anything she’d ever tasted and was proud of himself that he did not. The best he could hope for at this time, right now, was to let this blond self-declared crazy girl lead him through the night. The air washed over him warm as a bath and the people around him scared him and he did not want to be anyplace but right where he was.

She left the engine running and told him to stay and went in to buy the liquor. Parked alongside a house no different from the others around it, the same dim shades. But a handful of men squatting on their heels on the porch, all watching the car. This time no eyes turned away. Hats tilted back on their heads. In the headlamp light their eyes did not show white but red. Staring hard at him. He could not look back at them. He opened the glovebox and took out the box with the single last of his father’s cigarettes and smoked. The smoke dangling in soft ropes out the open window. He looked at his knee propped up on the dash and watched also for the flash of light that would be Daphne coming out of the house. He felt the men on the porch could ignore him or kill him and either way would take the same pleasure in it. But they did not move. He understood that they were in some ways more afraid of him than he was of them. Which, he guessed, would not stop them from killing him if he stepped from the car.

She had two quart bottles of beer in a paper sack already sweated through and a fruit jar with a screw-on lid of clear corn liquor. They’d gone on through the hill broken apart by the lanes and homes of Fishtown and then were up away from the river bottom and out onto the great rolling pine flats and swaled fields of the Piedmont countryside, Daphne driving faster now with the road ahead open and clear under the moon, a smooth pale swath in the dark land, the even darker hemmed woods.

“You got a opener in here?”

“A what?”

“A opener. For the beers. Someway to prize them open.”

“I can do them against the door handle.”

“Just open one. We’ll pass it back and forth. What you do is sip some of the liquor and swallow some beer to smooth it down. By the time the beers are gone they’ll be warm anyhow but we won’t care then and be happy with the liquor straight.”

Foster said nothing but opened one of the quarts and handed it over to her and unscrewed the fruit jar lid and took a swallow, holding it in his mouth a moment for it to bite against his teeth. It was good, smooth, lacking what his father would have described as “fumey” from being hurried. He took a little more and then passed it over to her and took the bottle she held out. He didn’t like beer and this beer was pretty bad, flat and oily, bitter, but he thought he’d do things her way, this time anyhow. She wanted the beer right back after the liquor and he was happy to let it go. She pressed her dress down between her thighs and nested the bottle in there. He thought it was pretty bad beer to be treated so well. He was glad to have the liquor back.

“Uncle Lex tells me we’re cousins, you and me, in a mighty slender nigger-in-the-woodpile kind of way,” she said, one hand lying flat on top of the wheel as she drove fast, not looking at him. “Don’t worry, he also told me to keep that quiet and you might not think so to listen to me but that is one thing I am real good at doing. And, it doesn’t make any difference to me.” She modulated her tone then, said, “It don’t make me no nevermind,” as if mocking something—herself, some unknown listener—and went on. “The truth is—you want the truth Foster? The truth is there’s most likely plenty ‘cousins’ out there that we don’t look at or think about or pay any attention to at all. Some of us even with brothers and sisters too. But they’re not. They’re colored. They’re Negroes. That’s what we say—what we say if we’re nice people like my Mama is, likes to think she is—but the truth is that we all, each and every one of us, we say those words and all the time what we hear in our heads is Nigger, Nigger. And those are the ones we like. The good ones. The others, we don’t talk about. But the men, the men can talk about them. Those others. Those bad niggers. And the women they hear that talk and their mouths get all tight like they’re biting down hard onto a sour apple and you know what, Foster? Part of it is because each and every one of those women knows or suspects—and you tell me which is worse, to know a thing or just suspect it—each of them knows there’s little Negro children running around that’s half brothers and sisters to their own precious little children. And more than that. Each one of us knows that anywhere within a two—three-mile circle of any one of our homes there is more than that; there’s aunts and uncles and some split-off piece and parcel of every type of relative you can think of. Pettigrews. But they’s colored Pettigrews. So what do you do, Foster? Why, you clamp those sweet little dried-up old lips together and you don’t think about it. So there. Just in case you were feeling unique. Just in case you thought you were some walking one-and-only. But people found out about you, that’s what they’d think you were. And you’d flat disappear. Standing right before them you would change and go away. Unless of course you were pushy about it. Then you’d become one of those bad ones. They’d all look twice at this big car then I can tell you. What happened to me was I was at the University and had a breakdown was what they liked to call it and so they brought me home. Mama took me down to Dorothea Dix hospital? In Raleigh? Where some doctors talked to me for days on end and then finally one of them told my mama I was suffering from neuroses. He had to tell her something. He had to give her some word to cling on to. What could he do? Tell her I was the sane one in a crazy world? That wouldn’t pay the bills, I don’t imagine. So. What happened to you?”

“Seems to me,” Foster said, wondering what Mebane had told her, wondering what he himself might choose to tell her, and not sure of either one, “you already know about me what you need to know.”

“You can do that, baby,” she said, “if that’s what you want. But it’s not why I’m sitting here.”

“You’re the one driving the car.”

“But it’s your car, isn’t it?” She looked over at him. He did not know what that look was intended to convey. She said, “Give over that fruit jar.” She took it and drank and shuddered and handed it back and lifted up the beer from the incubator of her thighs and drank some of that and offered it and when he declined she made no argument but settled it back down. They were driving with the windows open and the night warm and comfortable flowing over them, the land all but lost in the headlights and the speed, just here and there openings, sometimes the white shabby dribble of cotton and othertimes the dense rank of woods and here and there would be a farmhouse or shed or shack and he could not always tell which was habitation and which was not. Once there was a vast looming shape twisting in the air above the road before them and she braked the car hard and they sat silent while a froth-mouthed, redeye mule turned to face the headlights, blowing from its nostrils before it smelled them or smelled the car or just came to some decision from mule-sense and bolted from the road. And she drove on then, hard, going up through the gears and when they were back up to speed she said, “All Uncle Lex told me about you was the parts important to him. You can figure out what those were. And I’m not saying that’s not of interest to me, it is. But it’s not why we’re out riding around. Now is it?”

He was quiet then. He drank a little from the fruit jar. He wished he hadn’t squandered that last cigarette. Then had one of those rare wondrous moments of illumination where the past was not passed but breathing, working alongside him. And he leaned over her and with his right arm bracing himself against the dash to not touch her said, “Excuse me,” and leaned over her lap with the scent of her like a dozen campfires each burning a different fuel rising into him. He used his free hand to fumble down in the side pocket of the driver door and came up with a box of cigarettes. Because too many times to forget he’d seen his father set some partial almost-gone pack down into there when he wanted a fresh unopened one to take with him out of the car. And this was perfect knowledge to Foster. He dug in the glovebox and found a box of matches and struck up the smoke and worked with the fruit jar a little more. The girl Daphne just driving, the speed the same. Although he’d felt the hover of her breasts and the catch of her breath when he leaned over her. In that moment he understood that her talk was not all talk—she was fragile as he was and something in her searching was honest.

He said, “My father died nearly two months ago. My mother and baby sister ten years ago with the influenza. I didn’t know a thing about North Carolina or what went on here until after Father died. He was his own man was all he was, I never knew a thing about his family. Then I went looking. It’s all strange to me. I’m just trying to sort it out. That business you talk about—who’s white and who’s colored and why—it doesn’t make any sense to me. Except it’s starting to. Because my father never talked about his family. But what I don’t know is what does it have to do with me? I guess something because I’m here. All I’m trying to do is figure out what happened to somebody a long time ago. It’s not something that has much to do with who I am. Except maybe to you people. What I think, you people pay too much attention to what doesn’t matter all that much. I’ve got a simple question and your uncle is determined to not give a simple answer. Maybe that’s because he doesn’t have one. Or maybe it’s because he doesn’t want to.”

He had been watching the road. It was like driving with his father, the road tearing out from under them. Daphne had not looked at him as he spoke. When he was done, sometime after that, she lifted and drained the beer and then backhanded the bottle out the window into the night. Still she did not look at him. She was flexed away from the back of the seat, driving fast and peering ahead at once. Then she braked hard and dropped the gears and the car fishtailed and she let it do that, her one hand sliding and then gripping the wheel. As she made the turn off the road onto a shallow dirt track between files of tall pines she said, still not looking at him, “Don’t confuse me with him.”

“You’re the one brought it up.”

“If I hadn’t,” she said, “you’d of had to.”

“You think?”

“I do.” She was quiet then, driving slow down through a stand of woods. She killed the headlights and they were just in moonlight and the columns and shadows of the woods. The pines thinning to hardwoods, big canopied trees still holding their leaves. Then those thinned and he could smell the river before he saw it. An opening that spread out under the reach of the trees and then there was the broad slow drift of the water and the Chrysler came to a stop in the dark. She turned the engine off and twisted sideways on the seat to look at him, one knee poking free of her dress. Pale round bone under the moon. She said, “It’s a strange thing all right. You’re a perfect stranger but you’re not. There’s all that mess back there and if you don’t know it or like it I can’t help that but it’s there.”

“Seems to me it doesn’t have to matter much. To you and me.”

“Is that what you think?” She did not wait for answer or argument from him but threw open the door and stepped out and walked around in front of the car and down toward the river, a floating solid form of white dress and blond hair in the sparse moonlight. He sat in the car and watched her hunker before the broad silent river, her arms around her drawn-up knees, the dress pulled tight over her curled body. He felt very still, warm and comfortable with the liquor and also as if he were in another world altogether from any he’d ever known. And thought that what he would do was tiptoe his way as quiet as he could through this whole place to learn what he might and then load his dogs and head right back to New Hampshire and live quiet. Be a dog-man. Maybe see those two old women time to time. Maybe not. Maybe go to school. Maybe not. All he wanted right now was some slice of old solid earth to put his feet down on. And recalled the afternoon just passed when the quail rose up in the evening out of the creek bottom in their breathless wonder. And felt that moment was the end of something. Just what it was he could not say and he wasn’t sure if the sadness was real or just the liquor. As if the fruit jar could hold sadness that the world did not contain.

He got out of the car and walked down and knelt beside Daphne, not too close. He wanted to say something to her but would not wait to rehearse it and so was still not sure of the words as he knelt but she turned to him quick and reached out and put her hand on his knee and asked him, “Tell me Foster. Do you think I’m crazy?”

And he rocked a little under her touch and said, “Well. It’s hard to say. I’ve only known you a couple hours. But you don’t seem dangerous.”

And she laughed then, the laugh a splendid thing as if she opened her mouth and moonlight billowed soft out of it into the air to drift over him and beyond, on over the water where it fell apart under the cicada drone. And he wondered then if she was a little bit crazy.

She said, “You know what I thought? When Uncle Lex told me about you and why I came to wake you up? You want to know what I was thinking?” Her hand still on his knee, as if she were balancing herself. Or just wanted to touch him.

“What’s that?”

“I thought, Here’s this person come who doesn’t know me at all. Who’s never laid eyes on me, never heard the first thing about me. But who’s some part of me. Not the distant cousin part so much as maybe the one who would recognize me, who would know me. I don’t know what made me think it would be you but I did. Maybe some way Uncle Lex talked about you. Maybe just something I thought I heard. You know what I mean, Foster? You know?”

He looked at her then, seeing not just her but himself as well, the two of them in the dark on the bank of the river. And knew just what she was saying and at that moment did recognize her, as if each part and line and tissue of her was known to him. And was frightened now truly for the first time. He thought if he didn’t get his hands into her hair, along her arms, hovering over her face, he would lose the ability to draw breath. So he looked from her to the river and was quiet.

She took her hand from his knee then. He did not know what this meant. She took the fruit jar from him and drank a little bit from it and rocked on her haunches and he wanted to reach and steady her, just his hand along her shoulder, her upper arm, but he did not. And she said, “You can’t ever tell, can you?”

Then she rose without warning and he rose up with her and both unsteady, turning and reaching out for each other, hands on forearms, elbows, holding each other upright, steadying, not touching otherwise. Her breath against his face, warm and sweet with corn and the faint edge of charcoal. Then she said, “Oh,” and let him go and turned to walk up to the car and he followed her, lifting up the fruit jar forgotten on the riverbank. She went around the side of the car and got in the passenger seat. He stopped in front. The moon breaking apart fleet clouds driven by some high wind, the air down below still. He looked at her through the windshield. He took the lid from the jar and drank a little bit. Then went around and got behind the wheel.

She was low in the seat with her knees up against the dash, her dress pushed between her legs. She was smoking one of his cigarettes, lazy smoke dribbling from her mouth as she turned to him and said, “Tell me something, Foster?”

“What’s that?” His voice rough, torn with itself.

“What’s the craziest thing you ever did?”

He did not have to think about that. “This right now. I mean coming south chasing after something happened a long time ago to somebody I never knew. Some part of me feels like it’s all for someone else, I mean for my grandmother. I guess I’m trying to figure out what it all means to me.”

“Don’t you know already?”

“Thought I did.”

“What happened?”

He looked at her. “How much did that Alexander Mebane tell you?”

“That your grandmother was a colored woman his family owned and that she ran away right before the end of the war. And came back years later looking to find her own mother and then went away again.”

“That’s all?”

“And that she—your grandmother—was his half sister. That his father was father to both him and her. He told me that part.”

Foster drank from the fruit jar and looked straight ahead and said, “Whatever happened when she came back looking for her mother, I don’t think she found her. But when she went home, back to Vermont, she went crazy. Not crazy like you but crazy crazy. Talking to herself. Not talking to anybody else. Before she killed herself.”

The blond girl looked at him, her bottom lip out and down a little. “She killed herself?”

“That’s right.”

“How?”

“She hanged herself. My grandfather found her. Up in the woods.”

“He didn’t tell me that.”

“Well he knows all right. Because I told him. And he knows something of why. But he hasn’t told me. Not yet at least. I can’t figure him out. So far, in one afternoon and evening he’s baited me, teased me, threatened me and been nice to me. Sometimes it seems all at the same time.”

“That’s because he likes you. Or is intrigued by you. Or both. Most people can’t get past his door. And he hasn’t told you what you want to know I guess because once he does then you’ll be done with him.”

“A lonely old man, is that what you’re telling me?”

She ran a hand over her face and looked away from him a moment out into the dark and said, “I think it’s more than that. I think whatever it is you’re after, is something after him too.”

Both quiet then. Foster drank a little more of the fruit jar and silent handed it over and she took it and drank also and then set it up on the dash like she wanted it out of the way. Then she said, “You’re sixteen is what he told me.”

“That’s right.”

“I turned nineteen the end of May.”

“Well, I can’t help that.”

“Orphan boy. Are you ever going to say my name?”

“What?”

“You haven’t once called me by name. Since I introduced myself.”

“Well. I will I guess.”

She laughed again, a low thing out of her throat. Then said, “And you’re not going to touch me unless I touch you first. Are you?”

“I don’t know. I guess not.”

“Foster? Let’s get in the back. I want to get in the backseat now.”

