No one wanted the girl.
After her introduction a few people drifted toward the door, then others followed, lured by Sullivan’s offer to open his best keg of beer. The girl, grotesquely outfitted in an antique ball dress (perse), with an accent of velvet flowers at the décolletage, her hair parted down the middle, watched them leave with the resignation, the fatalism of a woman rejected more than once on the road, who expected it, and lowered her cheap parasol—they’d dressed her to favor a girl at the fair—stepping down unsteadily from the table: the token black girl at the beauty contest, forever told, “Maybe next year.” Except for a few children, and those signing papers for the earlier purchase, the storeroom cleared, leaving the floor littered as if a trashbin had been upturned, and the auctioneer in the worst of moods, tearing his leaflets from the wall, pulling down balloons, barking at the girl: P. T. Barnum on a slow day, giving the Crocodile Woman her severance pay.
What I could not tell was whether this was indeed Cripplegate’s Minty hanging back in the shadows, flinching as the auctioneer shouted, watching him—not unlike a theatrical agent—turn his other talent over to their new owners. And soon even these left, and I stood trying to recognize something of the girl at Cripplegate, in whom the world once chose to concretize its possibilities in the casement of her skin—limiting itself that something beautiful might be—in this badly used woman by the table. If you looked, without sentiment, you could see that her dress was too small and crawled up when she moved, flashing work-scorched stretches of skin and a latticework of whipmarks. Her belly pushed forward. From the cholesterol-high, nutritionless diet of the quarters, or a child, I could not tell. She was unlovely, drudgelike, sexless, the farm tool squeezed, with no thought of preservation in the seigneurial South, for every ounce of surplus value, then put on sale for whatever price she could bring. She was, like my stepmother, perhaps doubly denied—in both caste and gender—and driven to Christ (she wore a cross) as the only decent man who would have her.
And, dear God, she was Minty. I did not have a hold on my feelings. They slipped from remembered desire, the glandular hungers I’d once felt for her, to a biblical grief (Pauline) for both her damaged beauty and, within me, the inevitable exchange of passion for compassion.
“You want something?” asked the auctioneer, dragging his equipment past me. “The sale’s over, son.”
“You have not sold that girl,” I said.
“Her?” He laughed. “And I probably won’t.” He snapped his head, and she obediently came closer, curtsied clumsily, falling left, then turned around for me to examine her. Someone had, I noticed, buttered over a gunpowder burn on her back. Scar tissue like a bacon-grease mark. Her eyes were too deep, the sockets in a cowskull. My distress was not lost on the auctioneer.
“See what I mean?” he said. “She’s sick.”
The girl finally spoke: “I can work! I can!”
“If you believe that,” said the auctioneer, “there’s forty acres of good bottomland in Anderson I’d like to talk with you about.” Now he looked tired. “You can turn it off, sweetheart. Tomorrow you go back to Colonel Woofter, and if he still don’t want you, then it’s too bad, because,” he slid his eyes at me, “I been in every village between here and Ware Shoals with her, and you know what, son? No takers.” He laughed again, at himself, I thought. “She’s bad for business, you know what I mean? You gets a reputation for putting poor stock on the market and….” His shoulders bunched. He walked outside to his wagon, the back of which was loaded with chains—like a pile of coiled snakes copulating—and the girl, for whom every step seemed excruciating, began to cry. In less time than it takes to tell, I was at the wagon, pulling out my purse.
“What will you take for her?”
The auctioneer smiled, then suppressed it, a poker player’s slip. “Make me an offer.”
“I only have a few dollars, twenty….”
“You need ten times that.”
“Two hundred?” My heart swung into my ribs. “You said yourself—not a minute ago!—that no one would have her! Is she so valuable now?”
“My instructions,” he said, “are to sell this girl for no less than two hundred dollars. That’s what Colonel Woofter paid for her—I ain’t saying there ain’t been a whole lot of depreciation, but I’ll tell you what….” He reached into his coat for a deed of sale. “You teach over at the schoolhouse yonder, don’t you?” When I nodded, he said, “So you’re good for the money. You kin raise it in a month, can’t you?”