There was a moment, not during the first fumbling awkward fast time but during the second when she was over him, there was a moment then that was not thought or feeling or even the illumination of earlier by the riverbank but an understanding that flowed throughout him, a moment when it seemed for the first time of his life everything he understood to be himself was all of one piece, as if his body and mind and that other, that unknowable soul, had fused to unity: her over him, her breath shredded, broken by small cries that no longer alarmed him but seemed instead to enter directly into his blood, those cries small paper boats that would float forever through his veins toward his heart; her ragged breath against his face, her hands on his shoulders as she leaned her tipped breasts toward him; the moment then when her wet wrapped around him and the drops of sweat that beaded and flung from both of them straining toward the other and the air through the open car window and the silent tug of the passing river and the smell of her and the smell of the wet riverbank and her cries and the cicada echo and his hands wondrous sliding over the globe of her sliding against him and the hot writhe of her mouth against his and the sudden swift wet probe of her tongue and the tobacco liquor smell of the car and the pale thread-smell of dying leaves—when all these things were one thing and all things made sense; when the world became known to him and it was not bad or good but bitter and unbearably sweet. And he would live forever. If he died tomorrow. And he wrapped his arms around her tight and drew her close and hard against him, arresting her so she could not move before he spoke her name against her ear. Over and over.

He woke sheathed in sweat, the sleeping bag thrown open beneath him also wet, the air in the cabin dense and sullen, unmoving, swelled-up to some liquid state around him. Hot. Bright angled heat breaking in bars through the window and open door. He did not know where he was. He sat up naked on the sleeping bag laid over the old feather tick. His dogs were missing. His penis was staring up at him from between his legs. She had brought him back in the long flown-together hours before dawn and jerked him to her and kissed his mouth as if she would take it with her and then let go of him and walked down the alley, looking back once to say, “Bye, Foster.” He’d stood there swaying until he heard the rupture of the old Ford firing before the house and traced its passage through the town and away until it was gone from sound. And there was nothing then. Some nightbirds pealing in the bushes. And he’d come in through the yard and piled himself into the bed with his sleeping dogs and had not thought he would sleep at all but replay her forever. But now was up sweating and blinded and without dogs. He stood off the bed, losing balance before stepping into his trousers, hopping one leg around after the other. Then out into the day. Through the open door. Which he was sure he had not left open. So he was elated and rebuked and terrified all at once. As if he had made a fatal error he could not yet name.

The midday cascaded upon him. His eyes were broken to pieces. There was a pump between the cabin and the house and he went there stumbling with his head down and worked the handle until the water was surging and bent down to hold his head under the gush, tipping to one side to drink, the water over him cold and riveting, bringing him back. And he recalled the vast liquid of the night before and could not understand how both the pump and that night could fit into the same world. He raised his wet head and shook it. His dogs were lying up in the shade of the house at the edge of the ruined garden. Tilted back in a broken-legged kitchen chair out in the middle of the yard, in full sun, was Alexander Mebane. His cane hooked over the chairback. One leg crossed over the other.

“It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” Mebane observed. “Your dogs was fussing so I let them out. You were dead to it all.”

Foster raked his hair back with his fingers, wiping at his brow, trying to do it in such a way as to blinder the sunlight. “Good morning.” He needed half an hour, some time to gather himself.

Mebane said, “Afternoon. It was high noon the last I looked at a clock. That girl’ll lead you to damnation.”

“I was willing enough.”

Mebane nodded. “Of course you were. Wouldn’t be natural, you wasn’t. What you want is a cup of coffee.”

“That’d be all right.”

Mebane grinned at him, tight lips drawn back over yellow teeth. “There isn’t any. I don’t keep it in the house. Life itself works me up all I need to be worked up.”

“I imagine I’ll live.”

Mebane jerked his head toward the house. “You go dig around in the icebox you’ll find you a bottle of Coca-Cola in the back of it. That’ll do you better than the coffee anyhow. Settle your stomach.”

“My stomach’s all right.”

“Go on. Get something in you. I don’t want to sit here and watch you get sick. You look like fishguts right now.”

“It’s hot out here.”

“I sit out for an hour or so every day. The sun is healthful. And the inside of the house feels so cool afterward.”

“I’ll go get that soda pop maybe.”

“You do that.”

Foster turned to the house. Lovey and Glow in the shade, watching him, their tongues heavy. Behind him Mebane called out, “Get your drink, come back out here.”

Foster stumbled in the kitchen dim after the outside, found the icebox and squatted before it and reached around in the back of it and found the bottle and lifted it out. Shaped like a woman. Everything in the world was changed. He wondered where she was, doing what. When he’d see her again. He rolled the bottle in his hands. Everything could go away. He already knew that. He went to the screen door and called out, “Is there an opener?”

“Drawer under the toaster. In there somewheres.”

He popped the cap from the bottle and took a couple of swallows. It was good. She had such great power, he thought. And wondered if it was her age or if that only added to it. He would not hunt her down. He drank off half the bottle and went back outside, already feeling better, his feet more steady.

“I thought you two might get along,” Mebane said. “Of course there was no way to know if you could keep up with her or not. But that would not be any disaster—there’s not many that can, I understand. It’s possible she makes a career of that sort of thing is what some think. Myself, I just think she’s looking for someone what can hold pace with her. From the looks of you, I couldn’t say. What do you think?”

“I’m all right.”

“Is it your nature or the situation that keeps you so tight-lipped?” Foster grinned. “Both I guess.”

“Well you two managed to stir up the neighbors. Old Winifred Coxe was over here this morning bright as a birdbath telling me all sorts of things I had no interest in knowing or hearing and all the time her head swiveling around so she could listen to the upstairs trying to figure out where you were. I wasn’t about to tell her you were camped out in the nigger cabin. These old birds they don’t miss a thing. If I was to move a flowerpot from over here to over there, if I had flowerpots to move, they’d not only note it but attach a meaning to it that would be lost on me. But it would be some reading of my character, of who I am, of who they think I am. It’s their job, the only job they have I guess. Or at least the one they’re best disposed for. Just so you know all I told her was you were the grandson of a friend of mine from Chapel Hill who moved north after the war. It was close enough to the truth so I felt fine about it and just far enough from the truth so’s to shut them up. My business is not theirs and never has been, never will be. As far as Daphne is concerned, I can’t help her in the eyes of these old ladies. It’s not as if she wants my help anyhow.”

“I like her.”

“Of course you do. I like her myself. I’ll tell you a secret.”

“What’s that?”

“The way you feel? Right now? About her? That’s the way you’re always going to feel about women. Now, it’ll get wrapped up and tamped down and turned around and pushed back into some little corner mostly by the actions of women theirselves as time goes on and time to time you’ll forget it and othertimes you’ll feel that way and think you shouldn’t for all sorts of reasons but there will always be that part of you. And you pay attention to it. There’s worse things a man can do.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“I wasn’t asking you to understand. I was asking you to remember is all.”

“All right.”

“You do that.”

“Yes sir.”

“That drink helping?”

“It is. Thank you.”

“Don’t you thank me. It’s the last one though. I’ll have to send around an order for more, you keep on nightcrawling.”

“You don’t need to do that.”

“You say that now. See how you feel about it tomorrow.”

Again Foster grinned. “Nothing says I’ll be out raising hell again.”

“Oh she’ll be back. Don’t you worry about that.”

“She talked about something that happened to her at college. What was that all about?”

“What’d she tell you?”

“Said she had a breakdown.”

Mebane wiped his hands along the tops of his thighs, scrubbing his trousers. He said, “That’s her mama talking. There is not one thing wrong with Daphne except she’s restless in a place that makes no room for restlessness. And she hasn’t figured out what to do about that yet. If she should cave or run.”

“So what happened?”

“She didn’t tell you?”

“No sir.”

“Well that’s a sign of some sort. She doesn’t mind telling the tale has been my experience. They threw her out is what happened. October of her first year. That would be a year ago. Pissheads. If it’d been a boy they would’ve told him not to do that sort of stunt again and all the time all of them, him too, laughing about it, knowing it would become a little legend that would follow him around the rest of his life and that not a bad thing but something good, some signal of the sort of man he would be. But she is no boy and they did not know how to fit it in with their ideas of how things should be. So they heaved her out. And every one of those little chit-mouthed girls over there glad to see her gone only because it meant they didn’t have to provide for themselves the same way; all they had to do was sit around and talk about it, how horrible it was, how deformed she was. It is a gift of women, in case you don’t know it yet, to turn on one of their own once she steps away from what they all think is the way they should be. Women are the keepers of the pack, I tell you that. We could not do without them but they are not kind, in the end. Most likely for good reason, I give them that. What she did was like any other good boy or girl just off at school: She drank too much one night. But was not content with doing that or just screwing some fraternity boy what had been panting after her all night long like her good sisters did; no, what she had to do was hike down Franklin Street all the way into Carrboro which is its own town piled right up against Chapel Hill, where she went into a colored man’s backyard at dawn to steal his mule from the shed and then she rode that mule back up right through the middle of town wearing only a sheet she’d stole off somebody’s laundry line and singing “In My Merry Oldsmobile”. She always had a good voice in Sunday school and I’d guess she looked pretty good up on that old mule’s back but still it was not what anybody wanted to face first thing in the morning with each and every one of those people doing their best to forget what their own nights were like, what lizards lay down in their nightsouls, and the last thing they could abide was a vision of that come to life right before them. Which is what she was. Because she is a girl. I can tell you that right now. If it had been a boy, like I said, it would be laughed off and forgot for the most part except where it would be helpful to him. But they would not laugh at her and they would not forgive her. So they turned her away, back to us.”

“What happened to her clothes?”

“What?”

“When she stole the sheet off the line? What happened to her clothes?”

Mebane looked at him, his mouth clamped down tight. Then he reached over his shoulder for the cane and brought it before him and stood up out of the chair. Rocking a little before Foster. “Let’s go in the house. I’ve had enough sun. Come on. I don’t know what happened to her clothes. She’s got you good, doesn’t she?”

In a small iron skillet varnished with ancient grease Mebane fried an egg on the electric coil and charred two thick slices of bread in the toaster and spread butter over the toast and slid the egg out onto a plate from the drainboard and set it on the counter for Foster to eat standing up. While Foster ate Mebane said, “What I hate about getting old is it gets harder and harder to get a good night’s sleep because you don’t do enough during the day to tire you out but then you can’t sleep so you feel like you don’t have the energy to get anything done. It’s a little circle that goes round and round. All it does is leave you wide awake come the middle of the night with nothing but a weary old brain and the tinkerings you make from that. I was up much of the night considering your arrival. It’s a little like the man waiting so long for some event that when it arrives he doesn’t know what to do with it. Because throughout the long waiting he’s turned into that—the man who waits. It becomes a condition of the soul. Were you raised in the church, Foster Pelham?”

“No sir.”

“You’ve not been baptized, christened, saved, or otherwise amended?”

“No.”

“Well you’re a free man then. You can come to learn God as you go along. As a student of your own life and as an experiment of whatever it is that sets us up walking and talking and breathing and thinking, whatever that mystery is, you can do your best to cipher it out on your own. Faith and grace are not empty words but you’ll have to fill them out your own self and not just accept some translation.”

“I haven’t thought about it too much. Sometimes. Thinking about my parents, my little sister.”

“Of course you haven’t. Unless there is something wrong with you it’s not a young man’s sport. What I was thinking was, we’d take a little road trip in your automobile. Nothing far but just a bit of history that isn’t quite dead yet. And perhaps you’ll begin to learn what you’re after.”

They drove the main highway back north and west out of town, the road Foster had come in on. It was hot and the dogs sat up on the backseat, a pair of wind-twisted gargoyles splayed out the open windows, their tongues spread wide with the wind of the moving car. Mebane had pumped them a bucket of water and Foster knew they were hungry but they would have to wait. It felt like they were all on slender rations. For himself, he thought that was good; he felt alert and liked it. The dogs would just have to partner along with him.

Mebane talked as they drove. “Used to be I’d come up here a couple times a month, at least once a month with the winter weather. But that was when G T Kress was alive. He did the driving. I’m talking a pair of horses here and a ragged old ruint covered buggy. After he died there was no one to do it with regular and I hate to ask someone to do what they’re not at least a little interested in. Still I used to get up here a couple times a year. But with G T it was regular. Every second Tuesday evening unless the weather was bad and then we’d just wait until the next. That little buggy of his was in bad shape but his horses was always fine. I never kept horses. A one-armed man would be a idiot to mess with horses.”

“How’d you get around otherwise?”

“Briefly I owned a bicycle. But my balance is not good and I lacked the courage to make a spectacle of myself for however long it would’ve taken to get the hang of it. Before that, in my short undistinguished career at the bar the boy who kept the yard also tended a driving team and would take me where I needed to go. This was not the one I was speaking of yesterday—Fred—but one before him.”

Foster thought of the story told him by his aunts of the colored man Peter who was burned and hanged for helping his grandmother. And wondered if Mebane guessed that Foster knew that story and wondered if he was being baited here or not. He said nothing. They were up on a rolling plain of land, big pastures of cattle broken by woodlots and fields, mostly of tobacco. It was a fine bright hot day with much wagon traffic and the air sweet from the tobacco flues.

Mebane went on. “Now G T was a younger man although he’s dead now. Killed by one of these automobiles after he sold off his horses, which is a cautionary tale itself right there but not the one we’re after today. See, he wasn’t even alive when the war ended. Born most near ten years after that, I’d make it. One of his uncles was killed at Fort Fisher and another shot up bad in The Wilderness but his own daddy did not fight a lick although I don’t know how not. Kresses was not the sort of folk to’ve found an easy out. Country people, poor farmers, I don’t think at the time they owned but two three coloreds anyhow. And that was before his time. G T’s I mean. Now hold on, slow down here. Pull in up there. No, there.”

They went onto a narrow dirt half circle of drive with patchy grass growing up through it before a long three-story stone building with a sagging porch the length of the front and many of the windows missing glass, the rows of windows so many blank eyes onto the day. Very large old red oaks grew to shade the building and the drive was covered over with green acorns that broke with a harsh wet sound under the tires as Foster came to a stop in the shade. The blocks of stone rough-faced and dark gray, as if they still held some moisture from the earth they’d been quarried from, as if the endless heat and even neglect could not dry them.

“It was a little military academy for boys run by a veteran of the war with Mexico right up until ‘sixty-one when it emptied out so all those boys could go off and get shot up. The colonel too, which I guess if they’d known it not many of them boys would’ve grieved over. It sat empty not very long and then was turned into a hospital.” Mebane turned in his seat, hitching his upper body around to glare at Foster. “Not the one I ended up in. That was nothing but a pitched row of rotten tents up in southern Virginia.” He looked back at the building and went on. “After the war it was a home for survivors. Men worse off than me. Men without legs or both arms gone or men torn up in the body or mind so awful they could not tend to themselves. There was a subscription taken up to keep it going and I guess some money came down from the government too. It was closed up six—eight years ago when it came down to just a handful of old men what they moved down to Raleigh to another home. Before that G T and I used to come up here and visit with those old men. G T liked to get them talking, hear their stories. There was some anxious to tell it all over again. Me, I’d rather sit and read or write letters for them unable to do it for themselves. In a way it all came down to the same thing—he heard the same stories over and over and I wrote the same letters. But it was what we could do. What someway suited each of us. G T was after something he’d just missed, what he felt someway cheated out of. The way a man will when he makes most of something out of his head rather than having lived it. Me, I’d like to say all I was up to was trying to help those poor old creatures what way I could but, truth is, more like I was chasing after something too, something closer to home. Maybe my dead brother, maybe my own dead boyhood, maybe something part of each. That’s not why we’re here. Not really. That’s just the cartoon and newsreel, we still got the feature picture ahead of us. Do you go to the pictures?”

“No sir. Not much.”

“Well I enjoy them. Perhaps only because I can walk downtown easy on my own of an evening. Perhaps because I can leave myself alone for the time I sit there in the dark. Well, get out of the car. Let’s walk around. Your dogs’ll like this.”

They walked out, not up to the building, which had a pair of planks nailed crosswise to bar the door and trash, bottles and such on the wide rotting steps of the porch, but out through the tall brittle-stemmed grass beyond the oaks, the dogs crashing ahead, grasshoppers flinging themselves off in reckless short bursts with each step. Out of the shade it was bright and the sun was not a point in the sky but a spread of white haze that blended without clear ending into the pale blue. There was a cemetery beyond the building, a long rectangle enclosed by a spiked-tipped iron fence with an iron gate turned back, and they went in. It was not like any cemetery Foster had seen. There was a single peastone path straight down the middle and out at the far end a single shadetree oak with an iron bench under it and otherwise just the flanks of graves, each stone alike, a squat thick white marble slab laid into the ground equidistant from the next, uniform in size and height. The names and dates chiseled almost invisible in the white marble. Before each stone a small iron circular marker held a small rebel flag. Silent and solemn, without the distractions of monuments and stone angels, without variety of any sort. What death, Foster realized, might be like: small white spaces in endless files and ranks, all manner of identity pared and paled to be unseen.

The cemetery grass was well-mown. “The Daughters pay a man to keep it up,” Mebane said. “I find it peaceful out here. It’s a colored man that does the work, I’ve seen him at it. He does a good job. I wonder though what he thinks. Getting paid to tend after these old Confederate boys.”

“Well, they’re dead,” Foster said. “Probably he’s just glad to have the job, make the money.”

“Could be, could be. Could be he feels he can’t get free of those sonsabitches no matter what. I wouldn’t know. Tell you what we’re going to do: we’re going to sit on that bench there and talk about the nature of evil. Except I doubt a young man like you is much interested in that, has much faith in that sort of talk. So what I’ll do is tell you a story, a true story.” Mebane reached the bench, his cane striking hard to not slide among the peastone, and anchored the cane and pivoted around and settled himself. The shade seemed dusty, the leaves of the oak also dusty as if they were tired of living. Foster did not want to sit beside him and so squatted in the gravel before the bench, a little to one side of Mebane. His dogs off nosing among the stones. He kept his head tilted to keep them in his sight—all they’d need would be a breath of scent and they’d slip through the iron fencing and be off.

“What it is,” Mebane said, “is some family history for you.”

“I already told you. I’m not after anything like that.” Foster went on, not knowing he would say this until he did. “I’ve got all the family I want. There’s Pelhams been on the same Vermont farm since just before the Revolution and my mother’s family is up in French Canada, probably been there a hundred years longer than those Pelhams in Vermont.”

“It’s blood we’re talking about here,” Mebane said. “It’s not some single isolated event you’re looking to learn about. There’s swampwater and rice in your veins too and it don’t matter if you like it or not, it’s a fact.”

Foster rocked back on his heels, craned around to seek his dogs, spotted them and followed them a time with his eyes. Then looked back at Mebane and waited.

“My father was Caswell Mebane and he had one brother older by eight years named Buchanan. My grandfather, Coleman Mebane, was the youngest of three brothers and so what came down to him was whittled away at pretty good—it was right much by any terms I could imagine but for him in that time and place he was bound to feel thwarted by fate as his two older brothers got the pie and he got the crust or so he always felt. But this isn’t so much about him. Although he did what you would expect in a man feeling that his place in line had determined his lot in life; he favored his older son and not the younger. You might squat there and think it would be the other way around but that’s not human nature. And to forgive him what I can, perhaps he felt it just was the way things were done. Perhaps he believed he had no choice. Perhaps his nature was such that he saw no choice. Every man is a curious thing—each one of us thinks we are nothing so much as our ownselves even as we fume about what has been done to us by others but we almost never see how we pass those wrongs along; we have our reasons for doing what we do and believe them not only to be right but the way things are, the way they have to be. If each man could see truly how they are and the way they fit some pattern laid down and could see it fair and true then likely they would all quit, the way I have, and we wouldn’t get anywhere. We’d die out. Which might not be such a bad thing. But is not likely to happen.

“What happened was there was these two brothers far apart in age who hated each other. The way I think only brothers can. Because one brother knows someway the secret workings of the other and each knows the other knows it. And they either make peace with that and are friends rare and precious or they don’t and so are bitter with hatred. Because they know there is that one man who can undo them in any number of ways at any time he chooses. It doesn’t even have to happen in public; it could just be between the two of them and one of them would be destroyed. Maybe able to carry on outside but flanked and pinned and bereft inside, always after. And that is what happened.

“My father and his father were alike in their temperament. They were both men who, in the end, could not comprehend how to respond to the world. Both men who flailed as they grasped and so almost always came up holding the wrong stick. And they were both men of appetite, always hungry for something and unable to determine what that was so they chased after whatever might be right before them. And in between them was my uncle, Buchanan, who was steady as a pivot that could look both before and after and see what was coming and where it came from, see that and know also where it was headed, which neither of those other two could do. And so my grandfather could not stand my father who was the image of himself and loved his other son and my father could not stand his own father and loved his brother but hated him also with every pulse of his blood. And what’s important is to know that my uncle, Buchanan, knew how both the others felt about him and did not care. He did not have to care and not because he had the land and not because he had the money but because he had the other two, the elder and the younger, in thrall to him. He didn’t care if they would admit it or not. He knew. Now you see, we’re getting close on to what is evil. Not that he was evil itself. Evil is not a thing that just sums up in a man. No. It is a thread that begins to run in a small way and then falls down through the years and generations to gain weight as it goes.

“Now my father Caswell when he went off to the university he knew he was leaving the Cape Fear for good. He didn’t have to. He could’ve gone up and taken his degree and gone back to Wilmington and read law there and life would’ve been good for him where his name and people was known. Where there were plenty of other less fortunate sons in professions and trade that he would’ve done business with. But it was not his way. I can’t tell you the entire why of his wanting a fresh start in a new place but it’s something plenty of men do, have done and always will. At least some it’s safe to say was to put distance between himself and his brother and father. And so he looked around and found this place which needed a lawyer but was big enough so there was some town to it, and close enough to Raleigh so he could reach beyond Sweetboro without too great an effort. And he met my mother and took her down there to the big rice farm on the Cape Fear enough times so she thought she knew what she was getting and married him before she’d even heard of Sweetboro. And if it was not what she was expecting it was still not so shabby; it’s not always a bad thing to be exotic without having to make much effort at it. And she was not unaware that he had political intentions. Raleigh might’ve been upstart compared to Wilmington but she was a young woman and young women can point their noses into the wind better than most.

“So he built that house there in town which you would not know to look at but was a pretty nice place at the time. And they—Grandfather and Uncle Buchanan—sent up as a wedding present a pair of Negroes, an old woman to keep the house and an old man to tend the yard and horses. And my mother went right ahead and had my brother Spence and then a pair of girls, Audrey and Deborah. And somewhere along the time those girl babies were arriving my father decided more help was needed around the house, to keep up with all those babies, to help my mother. Now, he could’ve looked around the area and found some girl to suit. But he didn’t do that. Some men are unable to keep themselves out of where they shouldn’t be. What he did was, he sent down eight hundred dollars to his brother and asked for a girl to be sent up. Maybe he thought he would get a better deal that way. Eight hundred was not a lot for a strong healthy girl. And so there was Buchanan Mebane with a bank check for eight hundred dollars in his hand from his only brother.

“There’s been three hundred years of colored people owned by white people. There’s very few white boys that did not start out their manhood with a black girl. And there was some that would continue right on all their lives, without regard of their own wives and children. Some of those did it because they could. Because it was there and could not say no. Some kept on because it was a reach into some other life, something wild and unfettered missing in their own lives, regardless of how fettered it might be on the other end. And there was some, some few, who did it because they could not stop themselves, because their hearts bolted away from them. And the ones who did not, who left the colored women be after that first initiation or maybe even did not partake of that, they came down into two groups also. There was the ones who understood pure and simple that it was wrong. And there was the others who did not understand that but knew it was true. Do you understand the difference? To not do something because it’s wrong and not do the same thing because everyone else thinks it’s wrong?

“I do.” Foster, back on his heels, his legs asleep from his knees down, unable to move, his eyes on the face of the man seated above him.

Mebane said, “Coleman Mebane was one of those ones with the bolted heart. And his son, his heir, Buchanan, knew that about his father and hated him for it. I don’t have to tell you he was one who held himself above it all. Or if he had to rut on some girl you could bet it was a girl off in some corner hid well from everybody else. But there he stood. With that eight hundred dollars in his hand. And knowing his father and his brother were men from the same piece of work. With that softness of heart he so despised. You see, it was not like some men that would spread it around. Grandfather Coleman had just the one woman in her own little cabin down the end of the row of cabins and each one of those babies the same dun color as the next, not a one with a father different from the next.

“It was a good-sized place, sixteen hundred acres. And it was Buchanan’s. But that didn’t mean his father just sat off to the side of things. What that meant, for our story here, is that those dun-colored children were not just left down there at the end of the row. The boys were taught trades, smithing or wheel-wrighting, coopers, masons. The girls were all brought to the house. They did not work in the fields, those children. Well there was Uncle Buchanan, with that eight hundred dollars to commission household help for his brother. So with his genius for stabbing both ends from the middle, he picked out the middle girl, a pretty girl just fourteen years old called Helen and sent her upcountry to his brother. Half sister to the both of them and he sent her along, knowing somehow that his brother, my daddy, would not be able to refuse her and would not be able to refuse his own heart either, anymore than their own father had been able to do. Buchanan knew my father would hate that girl and love her too and hate himself for both and so poison himself. Would love her because he could not help it and hate himself for allowing what he could not help. It was poison perfect, innocent if untouched. So he sent her off. Everything his brother had asked for. And I do not fail to blame my father. As I said, some part of him must’ve known it would be that way. You do not ask the man who chopped off your foot if your hand is sound as well.”

Foster was flat down on the peastone gravel now, cross-legged, his hands loose in his lap, open. He had not seen his dogs in some time and it seemed terribly important that he locate them but he would not look away from the old man. Who sat with his palm capped over his cane-crook, looking down at him. He wrapped his tongue around the inside of his cheeks for moisture and wetted his lips and said, “So my grandmother then: she was not only half sister to you. But her own mother was half sister to her father. Is that right?”

Mebane looked away from him then. Peering off into the sky above the empty shell of hospital. Without looking back he said, “It is blood-soaked. All of it is. Already now and more in years to come what we will recall is the big event of it. What people did to other people. But it will all be turned into something abstract, removed from each of us. Both colored and white I expect. I seen it happening already with G T Kress. And what will be forgot is the small everyday things that made it real. Because each man has to contribute someway to keep such a flimsy tent aloft. But once it is down we all can step away from it and say it was the other fellow—the other fellow that pitched it in the first place and the other fellow as well that helped hold it up. And so we walk away from it, from the ruins of it. And it will never be made right. It will never be repaired. Because some things are beyond repair. Those things that need it most, it’s beyond the scope of man to do the job. Because all we’re up to, most of the time, is trying to get a little bit back of what we think we lost. It’s human nature. We could flourish I guess. But it will not happen. Perhaps because in our hearts we don’t deserve it. Perhaps because it’s easier to lie between the legs of that dark sister than to call her by name.”

“Is that what you told her,” Foster asked, his voice rasped thick, “when she came back down looking for her mother. Is that what you told my grandmother?”

Mebane looked back at him. Foster had to look around the hand on the cane tip to see his face. As he watched, the hand clenched hard and the old man stood. Way up over him, looking down. Dry-skinned in the heat of the day, his face blotched with color, blanched and ripe at once. Then he turned away and went down the gravel path between the graves, a tall lean figure bent to one side, the sunlight soft as bathwater over him, the cane stabbing out hard and angry ahead. As he went he called back without turning his head. “No. I did not tell her that. I did not. I was a coward, what I was. I did no better than my father or any of them before him.”

He did not look back again but kept on going and Foster watched him until he reached the car and once there Mebane stood, his one hand holding on to the side of the car, his back still to Foster. Foster could see him breathing, the small hump of his shoulders rising and falling within his back. He looked away from the old man, down at the ground beneath him. He raked his fingers through the gravel, the stones smooth against his fingers. Then he stood. Once up, he rocked from side to side and stamped his feet against the earth. Ran a hand through his hair, down over his face. The muscles of his cheeks and jaw tight as drawn bolts. He looked out away from the files of headstones toward the pine-stand beyond the fence. The light there in sharp angles between the trees. He whistled for his dogs.

They rode back silent to town: the old man slumped down against the seat and doorframe, his face turned to catch the wind through the window, his pale stringy hair blown up away from the stretched-paper skin of his skull in some awful halo; Foster driving one-handed, his right arm draped across the seat down into the back where his hand rested on one of his dogs, driving through the deadstill middle of the afternoon where even the muledrawn wagons they passed seemed to swim in the dust, the mules trudging each step with a sideways yaw as if belabored more by the strike of the heat than the load behind. Foster no longer raising a hand in greeting to the black men driving the loads, no longer able to see them as other working men but recognizing that they inhabited landscape unknowable to him, one that he could not penetrate regardless of what blood he shared with any of them or not; it was not blood anymore than it was the common shares of dreams and hopes and fears that bonded them but rather the dark bay of the soul that the one race had opened unhindered upon the other. Slavery he knew then was not the whips and chains of the school history books, not the breaking apart of families or the unending driving labor but some stain far greater and deeper, something that had been unleashed and then bloomed up, between and within at once, both races, white and black, forever without surcease, tenacious, untouchable and unchangeable. And wondered how a man might know this and go on. And for the first time since driving up to the farmhouse in Vermont and seeing the face of his aunt come out the open door he thought he understood something of his father. And he thought then, That is how it’s done, how we go on; we make it personal because we can bear that. And recalled Mebane saying something like that and looked over at the old man as if to see something of himself there. But this man was a stranger to him, in a way that other old man, that faded yellow ferocious old man on the parlor wall a thousand miles away would never be. And Foster then also thought Don’t be so sure.

He parked in the alley and opened the gate in the back fence for Alex Mebane and left the old man to make his way unaided to the house while Foster opened the trunk of the Chrysler and fed the dogs tinned meat out of there, sitting on the seat with the door open and his feet out in the sand of the alley under the speckled shade of the live oaks as the dogs wolfed the gray meat from a shared tin plate. Then he let them into the yard and worked the pump to fill their bucket with fresh water. He brought in the tin water can from the car and filled that also at the pump, wanting things as much in order as he could make them. He refilled the bucket for the dogs and watched as they switched ends of the yard from earlier to lie up in the shade now against the side of the unused barn. Then he went quiet into the house.