He took my name, and took my twenty dollars as “earnest money,” then snapped his head again at the girl. “Go on, darlin’. This gentleman just saved you from the auction circuit. No more pancake and greasepaint.”
Now that she had been sold, Minty was uncertain; she had not truly looked at me until he eased her off the wagon, and had only one question to ask him:
“What’s he gonna use me for?”
“That,” said the auctioneer, “is between you, the Holy Ghost, and Master Harris.”
I helped her onto my horse, letting her use my hands as a stirrup (the ones on my saddle were too high), then pulled myself up behind her, leading the horse west of town and toward home, but slowly, for it was not clear to me that I could sally into the bedroom and shake Wife from her beauty rest with news that I’d bought a Negro servant, adding, “And will you pay for her, dear?” But if she, or Dr. Undercliff, did not pay, then Minty would be reclaimed. Outside Spartanburg, I spread my cloak over her shoulders. She remained silent, suspicious of me, and we rode twenty or thirty rods more into a field as dark as the ocean floor, where I dismounted, and walked a few yards away from her to think: If I could not raise the money, what then? Her only option would be flight. And would I have to go with her? Did I have a choice? Was loss of Wife and home what I had purchased? Behind me, I heard her feet fall softly off the horse, and turned.
“Master Harris—is that your name?’
‘Yes.”
“I wanna say thank you, and God bless you, sir, for picking me.” A prepared speech, this. Said so often, and to so many owners, its meaning dissolved into mere sound. “And I promise I will work, if you don’t sell me. I been sold three times since I left Hodges.”
“After Anna Polkinghorne took charge of the estate?” I led her back to the horse. “Was my father sold? And my stepmother? Do you know what happened to Mattie?”
“Your stepmother?”
She made the sort of face Jocasta reportedly gave Oedipus after his interview with the Herdsman. I understood her confusion. (The Old South bred reversals almost as severe as anything in Greek tragedy: the brother and sister, I’d heard, sold to different plantations; fifteen years later, they meet again, fall in love, feeling an inexplicable tug, a partial anamnesis, and produce a brood of Bleeders.) Minty kept me at arm’s length. “It ain’t right to play with me….”
I moved forward; she moved back.
“Minty, I am Andrew.”
You are familiar with the way travelers, trapped at the train depot, listen to people peddling The Watch Tower? So Minty listened to me.
“Master Polkinghorne, if you remember, apprenticed me to Flo Hatfield’s farm in Abbeville, from which I barely escaped with my cullions (excuse me), after which I, and a coffinmaker—you do not know him—fled north, well, only this far north, where I have reestablished myself, taken a new identity, and live nearby with my wife—I have a wife now,” Minty’s mouth pressed in, “and I’ve purchased you not to put you to work but, as I promised years before, to buy your freedom….”
There is a place where southern women retire when their nervous systems short-circuit, a pleasant region much like a sanitorium, or a Writer’s Colony, and I have often heard it referred to as a swoon; I can describe it no further, having never been there: Men pass out, a few faint, others are knocked out, but men do not swoon, and I thought it improper to trouble Minty about details of the Ladies’ Psychic Powder Room after she checked back in. We rode slowly. Slowly, I say, for I wanted word of Cripplegate. As it happened, Minty knew nothing of my parents’ whereabouts after Anna put them up for sale. My father had bolted for the Georgia border. And Jonathan? It was now he who was bedridden, paralyzed after a particularly vicious crack to the skull from George (the clivus and anterior edge of the occipital bone were pushed permanently against the upper anterior surface of the medulla oblongata), and Anna, the long-suffering spouse who changed his bedsheets and sponged his backside, grew inversely in vitality (said Minty) as the old man weakened. More than this Minty did not know; and she only spoke sketchily of her masters (all men) who sprang up in her life, one by one, like principals in a gang rape.