Alex Mebane was asleep in the padded rocking chair in the dining room, his head tilted back, mouth open. Foster stepped back into the kitchen and let the quiet door swing shut. He took a tin basin down from a nail in the kitchen wall and carried that and a bar of handsoap from the sink out to the pump where he filled the basin and then on to the cabin. Where he closed the door against the bright light and stood in the dim dull heat and washed himself and then stepped back into his trousers but left his feet and chest bare and lay down on his back on the sleeping bag, sweating again where he’d just washed but thinking he might not smell as strong.

Then he stood again and went to call the dogs in and close the door. He wanted them with him. They came fast as if they’d been waiting for him. Glow circled around up on the tick and lay where his head had been. Lovey, older, wiser, went straight to the hearth and stretched out there, disregarding the snakeskin for the cool old bricks. Foster lay back down, pushing the young dog away, not wanting the heat of her against him. Both dogs speckled with the green triangular pods of beggar-lice. There was a steel-toothed comb in the Chrysler that he needed to run through them. He closed his eyes, a great stripped-down fatigue over him. He felt he should leave the place he was in. He could not get away from the sense of some unknown looming event, some disaster before him. But knew also he was not done here. He did not trust any of this but could not step away from it. It could be the heat. It could even, he thought, be everything all at once come down on him. He was lonely, with a pain that spread out from his chest throughout his body. He laid his hands open on his belly and breathed the closed dread air of the little shut-up miserable cabin, his eyes closed; the room around him burned into him as if he had spent winter nights by lantern light memorizing each split and splinter in the squared-log walls, each pouch and pout of the clay-mud daub between the logs, each smokestain on the stone chimney, each grease stain on the hearth. The air itself he sucked into his lungs, air that had been expelled by those before him: dense, wet, close, only just enough to live on.

When he woke the light through the now open door was pale, quivering with dusk, and he came up startled with her sitting there beside him on the bed watching him and as he cried out in fear he knew who she was. She did not move when he called out, did not shrink from his abrupt fear. Sitting sideways at his waist, wearing a pale green skirt with a white blouse open at her neck where a fine gold chain fell holding a slender gold cross. Glow lying alongside her thigh, the dog’s head up on top of the skirt. Two sets of eyes watching him. His first clear thought how close her sex was to his and how little there was in between and his penis moved inside his trousers and he stayed sitting up, putting his hands down in his lap. His face a foot from hers.

“You haven’t been lying here all day sleeping waiting for me.” It was not a question.

“Daphne,” he said.

“That’s better,” she said. “Just the sight of me should not make you scream.”

“I was startled was all.”

“That’s all right. I don’t mind that.”

“Oh shoot. Boy I was asleep.” He wanted to kiss her. He said, “That’s what I hear.”

“What do you hear?”

“That you don’t mind startling people.”

“That’s true enough. Up to a point. But you’re aiming at some detail. You want to fill me in?”

“I spent the day with Alex Mebane. He took me for a little trip. And talked the whole time through it.”

“I see,” she said. “So, you’re learning what you came after. That’s good, isn’t it? But you’re not being straight with me, Foster. Foster? I thought maybe we understood each other.”

“Maybe we do,” he said. “But I’m not sure that’s a good thing.”

She spouted her lips and blew air at him. “What else is there? But you hold on and back up. I want to know what you heard. About me.”

“Isn’t that the way it is? We always need to know about ourselves first.”

“Well shoot boy. What’s the alternative?” And she grinned at him.

“I don’t know.”

And she heard the despair in his voice and she was quiet a long moment. She did not move away or toward him but she looked at him close. Then she said, “I don’t guess there is one.”

He said, “I heard about you over at the college. Riding that mule.”

She sighed. “I always felt bad about that mule. He didn’t want to go. I had to get off him and break a branch off a bush to whip him on with. I never thought it was because he knew it was wrong. I just figured he knew it was the wrong time of day to have to work at all. It was so early in the morning. A mule knows what time is his and what time is not.” And she grinned at him.

“Seems to me, you wearing only some kind of toga made out of a sheet, even a mule would be happy to rouse himself to carry you.”

“Is that what he told you? Well, I had a slip on. My underwear. I was not jaybird naked.”

He reached for her face. She stood up. “Are these your dogs?”

“This here is Glow and that one is Lovey. They’re English setters.”

“I know what they are. They’re pretty.”

“They are pretty.” He sat without moving, watching her. She stood beside the bed not looking down at him but off. She was very still but he felt that she was in some motion within herself. Some perturbation, some conflict rising up. It’s me, he thought and reached for her hand. Even as he reached thinking it was the wrong thing to do.

She stepped away from the bed and went before the small single-pane window of old bubbled glass. He could just see the side of her face. She reached up and ran a finger slow in the dust on the glass. Without turning her head she said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. People just make me so damn sad. I can’t stand it. You know, when I was a little baby my daddy used to carry me around with him all the time. I remember it, hugged up against his side. Took me with him everywhere. I went out in the fields, went to town, to the gin, the tobacco warehouse. The livestock sales. And he’d introduce me to everybody—I remember that, shaking big old grown men’s hands. I can’t tell you what that was like, the world of men. All in their overhauls and suitcoats and their big boots and the heavy stained cattle prods they carried, the smell of their sweat and tobacco and the earth on them. Bending down to shake my hand solemn as if I was one of them. Doing that even as they smiled at me in the way they would not smile at one another and those smiles telling me I was someway special. But still let in! Still in with them. Even after I started school I’d come home afternoons and run out to find Daddy and like as not he’d be watching for me, see me coming. Stop what he was doing to hoist me up or squat down talking to me, asking me about my day and then telling me about his, what he was doing. What we were doing. That’s what it felt like. That it was all something we were doing, the two of us. Like my absence was just something temporary. As if he was holding some place for me. I’m the youngest you know. Two brothers and a sister all older and those brothers worked alongside Daddy ever since I can remember but it never seemed the same with them as it was with me. He drove them hard. Still does. They hate him and he hates them but they all love each other and they don’t ever say a word about it. What they talk about is what work they need to be doing. But now he can barely bring himself to look at me, much less speak to me.” She turned from the window and looked at Foster. “But nothing changed with me. I’m no different than I ever was. So, what happened? I tell you what. I don’t know. What’s wrong with me? I don’t know.” She walked halfway back to where he sat on the bed and stopped again, her hands out before her as if grabbing something from the air, her face turned full upon him, working upon itself and before he could speak she said, “Do you think I’m a slut, Foster? Was last night just some slut to you? You tell me the truth, Foster. I’m counting on you for the truth.”

He spoke slow. “I guess I know what it was to me. I’m not sure I can tell you what that is though. What words.”

She nodded.

He went on. “The question it seems, is what it was to you. That’s how it seems.”

“How can I know what it was?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess you either do or you don’t. And I guess if you don’t then it isn’t.”

She cocked her head at him. “It was your first time wasn’t it.”

He looked at her awhile. Then said, “Why are you so worried about what I might think about whatever you might have done before with anybody else?”

“Do you think that’s what it is?”

“Well. It doesn’t seem like you trust me.”

“I don’t trust much of anything.”

“What I’ve found, there’s not much to trust. Not much that stays.”

“So why do you trust me?”

He grinned at her. “Didn’t say I did.”

“What about those words you can’t say?”

“I don’t know. I’m not even sure what they are.”

“Yes you are. You know exactly what they are. You just don’t want to say them for fear you’d be wrong.”

“I’m not sure it’s worry about being wrong so much as wanting to get things right.”

She smiled at him then. “That’s a pretty thing to say.”

He looked at her again for some time. Then said, “You’re the last thing I expected when I came down here. The last thing on my mind. The last thing I thought to find.”

“It can be funny how that works.”

“I guess so. Some ways it makes sense.”

“It’s funny. The first thing I thought when I heard about you was that this was someone I had to find out. Someone who was here for me.”

He was very serious then. “It’s complicated. There’s business between your uncle—your great-uncle—and myself that’s just starting to get worked out. And I don’t know where it will lead but already I can tell you some of it’s not so nice. There’s no reason to think it will get better as it goes. If it goes any further. He could clam up on me anytime I think. Although I don’t guess he will. He’s going slow with it, bits and dabs, but what I think is that’s more to let each piece sink in all the way with me before we go on. Anyway, I don’t know what’s going to happen with it all. And I don’t know how much he’d want you involved in it.”

“You’re afraid I might mess it up for you and him, my being around?”

“No. I don’t see it as a problem. If anything, it seemed to me he took some delight over me this morning, teasing me about you. But serious too. It seems to me he cares for you.”

“He’s got a soft spot for me, somehow.”

“Thing is, what he’s telling me, it’s not exactly making us close, him and me.”

She was quiet then, studying him, understanding what he was saying. Then she said, “I’m not stupid, Foster. I know plenty about him, those others too.”

“Well I figure you do. Still, you know what they say. About blood.”

She came then to the bed and sat beside him and reached her hands up to his shoulders, just resting her hands there, the droop of her arms between them. He did not move. Her eyes broken shards of winter sky. She said, “It’s all blood, baby.”

The blankets, their skin, the very air of the room a swamp, everything rich, glutinous, gelid and pure as he imagined some ocean, some forgotten lost sea might be. The dogs, both of them now, off on the hearth, watching them, their heads up, their eyes alert, curious and somewhat alarmed.

“I’m not a bad girl. Not really. I just want. I want.”

“I don’t think you’re bad. I think you’re some kind of wonder is what you are.”

“No, no, no. Foster. Anybody, any girl, could do this for you.”

“I’m not talking about this. I don’t know what it is. It’s not what you think it is, what you seem afraid I’ll think it is. I’m just all scrambled up inside is all.”

“You boy. You sweet boy.”

“What is it?” he asked. “What is it you want?”

“Oh Lord,” she said. “Everything.”

Late dunrose dusk, pale light dimmed free of shadow. The blanket off them. Still hot. Still-hot. Something passed, not sleep, not waking but some nether nuzzle between the two of them, drifting up and down.

The door opened. The dogs shot out. Alexander Mebane standing in the door, his cane leaned in like something extended out before him. His head tipped sideways to look at them. Daphne scrabbling the blanket over them, her movements clumsy against Foster as the rough army blanket tented them.

“Children,” Mebane said. And shut the door.

“Oh Jesus wept.” She was up in the half-light, tipped awkward on one foot then the other as she stepped into her underwear. For the brief moment before she pulled the rest of her clothes on as glowing white as a peeled onion. It was the first time he’d seen her this way, naked and struggling with her body, and he sat welled with tenderness, thinking that the very way she lived within space was different from him, that the world someway was not made right for either one of them alone but together they might find balance one against the other. She said, “I’m dead. I am dead. Oh shit I’m shot and skinned and hung out to dry.”

He got up from the bed, languid, pulled only by her urgency. He pulled on his trousers and said, “He didn’t seem that worked up about it.”

Her blouse over her head, she was running her hands through her hair. He could not see that this changed the way it fell. She said, “You don’t know anything about it. What it is, is I carried Mama in to Wednesday night church and brought a sack of food for you two which is all I was supposed to do was come over and get you all fed and then be back there to pick her up. Do you know what time it is? I am god damn dead. She’s setting over there, waiting and pretending not to wait and there’s two or three other ladies setting with her pretending to chat about any god damn thing they can pretend to be interested in but all any of them is doing is waiting to see when I show up, if I show up, and they’ll all each and every one of them be sniffing the air, each one trying to figure out if I’ve been drinking or screwing or both or whatever else they can dream up.”

Foster buttoned his shirt, then reached out and straightened the little gold cross where it was caught bottom end up in the chain around her throat. “Well,” he said, “at least you haven’t been drinking.”

She batted his hand away. “Don’t you make fun. It wasn’t you that rolled in at a quarter to four this morning with Daddy already out in the sheds and Mama setting at the table with coffee already made, me stinking of corn liquor and everything else and cross-eyed and her reminding me that however old I might be or think I was as long as I was living under their roof there was things I could and could not do and I was just about done calming her down when Daddy came in and started up all over again. So I got through that and slept and got up and worked my tail off to make this mess of food for everyone just so they’d let me plead to bring you two stranded odd boys something to eat other than soup out of a can while my mama was at church and me making promises left and right and then here I am and I screw it up, screw it right up. Don’t you make fun with me.”

“Was that what it was,” he asked. “Quarter of four?”

“No it was not.” She was sitting on the bed, lacing her shoes. “I must of left you off here about two or so. I don’t know. What I did was swipe the rest of that liquor jar from your car and rode out in the country and set there stopped, just drinking and thinking. Until some old colored man came along on a bicycle and I knew it was later than I wanted it to be and so got along home.”

He wanted to ask what it was she had been sitting thinking about. But she was up, brushing her clothes with her hands. She said, “Don’t you have any idea what time it is?”

“It must be eight o’clock or so. Maybe later.”

“You think that’s all?”

“It’s starts getting dark early this time of year.”

“That’s right. Still, I’m awful late.”

“I could come along. Explain things.”

She looked at him, half-grinned. “Explain just what?”

“Well. Maybe distract her.”

“You’d do that all right. No. What you do. Damn it. I was going to build a fire in that stove and warm things over. Listen. There’s a sack of food in there. You two can warm it or eat it cold, I don’t care. But I got to go.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll be fine. Mama and me, we’ll have the ride home to get things worked out. I just want you to go in and eat that food. I can’t stand to cook. And there I was all afternoon in the kitchen, any minute feeling like I might could be sick, just to fix food for you. So you go in there and set down with that old man and eat you that food what was good once, before it got cold. And do your business with him. You’ve got business to do with him, isn’t that right?”

He stepped back, again feeling the faint threat of distance. He could not help himself and said, “When can I see you?”

She stepped up close and kissed him fast. “I don’t know.”

“It’s early,” he said. “I’ve been sleeping all day. He’s an old man. Even if he gets worked up I don’t bet he’s good for more than three-four hours.”

She looked at him. He could tell she wanted to go but still she stayed. Then she said, “You remember how to get out to the crossroads? Pettigrew?”

He nodded, pretty sure he did.

She said, “Between one and two, I’ll do my best to be down along the road. Not right by the house but somewhere along there. If you get out there and don’t see me just drive on to the crossroads and set a bit and then turn around and come back slow. I’ll slip up out of the ditch. If I can get out there. Don’t do it more than twice. Don’t drive by more than twice. Two times, I’m not there, I won’t be. You hear me?”

“I’ll be there.”

“If you’re not,” she said, “I’ll know it’s because you couldn’t help it.”

It was an odd meal. Mebane had it out of the sack, arrayed on the countertop. Wide-mouth jars of vegetables, snap beans and cutup yellow squash and a smaller jar of tomatoes stewed with peppers and okra. A cloth napkin tied around a heap of crumbling cookie-cutter biscuits. And a square tin box that had once held lard or lye or some such now filled with flattened pieces of beefsteak in a thick gravy the color of oatmeal. Chicken-fried steak.