“I am free then, Andrew?” she asked. “I did hear you say that?”
“No,” I sighed. “Not yet. There is the problem of two hundred dollars….”
“You do not have it?”
“My wife does, or,” I averted my eyes, “her father will provide the money, I’d swear on it. He’s the best physician in town.”
At mention of Dr. Undercliff, Minty stopped the horse, began to speak, then failed, her face tumbling into a fresh spate of tears. “Andrew, I need a doctor. People with what I got—pellagra—just rot away, unless they get treatment. I’ve had it a year. Colonel Woofter didn’t care. And no one knows what causes it. It’s like something you do to yourself, make a space for it inside, like, a year ago, when they sold me to Colonel Woofter and I couldn’t stand how he touched me, what he made me do, I stopped caring. I hated being alive that much. It’s like the way you feel turns into something solid and grows and kills you.” She pulled her dress to her lap. “Look at my legs.”
As I live and breathe, her bare legs, as I peered over her shoulder and down, were hideous. Hideous! Incredible, the clarity with which I remember those pustules and bleeding sores like spots of flame. Above and below her knee, the skin was scaly, reptilian, peeling like old house paint, seamed with festering fever blisters, a few of which had burst, and secreted down her thighs a green and yellow fluid so clayey, and protoplasmic, it made my stomach clench. Lumpy veins crisscrossed her legs. Old boils had left black places where they’d dried. Despite myself, I felt dizzy. She would die soon. Who could doubt this? I shuddered to think of it. Cells in me, corpuscles in my blood, spoke before I could reason out a reply:
“I will see you through this.”
This made Minty cry all the more. “I’ve always done for myself, Andrew. You know that. I don’t like being trouble.”
She was more trouble than she knew. She talked nonstop of the new life she would start, with my help, once she reached a free state, giving little thought to logistics, the long and perilous flight—I speak of running—if I could not buy her freedom. I would not stay. How could I? I had blundered into manumission, milked the Self’s polymorphy to elude, like Trickster John in the folktales my father told, springtraps that killed Patrick, crippled my father, destroyed (probably) Reb, and now—as we neared the cabin—would, I feared, take Minty. That failure would be final. It would finish me, for, if nothing else, I had learned that the heart could survive anything by becoming everything. Opening itself to others. And if the others, in whom you lived, died? Slowly, you died. Gradually, it wore you down. In this I saw the hand of Horace Bannon. He waited. He watched. I could let Minty be taken, or move on, forever trudging north, hope like the horizon, Canada a spiritual landscape as unattainable as Ultima Thule, and either way everything was lost but this: the important promise, the essential promise—the act of mercy—that the Soulcatcher offered. In weariness, I would welcome the kill as a wish. Could the trap be tighter?
Minty I told to wait on the porch after we arrived, and what composure I could muster, stepping inside, smoothing back my hair with both hands, disappeared in a sitting room that was no longer the room I remembered—my toe sent a wigstand clattering to the floor—but, in the darkness, a cabin that hurled back no reflection of my presence. Had I really lived here? Minty whispered, “Andrew, did you hurt yourself?” and, in her speaking the name I was called in the quarters, she gave me a nature that broke my mastery over the cabin forever. I stood stock-still: the sweaty fieldhand, a machete between his teeth, who has crawled through his master’s window. Minty’s scent was still on me. The smell of the quarters. An old, earthy odor of dirt floors. Woods. The cabin smelled different. Its darkness trembled with foreign sounds. An old grandfather clock tocking. A crack as the cabin floor settled. The furnishings no longer felt familiar. I touched things hesitantly like a guest, uncertain if this was the broken chair we propped against the wall and never used: a room of tables that threw out wooden legs to trip me, hanging plants that bent lower to bump my head, tools that rolled suddenly under my boots, bumped me from behind, and felt, I swear, as if they’d been shaped for an alien form—creatures built differently than I, with more (or fewer) fingers, no thumbs, or body parts I did not possess. Into this Martian parlor dropped Peggy, also a Martian. “William?” She had wrapped the topsheet from the bed around her. “You scared me! It’s almost morning.” Knuckling her eyes, she stumbled back to bed, and I followed: the first Earthman on the Red Planet, craning my neck in astonishment.