They ate it room temperature off old wide featherweight china plates that Mebane removed wordless from a china safe and wiped clean with a rag, taking each plate down one at a time and setting it on the counter and then lifting the rag to wipe it off, slow and cautious. As if, Foster thought, making clear that all his life had been conducted one patient slow step after another, every action thought out beforehand in a world where there was no free hand to arrest a fall, to catch a mistake.

Mebane disregarded the meat, dabbing spoonfuls of vegetable distinct on the plate, taking up a single biscuit. Foster loaded his own plate, digging deep into the tin of meat with a wide spoon to bring up the warmest slabs out of the thickened gravy. Then followed Mebane into the shabby dining-room where again they ate side by side at the single spare bare area of the table. He felt soft and easy, wide awake and, because of this, wary. He felt this was when he might miss something. He could not help but think of Daphne cooking this food for him. Regardless of anything else, this meant something. Thinking that it is the small things that stitch us one to another. And wanting to be stitched. As simple as a longing toward home. A home that might grow from a plate of food. Seeing her naked and stumbling into her clothes. Thinking he could not find the way to tell her that her being in the world set him to tremble, throughout his soul.

“Okra,” Mebane said, “is not edible.” He was lifting the chunks of green wheel free of the stewed tomatoes and stacking them at the side of his plate. “It was brought from Africa by the coloreds. Or to feed them with. Somehow we all got stuck with it. You can stew it like this or you can batter and fry it but all you’re doing is eating what it is cooked with. Still, everyone grows it and swears how much they love it. I’d rather eat treebark.” He glared sideways at Foster.

Foster put his fork into the stewed vegetables, lifting up a piece of skinned tomato and one of okra together, and ate them. The tomatoes were sweet with the peppers and seasoning and the okra was a sidelong crunch, something to chew and seep out the other flavors. He said, “I like it.”

“Of course you do,” Mebane said. “From her sweet hands. Eat it up. Eat it up, all of it. Eat that meat too. Used to be when I was a young man I could not eat enough meat. For a time I thought it was on account of not getting much through the war. But it occurred to me that it was something else I was after. Some big bite-hold that would never be mine. I’ve been happier since I gave it up. Better for my bowels, too.”

“I’m hungry is all.”

“I bet you are. Well, eat on it. Whatever you don’t will go bad and get fed to your dogs.”

“They’ll have to stand in line.”

“Boy, they already are. Your attention grows more divided by the minute.”

“I haven’t forgot why I’m here.”

“That’s right.” Mebane speared a chunk of squash, lifted it to examine and set it back down. Took up his biscuit and broke off a crumb-edge with his bright corn-kernel teeth. “You’re the one after the truth.”

The meat did not need a knife but came apart under the fork tines. It was not anything that he thought of as beef but he figured he could get close to the bottom of the tinful anyway. He said, “What happened, that you never got married?”

“Who says I never did?” Mebane now peering down his flung-up nose at Foster.

Foster looked around at the discord of the room. “Nobody. I just assumed—”

“Which you shouldn’t do. Young sir after the truth. No I never got married. What woman would want a one-armed man?” Stabbing green beans one at a time and lifting them to his mouth, eating the food as if angry with it.

“I don’t know,” Foster said. “I’d imagine there might be some. Depending on the woman.” Then he added, “Depending on the man, too.”

“Well, there,” Mebane said. “In one step you arrived at the conclusion of every busybody I ever met in my life. Which is to put the blame for it on me. As if it’s a lack just because everybody else does it. Or most everybody. There’s one-two old maids whose theories are the most severe concerning me. But mostly it’s a simple thing. Regardless of how two people start out, from what I can see, and the view is pretty far from these years, for most it comes down to the little things and the little things for me are ten steps for everybody else’s two or three. And I think anybody patient enough to put up with me that way for years and years would have to be stupid enough that I would hate her. Maybe that’s just an excuse. Maybe I never found the right person. Maybe it just was not meant for me. Maybe I’m not the marrying sort of person. It looks that way, don’t it?”

“I guess so,” Foster said. He laid his knife and fork on the side of his plate and let his hands rest loose on the table edge. Upright in his chair, looking at Mebane next to him. “Are you a queer?”

Mebane chewed on biscuit. His eyes on Foster. Some of the anger paled, some of the wry twist lifted in his eyes. He swallowed and said, “You’re a regular man of the world ain’t you?”

Foster shrugged. “It’s not anything to me. I told you my father worked those White Mountain resorts. Saw every kind and stripe. Warned me of it too.”

“There is plenty think I’m queer. But not the way you mean. A bale shy of a load is what they mean. But no, to answer your question. My own needs are unfulfilled and will always be that way. They are beyond the reach of life is what they are.”

His arm was what Foster thought he was speaking of. Foster pushed back his chair and stood, taking up his empty plate. He said, “I’m going to get a little more of this food. Can I bring you something?”

“Eat it all. I believe I’ve had enough of it.” He pushed his plate, still with dots of food, away from him. “What you can do is carry this into the kitchen for me. So I don’t have to sit looking at it.”

“I can do that.” Foster lifted up the other plate.

“What else you can do you’re out there in the kitchen? I could use a little drink. If I recall, down in the cabinet under the sink, back behind the bottles of soap and disinfectant and all that mess I don’t bother with anymore, back of all that I think you’ll find a fruit jar with a little corn liquor in it. You could bring that in to me along with a glass. Two, if you want some. I know you’re no stranger to it.”

Foster carried the plates through that silent door that each time he passed through left him feeling he’d moved some great distance he could only guess at. He set both plates down in the sink and then stood over the sink and with his hands ate three more pieces of the beef, the gravy thick on his hands, all of it ripe with seasoning. Then ate a biscuit and rinsed his hands. Looked out the window set in over the sink into the reflection of himself in the dark glass. Wondered how many times his grandmother had done the same thing. And her mother. And what they had seen looking back at them. He dried his hands on the old piece of sacking Mebane had used to wipe the plates. Took up the tin of leftover meat and gravy and stepped with it outside and stood silent a moment before his dogs came up out of the dusk. Then set the tin on the ground, pausing bent as they began to eat to run his hands over their backs. Unmindful of him, the dogs gulping at the food, swallowing pieces of beef whole without chewing, each wanting to get someway ahead of the other. Dogs knowing no one would wait for them to catch up, mother-daughter or not.

He went out across the yard and through the gate into the alley where the Chrysler was parked. He lifted out the backseat and opened the crate of liquor and brought out a bottle of his father’s hoarded scotch. Set that in the sand at his feet. Then opened the wood case holding the L. C. Smith and took it out and used the oiled rag laid flat in the bottom of the case to run over the gun. Then broke it open and reached again down into the backseat and rummaged for his vest and pulled free a pair of shells. No. 6 birdloads. It was what he had. He slid them into the gun and snapped it shut. With the shotgun in one hand he bent and carried the bottle of scotch with him back into the yard. At the slave cabin he went in and laid the shotgun upright in the corner by the head of the bed. Once the gun was laid up he slid his hand down to make sure the safety was off. His hands running over the gun in the dark an old familiar thing. Something known top to bottom. He could not say for sure why he wanted it there but knew he did. Something simple. The way you checked to make sure your shirt was tucked in before going in someplace. Then he took the bottle of whiskey and went back to the house. Passing Glow down on her stomach, her front paws pinning down the empty tin, her head up inside it. Her teeth scraping against the folds of soldered tin. Eating nothing but flavor. The scent of something.

There were jelly glasses on the drainboard but he left them there and went to the china safe and opened the wide double doors and peered in at the neat dust-ribboned stacks. Found a set of short squat tumblers and lifted down two in one hand. Light as holding a pair of postcards. He took them to the sink and rinsed and dried them, running the sacking rag over them until they shone bright in the light. And carried it all into the dining room. Again through that silent door.

He set the glasses on the table and made no show with the bottle but twisted off the seal and poured both glasses half full and set the bottle on the table and sat down. His chair now pushed a little back and to one side from Mebane. Without waiting he said, “My dad had a couple crates of this buried out back of the house. When he was killed I dug one up and brought it with me.”

Mebane leaned to peer at the bottle, took up the glass and sniffed at it, then sipped. “That’s the real thing, ain’t it.”

Foster drank off some of his own and immediately wished he’d brought cigarettes in with him. But went forward, where he was determined to go. He said, “I been thinking about all you had to say this afternoon. Up there in the cemetery. It was a pretty good job, seems like. I felt like I was being led around. But what I came after is why my grandmother came back down here after her mother and couldn’t find her and so went home where she was loved and needed and chose instead to walk up in the woods and kill herself. You haven’t told me one thing that gets close to explaining that. Why she did it. And what I think is if anybody knows it’s you. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me that her daddy being her mother’s half brother or whatever the point of your story this afternoon was, it doesn’t make anything clearer to me.”

Mebane lifted his glass and sighted along the rim at eye level and then drank some. Put the glass down and looked at it. “In its way,” he said, “it was part of it.”

“Her part or your part?”

“Could be they’re much the same thing.”

Foster drained down his own glass and set it on the table and poured for himself from the bottle and turned to look at Mebane. “The way I heard it, when she got back home she kept talking to herself about some old man set up on a block with a rope around his neck and doused down with kerosene and set afire so he burned up until he jumped off the block to kill himself. You know what I’m talking about? Mister Mebane? Sir?”

Mebane sat silent gazing off across the table, into the piles of books and newspapers and old ledgers there as if it was a place he longed to go. He ran his one index finger around the rim of his glass without looking down at it. “I do.” His voice loose upon itself, a soft strangle. He added, “Mister Pelham. Sir.”

Foster said, “I didn’t intend to be rude.”

“A man can’t handle his whiskey hadn’t ought to drink.”

“I can handle it just fine. What’s giving me a problem is feeling like I’m in the middle of some old duck-and-dodge. I think I’m patient, otherwise.”

“But you have an end to that patience, is that what you’re telling me?”

“Everybody does, I guess.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“No sir.” Then added, “Not yet.”

“Good,” said Mebane. He took up his whiskey and sipped. “Good for you Foster Pelham. You see, we’re beginning to understand each other.”

“I don’t see that.”

“Oh yes you do. It just hasn’t occurred to you that way yet.”

“Sir?”

“What there is between us is something not either one of us wants. But it’s here. It’s what we have.”

Foster was quiet.

Mebane filled up his glass and let it set on the old stained green blotter. As if he just wanted the glass full. He still had not looked at Foster. In the same quiet voice he said, “The man you’re talking about was called Peter. He was yardboy to my parents. And he took care of the driving horses and mostly except when my father got a burr under his butt did the driving for them. Now Peter was a horseman. This is something you need to know; most white people that owned Negroes would brag about them. If they wasn’t complaining. But it was all how good a cook this one was or how good with the children that one was or what a hand with the flowers or the horses.” Mebane looked then at Foster and held up his hand palm out flat. “Thing is, most of the time what we’re talking about is one people that elevated simple everyday skills to something special and appointed some of those other people to hold them. Not because the first people couldn’t have had those same skills, mostwise. But because it held the whole delicate balance a little more firmly. As if there were some things one set could do better than the other. What they disregarded was that it was a simple matter of what you have to do. If being treated well depends on how well you cook or fertilize a rose garden, then you’re going to do it well. And if you don’t have to do that, you can attribute some special level of skill to those who can. Most especially if you don’t have to know anything about it. If you can just set down and eat the food or walk through the garden and see how pretty it all is. You understand?”

Foster said nothing.

Mebane went on. “With that said, Peter was a horseman. Now, you have that automobile. Do you know anything of horses?”

“Not much.”

“You see? It’s a new world. All the time there are old worlds slipping away from us that we don’t even see going. What you’re here after is one old world, one thing, but there’s countless of them. Horses is one. Your children, their children certainly, will think there was never anything but motorcars. Yet they’re brand new. And behind them is ten thousand years of men and horses working together. Think about that. All going away. The horse will be a plaything in the world to come. And fewer and fewer will be the men who understand them, who know them down in their blood and sinew and sweat. I guess there will be men what know automobiles that way. I wouldn’t care to meet one. But forever, there have been horsemen. It’s not just grease and bearings and pistons and such. It’s the souls of two creatures that somehow line up. Link up. So one knows the other. The best of them, those horsemen, did not do well with people. But they could walk up to a strange horse and twist up its lower lip in one hand and lift the head to look up straight into that creature’s eye and talk to it and they would understand one another.”

“There’s men like that with dogs.”

“Ah yes, you’re the boy with the dogs. And some way you’re right. But allow this: Horses and dogs are different animals. It is the nature of a dog to bend to a man. It is not that way with a horse. A horse is a fragment more wild than a dog. There is always something in a horse’s eye we cannot see. Some place they look beyond us.”

“Dogs can be the same way. Good ones.”

“It’s the rare dog can kill you if you misstep.”

“All right.”

Mebane took up his whiskey and without pause drank it down. He said, “What happened to Peter was nothing of my doing. I didn’t even know about it until afterward. I was in bed at the time, insensible. I don’t remember any of it. All I know is what I learned later. But I will not lie to you. When I was awake enough to hear of it I was not unhappy. Not then. At that time it felt right to me. But I was not there. It was not me who called out for it, not me who stood by and watched. If I’d been able, would I have watched? Yes, I believe I would have. But it was not Peter I would have been watching. It was everything else. Things I would not have even known I was seeing then, the same as the men who did it. Most of them I guess. But I was not there. I was laid up in the bed.”

“Because she brained you with a flatiron is what I heard.”

Mebane lifted up the bottle and drank straight from it. He did not look at Foster. He tipped his head, the bad flowered ear toward Foster. His eyes still out in the dim reach of the room. The place, Foster guessed, where his eyes rested most of the time. “I was a boy. Younger than you. With my arm gone just three-four months. She stove in my head. And me already wounded. There was no one to look after me. No one that would tend to me. I was left to myself. I was alone. I still have dreams that soak the sheets and I wake from in a panic, right back there.”

“So who was it killed that old man Peter. And why him?”

“It was some few around. I was not among them.”

Foster nodded. “All right. But why?”

“Because it was him that helped her get away after she attacked me.”

Foster drank a little of his whiskey. Feeling now that he was firm-footed, following a way laid before him. He said, “How did they know that? That he helped her?”

Mebane looked down at the blotter before him. “When word got out what happened to me the men come up here and talked to Peter. I was not there. It was a wild hard time. These men come to talk to Peter, thinking he must know something of where she went, how she got away. A sixteen-year-old girl never been five miles from home before does not just pick up and disappear, not in the middle of everything coming apart. She had to have help, they knew that. But what happened, what I heard, was, instead of being a dumb nigger or a scared one or any kind they expected, not even a wild angry one, instead of any of that what I heard was old Peter stood out there in the yard, at the door of his little quarters up against the barn and in a voice so soft each and every one of those white men had to lean close to hear it, in that voice he told them they were evil, that the retribution of the Lord was loose upon the land and it would all end in blood and fire and sorrow for them and each one of them would walk the stones of eternity with the cup of their sorrows empty in their parched hands, their souls bound in the chains of their sins, the sins of their commission and the sins of their omission. It was quite a little speech and I guess those boys did not take well to it.”

“For somebody not there you seem to know it pretty good.”

“It got repeated to me. There was more I guess but that’s what I recall. And likely I’ve not even got that right. But the heart of it—that’s stayed with me.”

Foster did not ask who repeated Peter’s words. Instead he said, “If all she wanted was to run away why did she try to brain you with that flatiron?”

Mebane looked at him, looked away. Looked off. Then back at Foster, his face grim and tight, some old anger betraying the set of his face. Like his mouth was putrid he said, “You know why she did that.”

Foster sat silent. Like a trigger-line between his crotch and brain flared a sudden burst of images: Daphne first and rolled right over her was the idea of some other, some girl always there who could not say no. Whose no did not matter. As if some boil in him was lanced and spread through him. And understood the taint upon him and recalled also his father speaking to him once of women, bidding him to recall always that he once had a sister. And so because it was all he could say, all the authority he could claim, very softly said, “She was your sister.”

Mebane turned then, his mouth a pale working wretched line, his eyes a scrim of inflamed veins as he hitched his body sideways to face Foster. He said, “You’re not listening. Everything I’ve been trying to tell you is how we can find it in ourselves to let things exist or not. Of course she was my sister. And I knew that but did not admit it. The same way my father did not admit it, either about the girl that was his daughter or the girl’s mother that was his own sister. Anymore than my own mother would admit what she walked around in between each and every day. And all of that, all that just the small version under our own roof, but a piece of what all things were made up of. Can’t you understand that?”

Foster said, “Even if she hadn’t of been your sister—” And stopped.

“Don’t you rebuke me. You, out rolling around with that girl. Your own cousin. However distant you want to make it that fact remains. You see, you think it’s so far it can’t be traced, that it can’t touch you. It’s what we all do—we find a way to allow what we want but should not. It’s not so different, is it?”

Foster lifted up his glass and let whiskey onto his tongue and set it down and said, “I never asked her to do anything she didn’t want to do.”

Mebane was quiet then a time. Looked away from Foster, not off into the shadows of the room but down at the blotter before him. He closed his eyes and sat motionless. After a while Foster began to think he’d gone to sleep. He had the urge to rise and walk through the rest of the house. Through all the rooms, opening all the doors, cupboards and closets, all of it. Feeling someway he had that right. Even feeling Mebane would maybe expect it of him. But did not move. He did not want to see the preserved unused rooms he knew lay down the hall and up the stairs. Did not want to see the rank or spare room where Mebane slept. Or the furniture, the ornaments, the pictures, the spent detritus of the lives before of this house. He wanted none of it. He felt up on tiptoes, poised, on view only to himself; he felt he was stronger for disregarding everything else and staying right where he was. He felt he could tear the house down with his bare hands and knew he would only walk away from it and leave it behind him. As a man walks, he thought.

Without stirring, somnolent, Mebane spoke. “I was a boy. Your age, a year younger I guess. But I did not know what you do. I was still wrapped up in childhood. I don’t know what it was. Perhaps it was the war. Perhaps it was just the way I was made. But for me that winter was all about what I had not done. And that had-not-done was all laid up alongside what I thought I ought to’ve done. And you see, that was all Spencer. Spencer in my mind. Dead Spencer. I could spend the night talking about the ways I tried to track after him. Because they was countless; they informed and re-formed each breath and thought and step I took. Now, is that just the younger brother or is it something else? How can you know? There is the example of my father and Uncle Buchanan. Who came to my father’s funeral and stood solemn and silent watching the earth get thrown in under a winter rain, not saying a word to me or anybody else that I could see. Him in his brushed wool overcoat with the rest of us arrayed in clothes three years outgrown. But him watching that box go down. Like maybe it was something he’d been waiting for.

“I was fifteen. My brother dead more than a year. Me alone in the house with an arm gone. And there was that girl there. Your grandmother. I can’t see her as a grandmother. All my life what I see is her long lean body and that bright sudden smile and the way she walked as if every ounce of her body walked all over an earth that was held away from me, was something I could not touch. You see? I’m not talking about a sister here. And there was this: She and Spencer adored each other. As a boy that was all I could see. It seemed he had something I did not. And, to be fair, he would not admit to me what it was between them. That took me most the rest of my life to learn. Because at the time he was a boy too. So what he told me was not the truth. It was what he wanted me to believe. No. It wasn’t even that. It was what he thought I should believe. But beyond all that there is a more simple truth. Spencer did not bother to see her but as his sister. Spencer was able to step away from all the rest of it. That’s what he would not tell me. Or anybody else. Except of course her and I guess he did not have to tell her. They both knew it. But he would talk otherwise to me. I guess he thought he was protecting her someway doing that. Keeping their tenderness hidden. He would see that as more dangerous than any empty brag he could come up with. Because when all around you is built up of lies then where do you allow the truth in? You cloak it is what you do. You hide it anyway you can. You do not think about how one lie may twist around and allow another. You have no choice. So I was an empty boy. I did not have what my brother had.”

Foster drank a little whiskey. The electric bulb suspended overhead was arcing, dancing shadowy light. He waited a pause and then said, “Who was it?”

“Who was who?”

“When my grandmother did her best to strike you dead and ran off out of here and left you? You talk about being alone then. But you were just a boy. Bad hurt. So who was it that took care of you? Who was that person?”

Mebane nodded. Took up his whiskey. Did not drink but set it down and looked at Foster. He said, “Did you hear me?”

“I did.”

“All right.” Mebane nodded again. Then took up his cane and rose up, using the table edge to push his body against to stand. Clamped hard on the cane looking down at Foster. He said, “It was her mother. It was the only one here. It was Helen took care of me.”

Foster studied him. Then said, “She must’ve known what you’d done. To get your head laid open.”

“Well, I sure didn’t tell her.”

“But she knew.”

“I don’t know what she knew. What I can say for sure is I was hurt and her daughter was run off and one man was dead on account of her running off. So who can say why she did what she did? What she knew? What her reasons was? Maybe it was just to save herself. Maybe it was nothing more than that.”

“Now wait. You’re telling me there was just the two of you here alone and her nursing you and you two did not talk at all? Not one bit beyond what you needed or wanted? With everything else gone away you did not talk to her?”

Mebane weaved against the cane. As if the cane was the one reliable piece in the upright grouping of himself. A single slender raised vein pumped on his forehead. He said, “I tell you what. Some of this work you have to do yourself. I can’t lead you through like a child at a medicine show. What I’m doing. Is to go pee. I’m an old man. My bladder can’t hold that whiskey like it used to. Then I’m going to bed.” He scowled at Foster. “Other than that, I’m not going anywhere.”

“Well I guess I’m not either anytime soon.”

“There you go.”

“One thing.”

“What’s that?”

“I understand why you’re telling me all this. But sometime you’ve got to tell me the rest. The part I came after. Just so you know.”

Mebane looked at him a long time. The old man’s eyes watery with fatigue. Foster began to think Mebane would say nothing, was waiting for Foster to say something more.

Finally Mebane said, “You watch yourself with that girl. She is the only creature on this earth I love even a little bit. Do you follow me?”

“I guess so.”

“You’ll get what you want, in my way and my time. When I’m satisfied that I’ve got it right.”

Foster sat silent.

“Well,” Mebane said. “Goodnight then. Turn those lights off when you’re done setting there. I don’t trust that electric.”

He sat at the table for the time it took the sounds of the other life in the house to cease, the faint scrapings of movement from the second floor, the pad of uneven feet. Then a time more while the house settled to rest around him. He corked the bottle of whiskey still half full but drank off what was left of his own glass, left it there on the blotter as some rough evidence of the night for the morning and carried the bottle out with him, leaving the room dark behind him; also the kitchen where he paused before the dark to study the remains of the uneaten dinner—the jars of vegetables and the biscuits. It was not just food. He was pretty sure of that.

Outside the evening haze had thickened. There were no stars. It was still warm, the air heavy, a thing immediate to walk through, to breathe in. The rub of cicadas pierced the air as if the insects inhabited all living space. As if they would bore into his ears.

He let the dogs out of the slave cabin and kept the door open to sit and watch them, white ghosts scouting the fenced yard. Then left them be and lighted the lantern inside, leaving it on the floor as there was no place but the bed to set it otherwise. Went and knelt by the hearth and took up the snakeskin there and broke the segments apart in his hands. Dry hard shackles of some body passed by. Then reached into the hearth and rubbed one hand there. Squatting on his haunches. Just old stones, long cold.

The dogs came in and lay up on the bed and watched him. As if they wanted to see what he would do next. He turned and sat crosslegged on the floor with the lantern turned to a low wicker and looked back at them. He drank a little from the bottle of his father’s scotch.

Twice he went out across the yard through the gate to the Chrysler in the alley. He sat there and smoked cigarettes. He could take off the brake and hold down the clutch and coast silent down the alley to where it dropped to the street and there pop the clutch and drive off as quiet as driving could be. Out to the crossroads. Pettigrew. Where she said she would wait for him. He turned sideways on the seat and propped his feet up on the far side of the dash and with the bottle between his legs sat smoking. He had no idea why he did not go to her. Each time he went to the car he intended to leave and find her and each time he did not. Each time he left the car to return to the cabin where the lantern, the wick turned low, was blackening the chimney so the cabin grew more and more dim. Just shadows. Shadows of walls and floor and hearth and rising rough chimney stones and the jut of bed into the dim space and the two forms on the bed with their eyes yellow and pale as from another world watching him.

The rain began sometime while he slept, not waking him but entering into him someway as it struck soft against the old rotting splitcedar shakes overhead so his dreams were of rivers, of swimming underwater through windowglass water, some brown-skinned girl swimming alongside him, streams of bubbles sweeping from her mouth back into her short twisted glistening hair, her body naked but never quite seen altogether. Together they skimmed over the smooth riverbed stones.

He woke to a rain-dimmed early dawn, fresh and sharp-edged, bouncy. He stood up in his trousers and opened the door and watched the water run slantwise into the overgrown dried-up backyard. The dogs went past him, quick-footed with the sudden cool, after rabbits in the tall broken grass. The rain came through the open door and streaked an oval on the old floorboards around his bare feet. He ran out to the back fence and through the gate to the Chrysler where he rolled up the left-down windows, thinking, Stupid. He should’ve guessed it would rain. Feeling again that he was in a place where he could not recognize simple signs. He dug in the backseat and got his canvas coat.

Everything—the yard, the old carriage shed, the still-dark house, the trees beyond—was distinct yet close. As if color had been drained from the world and with it simple perspective. Back in the cabin he took off the coat and got a shirt on and his socks and boots. Roughed his wet hair with his fingers and then put the coat back on. The dogs splattering damp marks, traces of themselves, in the dirt layer of the floorboards. Wet and happy, both of them, smelling like dogs, eyes pitched up on him.

He stepped again into the wet day and shut the door behind him, closing them in. He stood a moment studying the dark house. It was early. He crossed over the yard to the carriage barn and went in a small man-sized door set into the two larger doors that would open out. To one side a row of vehicles: a covered buggy, an open carriage, a two-wheeled fancy gig. All dull with grime and dust, spiderwebbing like the hands of ghosts over them. The cloth sunscreen of the carriage rotted off its slender frameworks. The other side a row of straight stalls, empty, cleared of all manure or bedding, of anything at all. Except—when he went up into one and ran his hand along the planks of the stallside where the wood had been smoothed by years of rubbing—some few long dark horsehairs still caught in splinters of the wood. And the wood of the feed manger worn down where hungry necks had pushed down into it, time after time, day after day. Old tie-chains welded with rust lay in the bottom of the mangers.

At the end of the stalls a row of feed bins and beyond that a door let into the wall and he went through there and was in a small slope-roofed shed built onto the side of the barn. The shed empty. Nothing there at all. At one end a small hearth and rough chimney. Against the inner barn wall, high up, was a set of eight spaced wooden pegs the thickness of his wrist, a foot long and curved up. Harness pegs. That was all. Even the hearth had been swept clean. The room was dark, just a single paned window set high on the shed wall, dark with grime, not cleaned by the rain. Foster squatted and looked around him, studying the walls, the floor. And finally could see where there had once stood a bedstead built into the wall like the one in the cabin he was staying in. Along the wall at the end of where the bed had been, found some nails where clothing had once hung. Thought he could see patches on the floor where perhaps a chair had been scraped back and forth from a table over the years. That was all. At the end of the shed was a door that opened into the yard and he went out through there. Against the side of the carriage barn, right up close under the eaves, was a stack of stovewood. The stack had at some point come right up to cover over this outer entrance to the small shed. Where Peter had lived.

A pall of dense sour woodsmoke hugged close down over the yard. He looked at the house and from one of the two chimneys a thick oily spume rose up, the color of wet black wool. He crossed over to the house and went in through the kitchen. In the dining room he found Mebane down on his knees before the grate. Stacked up smoldering against the andirons was the stack of ledgers from the table. Beside Mebane was a pile of yellow newspaper, from which he was removing sections and crumpling them against his chest and then feeding them under the ledgers, prodding with a poker lying before him on the hearth. His cane was upright, within reach, against the hearthside. He looked around when Foster came in and then back at his work, reaching for another sheaf of newspaper.

“What’re you doing?”

Without looking back at him Mebane spoke. Into the fire. “Nothing. Burning trash.”

“What was in those books?”

Mebane took up the poker and stabbed hard at the mess before him and the ledgers gave way, sliding one off the other. Fresh fire licked up. “Nothing.” He stabbed again. Still not looking back.

Foster left the old man to his burning and went through into the kitchen where he stood at the sink washing up from the night before. Wiping down the counters. He fried eggs on the electric coil and toasted bread and laid the food out on plates. The work made him melancholy, the rain against the windows. The meals he’d cooked alone or for his father, the water dripping off the tamaracks and hemlocks. He was a long way from home. Even if the house was still there, even if it was his, it seemed long gone. He was terribly sad. It seemed the farther he went the less he had.

He carried the plates into the dining room and silent put them down. Took up the glasses from the night before and carried them to the kitchen. The fire was burning well now, Mebane standing to the side of the fireplace, a couple of sticks of wood atop the stacked ledgers. The room was warm, drying the moisture from the air. Foster came back in and together they sat and ate.

Mebane mopped eggyolk with breadcrust. “I thought you’d be out running all night.”

“No sir. I stayed in.”

Mebane nodded as if they’d agreed upon something. “I was awake myself much of the night. Pitch and thrash. Then just about daybreak the time I got to sleep that girl called me up to make sure I hadn’t killed you or run you off.”

“Daphne called here?”

“Wasn’t you supposed to meet her?”

“It wasn’t anything firm.”

“Un-huh,” Mebane said. “Are you going to run off on her? Treat her bad? Time comes you’re done with me?”

“I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Mebane looked at him. “Life is a misery, isn’t it?”

“Seems like.”

“You’re lucky, you know.”

“How’s that?”

“Most people, it takes up half their life or more to figure that out.”

“I don’t know. There’s ones that seem to do all right. That it seems things work out all right for.”

“All that is, is them not paying attention.”

“Could be luck.”

“Is that what you’re thinking? Luck? Let me tell you. Unless you get hit in the head, every one of us sooner or later comes down to lying there reworking each and every inch of our lives. Gasping for breath. Imagine how that is—to not be able to draw breath. And you lie there wondering what mercy the Lord can provide. Because it’s clear the tired old earth is out of mercy if it ever had any to start with. And the Lord, the Lord He is silent. He don’t go peep. Now tell me, what kind of luck is that?”

Foster grinned at him. “Not much I guess.”

“It’s not funny. Not much is right. Look over there in the fireplace. You know what that is burning up?”

“No sir.”

“That’s right you don’t. What that is, is years of trying to write out what happened in my life, long afternoons, midnights, long hours, chewing on a pen-tip, trying to get things right. Because it seemed like it was all I had. Some way to get it out of me and before me in a way I could see it. That would make sense to me. Something I could touch, could review.”

“Why’d you burn it up?”

“Why boy, because I got you. Because you’re the one I can give it to. Because you’re the single one needs it as bad as I do.”

“I don’t want all this. Some single answer is enough.”

“You’re close,” Mebane said. “You’re closer than you think. You been adding two and two and you just about got it. Except you got that extra one thrown in and you’re still trying to make her fall in and add up to four. But she’s a sum all of her own. Part of this but her own also. The same way you are.”

“You lost me there.”

Mebane scowled at him. “There is always some other one that keeps us hopeful. That makes us believe things can change. Or at least keep us smoking onward, intent on reaching the next bend. The place where it all comes together. Where it all makes sense.”

Foster leaned back in his chair and looked at the old man beside him. Mebane creased and white, his eyes up to a high glitter, a chatter of iris and pupil. Foster said, “You’re talking about love, aren’t you?”

Mebane said, “Sometimes it can be love I suppose. Or at least start out that way. Othertimes—”

“Othertimes what?”

“Othertimes, I don’t know what to call it. Something that eats at you, that burns at you, that consumes you. That you can’t touch. That you can’t even see. But that is with you every livelong day. It’s a fair thing to call it a passion. But you got to recall, passion is one of those things that is individual, complicated, as many-faced and -sided as a person. As the person that bears that passion. Do you understand?”

“I guess so.”

“Listen. Your grandmother. Leah. I’m going to call her Leah. That’s how I knew her, how I thought of her. You never met her. Is that all right with you? If I call her Leah?”

Foster was silent.

“There you see. It’s coming now. And you know it don’t you? What you came after. What you thought you wanted to know.”

Foster was very still. He said, “Tell me.”

“I killed her, boy. It was me. Yes.” He held up his hand palm out. “As sure as if I’d followed her back up there to those Vermont woods and tied the rope myself. I did.”

“Now what you have to do is forget everything I’ve told you. Because this is the part that is not about any of that. I don’t mean for you to discard it, just let it slide off to a corner of your mind and hold it there for later. For you. Right now feature only this—a man who twenty-five years past harmed a woman and the woman did her best to harm him even worse but failed. See that man, not young anymore but still one with a hint, a faint stir of hope that the mess of his life could change someway. See him there, right out the front of this house sitting up on the front porch in a hot September afternoon, not so different from the one you walked in on. Except he’s out there like he does most every afternoon. Waiting. Because there has not been a day go by but what he thinks of her. Not a single solitary one. She, who could be dead for all he knows. Except she is not. He knows this. And it is not just daytimes. At least once a week he wakes from dreams of her, dreams where her skin and voice, where the touch of her is so vivid that waking he wants to hurt himself to get back there. To that dreamland. And he wonders how many of those dreams occur that he sleeps right through. On the one hand he likes to think it’s not many of them and on the other he likes to think that she flows through him all the time without stopping. Because he knows it is not his brain that labors over her, not his mind but his soul. His heart. Where each and every day he is disturbed by her. Where he has long since worn out all the could-have-beens. All the ways he could have been different. Acted otherwise. Where he has made some peace with himself and does not quite think she will have done the same but still knows it will be different if he should see her again. And you see, he expects this to happen. Except he has been expecting this for so long it is expectation he has become. The actual woman, she is a fragment. She is only a portion of all that waiting. She could be anywhere on the earth, doing anything. And so he sits right where he is, because it is the only way he can think that she might ever find him. Because, you see, he cannot find her. And that is not a question of knowing where she is or not.

“All he wants is to explain he was a boy. That he did not know what he was doing. That he was a stupid boy. And that he is sorry. So sorry. It’s all he wants, all he thinks he wants through those long years. Because he knows when she does come, which he no longer quite believes will happen, it will be enough. Because he thinks that would be what she is looking for. And more—he thinks it’s all he’s looking for. The chance to say how sorry he is. But what he does not know, what he cannot know until he looks up and there she is, is neither of them are the same people. She is not that young girl. As important, he is not that young boy. He would be if he could. He thinks he will be. But he is not. He is a man grown into himself.

“So then there is that afternoon. Weather aside, one like any other. Except he looks up and there she is. Standing down at the end of the walk. Looking at him up on the porch. Her face revealing in one look that everything he’d thought this would be will be something else. Because what he sees there is only just a little fear of him but the rest a mask of pure loathing, a disgust of him so true as if she sees down into that empty soul of his and knows it better than he even can. And he feels shabby, feels caught out, found out. And he sits thinking perhaps she will just look at him and walk on, that her purpose will be satisfied. But she pauses only long enough for him to hope she’ll go on and then comes up the walk. Lifting the front edge of her dress each time she steps up the bricks. It was all still tended then. Until she is at the bottom of the porch steps, in the shade of the house where she can look him right in the eye.

“She tells him she’d thought he was dead. Nothing in her voice to show she wished it was otherwise.

“He told her she’d tried but not hard enough.

“And she just stood looking up at him. As if measuring him. She already knew him. So it was something else she was studying and he looked away from her gaze, knowing it was pity of him she felt. And he was still looking away when she asked him what had become of her mother.

“And there you see. He had her then. All the pretense of those years fell away just like that. He was revealed to himself as purely and cleanly as a tooth. So when he looked back at her he smiled. And he raised up his hand, his one hand, and ran it over this scar right here upside his temple, still smiling at her. And she looked serious at that smile and watched him stroke himself like that and he saw her fall away just a little bit. Not too much. Just what he was hoping for.

“It was a moment of miracles. She there before him: no longer some remembered teenage girl so much older than him but a full-blown woman still young and lovely, arched upright down there before him. In her best clothes better than any he owned by appearance but still he could look at her and see she was a countrywoman, a country colored woman who’d done well for herself and had dressed as such to make her journey back. And he could sit there, feeling ruined and proud and stronger than he had in years, maybe all his life, and look down at her and know that the both of them, each helpless before it, were right back in that rain-pouring-down kitchen all those years before. And he did not know any reason not to trail her over with his eyes, sitting silent that long time with her quest still out unanswered in the air between them, but sweep her with his eyes and let her watch him doing that. Because that was what lay between them. Then, and before, and always. And each knew it.

“Now it seems to me that you have begun to learn about sorrow. And that’s good. Good for you. But what you still don’t understand is desire. As a poet, Foster Pelham, you have to understand desire. We have, I believe, covered a portion of it. When we talked about the nature of man, of evil. That was yesterday. Or was it the day before? It don’t matter. Because man is at least an octagon. And desire is the one point that will lead. Where you have no choice. So, the poet is after desire.”

(“No,” he said. “I’m not a poet.”)

“A truth-seeker. And you should not disclaim that. I don’t need long stories to explain desire. Desire is not what the preachers talk about. What they talk about is what they fear most simply in themselves: chasing after whatever they can get. That is not desire. That’s not passion. That’s simply old root-hog-or-die. It’s why I can’t abide religion. They will not get down in the dirt and talk about how things really are. The best they can do is prate about the little common things that afflict each and every one of us. But they shy from the big ones. Because the big ones are so vast, reaching out to all of life, that there is no way to make a neat parable of them. There is no simple right or wrong. Desire then, desire is when you are helpless. It’s not a lapse, you see. It’s the truth of yourself. It’s all you have. All you can ever hope for. Right here on the sweet old earth. It is everything. It is, when you have it, something you know the Lord would bow His head before. Because, if He knows nothing more, the Lord understands desire. And when you have that, when it owns you, directs you, you have no choice but to surrender to it.

“So that man up on the porch revealed to himself. It was very simple what he did. He held his smile while he told her: what she should do. Told her to go over to Fishtown, to Niggertown, and went on then, enjoying the loss of twenty-five years to describe to her where he was talking about. Because when she’d left Sweetboro there was of course no such place. So he journeyed back and laid out the geography to her. Told her to go over there and ask around. Because he knew she would find no answer there. Because he knew there was none to tell her. But wanted her to do that first, because he knew there was only him. Wanted her to know for her ownself he was the only one she could come to. Reminded her she was a fugitive woman. And then told her what it would cost her to learn what she wanted. He sat up straight in that rocker, leaving that goddamn cane flat on the porch floor and forced himself erect to look down at her. Still smiling at her. And told her what she would have to trade for what she wanted. And did not wait to watch her face but bent and scrabbled for his cane and stood sideways a moment on the porch, looking off away from her, letting her see that some part of him still worked exactly right.

“It did not matter what she told him then. He looked down at her face all blotched with anger, still so pretty and fine. Fine like an animal, the sort of creature a man would make if he could make anything he wanted, to his own specifications—wasn’t that after all what those old Greeks were up to with their nymphs and naiads, the woman as a creature of the world, out of stone, rock, wood or some such thing, some material that we strive to join with? Some other beyond just the simple frail humanity of a woman?

“So he waved her off, just waved a hand at her response. Told her again to go over to Niggertown and see for herself, then come back. Not sure she would go anywhere. Just wanting her to have to wait. And he turned then and went on in the house, shutting the door behind him, sliding home the bolt he almost never used. So she could hear him do that. He wanted her to hear the sound of the lock sliding home. Wanted her to know she’d have to come up on the porch when she returned and knock at that door. That he would not be out waiting on her. Wanted that locked door to make clear there was no negotiation.

“Because the thing about desire and regret, when you’ve harmed someone and then have years to shred it and play it over time and again—the thing is you fail to comprehend the origin of that initial episode. You attach layers of meaning to it and feel it was an aberration, some moment of yourself out of yourself. That is what regret does. It allows you to live with yourself. You know what they say—all men in prison are innocent? It’s not that they are and it’s not even that they truly believe they are; it’s that they grow to understand themselves in such a way as to see that moment, the trigger that set them off in the first place, that got them to where they are, they see that as something separate from themselves. They come to believe, to know, that ever again their choice would be a different one. Not only in the past but in the future. Because they cannot allow the truth.

“The truth, Foster Pelham, is very simple. The nature of man is divided. And because we cannot live in the light we refuse to see the dark surrounding us. Until it owns us.

“So he sat up in that locked house the remainder of the afternoon. Because it was as if time had gone away. It was just hours of the day. Twenty-five years. More than that. He had no regret you see, no sorrow or remorse. All that was a confection he’d built around himself over the years. So he could live to that day. Because it was not love you see. What he thought it had been. There was terrible anger in it. Elemental is the word comes to mind. Possession is another one. To possess her in a way she would never be able to deny. That she could walk away from but would follow her, always. Yes, always.

“Now you can sit there looking at me like I’m some sort of monster. I don’t mind it one bit. You don’t know any better. But it is something that every man feels, at least once in his life. If he is lucky. That’s right. Lucky. That sort of passion. Beyond caring about anything. Any goddamn thing at all.

“So he did not move but sat in this chair right here. Waiting. For the first time in twenty-five years just waiting. Not thinking at all. Only a man, every bit and morsel of him. Roused, unstoppable. Needing nothing. Not food, not a drink of water, nothing at all. Not even that fucking cane. Which he laid up flat on the table and left there. So when late afternoon that knock at the door he knew was coming came he left that cane, and walked straight and steady and thoughtless as if he was fourteen years old again, down to the door. Where he could see her through the glass, her face turned down, her shoulder pressed close to the door. Waiting for him. He stopped some feet away. He knew she’d heard him coming but he did not care. He wanted to see her there. Waiting.

“When he opened the door she started to speak. But he reached out and laid his fingers flat over her mouth and held them there. Until she lifted her head to look at him. Her eyes wide and flat all at the same time upon him. And every bit of her piled up in those eyes. He leaned forward and kissed her forehead. It did not matter that she flinched from him. He expected she would flinch more than once in the time ahead of them. In truth, he liked that, he wanted it. He wanted to hear her moan, not only with pleasure but agony. Because it was the only way she could apprehend him, could understand all of him. Which he knew she could do.

“When she was quiet, he took her by the hand and led her into the house. Down the hall and up the stairs. And got her all the way to the landing, at the door to his bedroom where she stopped him. She reached her free hand and took his shoulder, his short one, and turned him to face her. She stood like that a long moment. Looking at him. And he saw not just the rage and anger that he expected but also some fracture in her soul, some infirmity, an ancient chasm. And he wondered then if she might kill him, might finish the job she failed at so many years ago. Thinking that the same way she had returned him to his essential self, perhaps he’d done the same for her. This did not frighten him. It was excitement, was what it was.

“When she spoke he saw the hatred of him there in her eyes, as if her voice was something apart from her. And it was that hatred he wanted. He wanted to own it. Not tame or change or make it go away. But to own. He held his eyes on hers then and saw the shrink of retreat. Ferocious, he gazed upon her. For as long as it took for her to look away. Because there was no negotiation. Then, her head turned, toward the door she was already entering even though she had not yet moved; then, she told him she’d heard what happened to Peter. He was confused a moment. He had to think who Peter was. He had been sure no one would talk to her. Because they would not know her, and they would know him. But Peter did not matter to him, then or ever. What mattered was she was now moving ahead and he was following, toward the bed.”

Still raining, hard. The fire burned down, the room hot and close. The long windows steamed inside and oily from driven rain, the room at midmorning dark as dawn. Foster stiff, holding himself from motion, wet under his arms, his skin rippling in the moisture and heat with recoil. Looking down at the stained green blotter. He could not recall when he’d taken his eyes from the old man seated up close beside him. The smell in the room strong of the old body, astringent, sour, blooded, as if some must, some musk, came off the old man as he talked, rising up in pitch as he went on, the smell one of decay and excitement all at once. All Foster wanted was away. He dreaded the old man reaching out that one claw hand to touch him someway, to draw his attention, his eyes back to that bitter bright maniac old face. He did not move.

Quiet but for the lash and splatter of rain. Time to time the low fire settled and would pop, some small chuckle of fire. After a long silent while, Mebane rose up groaning from his chair, leaning on the cane. He hitched his way around the table to the grate, where he took up the poker and stirred the sifting coals. The movement a terrible labor. As if sitting so long had crippled him more. And Foster thought maybe this was the old man’s natural gait, that his liveliness, his seeming ability of the past days, had been an effort. Some illusion for Foster. Or even for both of them. To get through it. To get here.

Finally Foster spoke. “So what was it? What did you tell her?”

Mebane’s one hand was up on the slender dark wood mantelpiece over the fireplace. Slowly he turned and leaned forward, his body a crane up over the tripod of the cane and his two feet. He smiled at Foster.

“Why, boy, I had to give her something. Her coming that long way and all. I had to give her something for the effort. And she knew about that old nigger Peter, what happened to him. So it was an easy place to start. What I told Leah, what I told your grandmother, was that after those boys done that way with Peter her mama and I had a little talk. It was Helen anyway tended me with my bashed-in head and mashed ear. It was a bad time. Everything was gone to hell. She was too scared to run. She’d seen Peter after they were done with him. She was still a young woman, even to a boy like me. That high fine round ass. Oh my. It was a beautiful story. It had Leah stunned right back down sitting on the bed still just wrapped in a sheet. And me standing there with my trousers back up, still feeling her against me as I told her how I’d made her mother my woman for fifteen years. Told her my father, our father, was dead. So Helen was my woman then. My housekeeper yes but my woman as well. Whenever I wanted her, however way. It was some moment, I can tell you. Grace is what comes to mind. All of it, as I told her, I could see it. Some rarefied moment of the mind. It makes you wonder what makes truth, where truth begins or ends. Because what I was telling her became my memory as I told her and I stood with the words coming and saw it becoming her memory too. It was lovely. I could not stop.

“So I went on. I made a child come, a girl child but an idiot. An imbecile. Soft-brained. Her name was Nell. Now that was pure genius. Just like that, rolling off my tongue. Her own mother’s name turned around. I described how Helen tried to keep her hid, hid away from everybody as much she could but that little girl could not be stopped. And I suggested to Leah that her mother was not without complicity, to go from the father to the son like that, the blood all mixed around. As if it was the one thing she knew. As if she could not stop herself from being what she was. And watched your grandmother’s face then, knowing that what she’d just done with me was no different, that it fell the same way.

“But I did not stop there. It had to come all the way from the night she brained me and run off in the rain to that afternoon twenty-five years later when she hunched naked sweating in my bed. So what I told her I had done with her mother, and what her mother had done with me, was someway a version of what she and me had just done. Some better version. One in which both parties knew exactly what they were doing and why. Where there was no hazard like there had just been that one time I’d waited twenty-five years for but something else altogether. Where it was not love pictured but need. Dreadful terrible need that would not go away. Could not be slaked. For either one. Because it was what I wanted, you see. It was what I wanted it to have been with Leah.

“So the story goes on. There was that Nell. She made it come all the way around. An inspiration, she was. I made her an idiot but that could not stop her body. All she was was body. I drew her tangled whole out of the air. What a daughter! Sister to your grandmother and cousin all at once. Who was fourteen years old when her throat was cut open in the middle of the night by someone unknown over in Niggertown where she’d been sneaking off for two-three years. Some jealous wife I suggested. Maybe even just some man sick of her. A simple creature-child who just wanted to lay back and splay her legs. The way any of us do. Leah fallen silent then, the sheet dropped off her shoulders. Flies landing on her and her not even aware. The smell of her still strong in the room. Her face like something broken by stone.

“Give me credit here—I made it short. Of course I was ready to wash myself. Get something to eat. It’s true, I wanted her gone. I had my reasons. But I did not torture her further. There was nothing left to tell anyway. It was just a detail to finish it off. How her mother then went out that night and walked the tracks to where the span is high over the river and dropped herself down into that water. That was all. I told her there was no grave. No marking. The niggers is afraid of suicides. But then, we all are, aren’t we? Then I left her. Alone in my room. So she could pull herself together and leave. I thought that was a nice touch, giving her that privacy. Even as I wanted her again and likely could have had her. But I was weary with it all. Some ways it had been so much for so long for so little. In the end, so little. Still, it was a good job. Wasn’t it?”

Foster could taste his eggs, the whiskey from the night before. His stomach was tight. Mebane was no longer smiling but his face was bright, pitched up. Foster ran his tongue over the roof of his mouth and swallowed. He said, “It was all a trick. Is that right? It wasn’t true?”

Mebane made a sound, a sigh, a hiccup of sadness, despair. It could have been a chopped-off laugh. He said, “I never knew where Helen went to. What happened to her. I was bad sick with fevers and somebody—it could have been her—got word to my mother in Raleigh who came after me. It was a terrible time to travel. The railroads was all torn up and shut down, the roads filled with Yankee patrols and every other sort of criminal you could think of. I don’t know how she did it. She got a man and a team and made that trip for me. Thirty miles. But by the time my mother got to me I was alone. Helen was gone, the other old nigger woman too. I didn’t know where, didn’t care. I recall lying on a tick in the back of that wagon sweating under a stretched canvas, crying with every step and jounce of the way.”

Foster stood. “It was all a lie then. What you told her was lies.”

“I was not interested in anything,” Mebane said, “except watching her break. All I wanted then was her gone. She needed something and I gave it to her. What did it matter? She needed that bad news the same way she needed to make the deal with me to get it. She did you know! She needed that deal. Maybe more than me. She had tried to trade her way into a new life. Fancy-go-to-town nigger woman! I wanted her to know what it cost. Cost me. I wanted her to have that weight over her every walking moment of her life.”

“Jesus,” Foster said. “Why? I don’t understand why.”

And for a brief moment Mebane’s eyes were focused on Foster, and when he spoke his voice was triumphant, soft.

“What I’m trying to tell you,” Mebane said. “She had that debility, stronger even than doubt. So there was that. But mostly,” he added, “because I could.”

“Because you could,” Foster repeated. He had grasped the top of the chair before him, the chair tipping on its casters, his arms shaking.

Mebane did not move. His face was pink, filmed with sweat. His shirt beneath his arms drooped dark along his sides. Foster could smell him. He let go of the chair and swung his arms loose along his sides. Mebane smiled once more, gray lips a rictus against the blot of his face. He said, “It wasn’t even that good a piece of tail. She was on top of me of course, her eyes closed. Just slapping up and down against me. I’ve paid for better. It was not the pussy I expected it to be.”

Foster started around the table. Mebane stepped back, away from the flue and leaned against the wall. He raised up the cane and cut several passes with it. “That’s it. Come on, boy,” he cried out. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

Foster stopped. He turned from the old man. The rain mapped dissolving continents down the window glass. He thought then of his father, of what he would’ve done. After a moment, he looked back at Mebane, the cane pointed at the ceiling, ready to descend. He said, “No.”

“No? What do you mean, No? It’s what you came after. It’s why you’re here.”

Foster put his hands in his pockets. He stood very still. Again, he said, “No.”

“No? A hunting man like yourself? You got those dogs. I seen you out in the woods with them. What’s the matter with you? Can’t you do the right thing?”

Foster stood silent. Mebane took a step forward, waved the cane in the air. Foster did not move. Mebane looked at him. There was a long silence.

Mebane was wheezing. He placed the cane-tip before him and leaned upon it. His breath broke. “I know you got a gun. I seen you carrying it in to the nigger cabin.”

Foster walked up to stand before him. He was as close as he had been to the man. He reached over with his left boot and tapped the cane-tip. “The worst thing I can think of. Is to leave you just the way you are.”

“Don’t do it.”

“Tell you what,” Foster said. “I’ll see you later.” And stepped around the man, aiming for the swinging kitchen door.

Mebane wracked, “Come on back here.”

Foster, already in the kitchen, straight for the back door, heard some crashing in the room behind him. Some flailing, some thing breaking. Breaking apart as it fell.

He went across the yard with his head bent down, the rain striking hard his humped back. He opened the door of the cabin but the dogs failed to pour out as he expected. He stepped up inside, shaking the water off his head. The dogs were up on the bed, one either side of Daphne. Who sat crosslegged, her hair in wet matted ropes, peeled away from her face, the L. C. Smith held over her lap.

“Jesus Christ,” he said and stepped forward to take the shotgun up from her, her hands coming off it and held up a moment in the air after it. He broke it open and drew out the two shells and put them in his trouser pocket and snapped the gun to and leaned it against the wall. Her eyes wide upon him, her face damp with rain from her hair. He said, “What’re you doing?”

“I got scared,” she said. “I thought something happened to you.”

“I’m all fucked up,” he said.

She stood off the bed. In heavy dark denim jeans too big for her belted high on her waist with four-inch cuffs over rough old boots also too big, a flannel shirt buttoned tight to her throat. The clothes splotched with rain, the boots rimed with red gumbo mud. She stood before him, not too close. When she stood the young dog Glow also rose up, sitting on the bed, watching. Daphne said, “When you didn’t show up last night I woke up this morning feeling something was wrong. I called Uncle Lex on the telephone and he didn’t sound right to me, sounded giddy and worked up, kept telling me everything was fine. The way a person does when it’s not. There wasn’t any way to get into town so I set off walking. I got a ride pretty quick.”

“What were you up to with my shotgun?” Feeling offkey. He wanted to be alone. Yet there she was. Her lips parted, her breath coming onto him a little sour. Her fear, he thought.

“I came right in the front door, down the hall and stood looking in the dining room at the two of you. He was off, wild, talking about somebody, I don’t know who. And you, braced back in your chair like you’d been hit. And not either one of you aware I was there. So I went out and came around here. And seen that gun leaned up against the wall and knew you had a reason for it being there. I didn’t know what to do. All I could do was sit here and wait, thinking if you came through the door in a hurry I could maybe stop whatever was coming after you.”

He looked at her then, the wet girl. “Is that what you thought?”

“Don’t make fun of me.”

He shook his head. “Whatever is after me, that shotgun wouldn’t be much good. I’m not making fun.”

Both quiet then. She was so lovely. He thought This is how it is, with all of them. Someway. His father and mother. His grandfather and grandmother. Even all skewed and twisted the old man in the house pale clean scent of her skin, her wet clothes. Her head laid sideways against his chest, her face turned down so he saw the crown of her head, the split-through to her scalp where her hair fell apart, the delicate rib of the back of her ear, the smooth swelling column of her neck going into the collar of the shirt. And when he stopped crying he still stood holding her, held her until they were both silent and still and he could feel her life against him, the beating of her heart. And stepped away when he felt himself begin to rise against her.

“Oh boy,” he said, turning from her, “am I ever fucked up.” And he took the box of his father’s stale cigarettes from the pocket of his jacket and lighted one and squatted in the rain at the open door of the cabin. And then, as if released, the two dogs came off the bed and went out the door into the rain, tracking again through the yard. He squatted there smoking, watching the dogs. The smoke came off in slow wrought spirals that held out in the rain before breaking apart. Behind him he heard her sit once again on the bed, the faint clicking sound as the tick settled.

“Where are you going to go?”

“I don’t know.” He did not look back at her.

“Back north?”

“I don’t know,” he said again. “I don’t think so. Not right off.” Thinking of the house in Bethlehem, the two old women on the Vermont farm. Them he would need to send some kind of word to. Some letter. Without any idea what he would say. Get away from here first, he thought. Then write something simple, painless, fill it up with his love of them, whatever it was he would finally be doing.

Behind him she said, “Take me with you.”

Where the rain ran off the shake roof there was a line of beading streams that were trenching pods into the earth, into the mire of mud, forming a shallow little trench. He said, “Before my dad died he talked of going out west. New Mexico. Arizona. We joked about it. I wonder how serious he was about it now. Maybe I’ll drive out there. Drive right on through the fall. Quail-hunt these dogs all the way, wherever I can find a place to do it. Right on through the fall and winter. See what it’s like. See what all that country is about. I don’t know.”

She was silent behind him.

After a bit he flicked the cigarette out into the mud and watched as it drenched through with rain and fell apart. When he couldn’t see any of it anymore, when the paper and tobacco were all mixed with the mud and gone, he said, “The thing is, I took you along, what I’m afraid of is everytime I looked at you I’d think about this place. And what I got to do. What I’ve got to do is put all this behind me.” He still did not look at her.

Her voice was very low. “You’re wrong. If you were to carry me along I’d just become a part of everywhere we went. You’ve got it backward. You leave me here, everytime you think of me you’ll think of everything else happened here. And I’ll get all mixed up with that. I’ll never be just me, to you, again. I’ve got forty-two dollars.”

He did not smile at this. But felt what he thought was a smile turn over within him. He stood, one last long look at the rain and turned to look at her. He did not say anything, just looked at her. As if reading every line of her, every part he could know or hope to know. To hold it with him. To take away with him. She saw him doing this.

“Then go,” she said.

“Daphne.”

“No. Just go. Go on.”

“Listen to me.”

“No. Go on, Foster Pelham. Look! What’ve you got here? That old ruint suitcase? Your gun? Those dogs’ll carry themselves out to your car. There’s this old sleeping bag. Here.” And without getting off the bed she rolled sideways and pulled it from under her and still sitting on the bed folded it and placed it on the end of the tick. “There. You’re all set.”

“Daphne—”

“You be quiet! Whatever it is you want to say, I don’t want to hear it! Maybe you found what it was you couldn’t say the other night. Well, that’s an old song and dance. I don’t want any part of it. Keep it, Foster. Keep it for yourself. Tell yourself those things. I don’t want to hear it. Just go. Just get out of here. Get away from me.”

He stood silent before her. Feeling crude, shambling, struck by her fury. After a time, knowing it was the wrong thing but not clear what else he might do, he said, “At least let me give you a lift out to your house.”

Her head jerked up to look at him, her eyes wild with anger. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to set right here. I don’t want any rides from you. Just get the fuck out of here.”

He carried his things out to the lane where the Chrysler was parked and sat in the car and used the oiled rag to wipe down the L. C. Smith and then shut it in its case and set the case down in the compartment with the whiskey and money under the rear seat and replaced the heavy seat cushion. Then back to the yard gate where Glow and Lovey waited him and he let them out and into the backseat of the car. They lay curled as if knowing it would be a long ride this time. He sat in the car, the rain streaming down outside, the day all brown and gray, even the leaves on the live oaks just a deep gray, a neutral tone against the downpour. Soon he could not see outside at all as the windows fogged from the wet dogs and everybody breathing. He opened the window and let the rain fall in to wet his left side and he smoked another of the cigarettes. And knew he would not leave her, would not abandon her to this place, certain that she trusted him because she was right to trust him. That he could be trusted. And then knew he could not leave her, and this had nothing to do with trust and all to do with her. That he could not leave her anymore than he could leave himself. He threw the cigarette out and sat a moment longer. Aware that for once his life was about to change because he wanted it to. Not as a result of what some other person had done or said. Thinking that right then, that moment was the true beginning of his life. He got out of the car and went back through the yard to the cabin door where he stood outside a minute looking in. She was seated still crosslegged on the bed, her elbows on her knees as her hands held her face, her shoulders rocking back and forth. She could have been laughing but no sound came from her but a desperate ceaseless suck for air. He watched her a moment and then stepped in and said, “I got no idea how far we can get today with all this rain. What I’d like is to get this place a ways behind us. Then, somewhere, we’ll hunt down some maps.”

She lifted her head, her face moist and blotched. She dropped her hands into her lap and studied him. Her chin was tilted off toward her shoulder, her lips as if she were silently whistling.

Then, somehow satisfied, she said, “You think we need maps?”