“Did you talk with Horace Bannon?”
Bannon’s name snapped the cabin briefly back into focus, but threw me farther from Peggy than Mars. To an image of myself fleeing hell-hounds in the forest. Of the two terrors, I preferred, to tell the truth, being the only Earthman stranded on a strange world.
“No, I went to an auction. There was an auction tonight, in Sullivan’s storeroom.”
Her legs drew up; she assumed the position (fetal) of sleep to hasten it. “It must have been awful.”
“Fruity,” I said, standing away from the bed, afraid to sit (why were Martian beds rectangular?), “you must ask your father to loan us money. There was a girl there, someone I knew years ago, and she is sick, and I have brought her home….”
Wife sat up in bed. She was instantly awake.
“You brought her home, William?”
“Yes—she is outside now. I have a month to make good on the sale.”
Wife’s hand fumbled on the night table for her bifocals, slipped them on, and this one item—glasses are peculiar like this—made her seem fully dressed. “You have to take her back! You say she is sick? And you still bought her? William….”
“I am indebted to her,” I tested the bed with my fingertips, then sat, “the way I am indebted to you, and your father, and Reb, and to my father, whom I shall probably never see again, though I would give anything for him to know and love you—I know that cannot be!—but there are duties I must discharge, if I am ever to be free.” I was fast losing her, stabbing at making sense, hoping the sounds would string themselves together on their own natural rhythms, creating order in front of me, for there was little within. “We are born, even slaves, into such richness, and if I cannot somehow repay them, my predecessors and that girl outside, then I am unworthy of any happiness whatsoever, here with you, or anywhere.”
“Really?” If Wife understood this explanation, which confused even me, she gave no sign. “Maybe I’d better go outside and see this grand person.”
Slipping into her housecoat, she walked from the room. Coward that I was, I could not rise until I heard the Martian Wife and Earthwoman talking in the kitchen, and even then I was too timid to join them. After ten minutes, Wife, very pale, her lips still twisted by what she’d seen, returned and crawled back into bed. “She is sick, isn’t she?” She blew her nose on a corner of the sheet, and asked point-blank:
“Did you make love to her? Before, I mean.”
I needed time to lie. She gave me none.
“William, you can tell me. Was she your lover?”
“Yes.”
If I had not lost the chandoo-induced ability to see the interior of objects, I might have glimpsed in Wife what did not show on the surface: the wound I’d inflicted. For a longer time than I thought bearable, Wife was significantly quiet, and if this quiet occurred in fiction, if she were a character in William Wells Brown’s Clotel, Delaney’s Blake, or Frank Webb’s Garies and Their Friends (all books Wife read), it would have been the lull before a cheap emotional outburst, an embarrassing scene: the horror-stricken belle pulls out her tresses like chicken feathers, she throws her husband, the beast, out on his behind. But Peggy Undercliff was no character in a novel. Her freckled hand smoothed a spot on the Martian mattress; here she told me to sit. Quietly, she said, “I don’t know what she means to you, William, but if you care, I care, and I will ask Daddy for the money.”
“You don’t want to know under what circumstances I knew her? Or why she calls me Andrew?”
She shook her head.
“If you decide, later, that you prefer her, and that she can make you happy, I will, of course, throw myself under the nearest train—”
“No trains in Spartanburg,” I said. “Remember?”
“—but I will throw myself happily under the train, because I want what you want, even if your pleasure means I experience pain. I had a long time to think about it after you took off.” She slipped her glasses down, cleaned them on the pillowcase, and smiled. “We will need help around here, I shall be doing less and, if she can work, she will be a godsend.”
I did not understand; I said so.
“Oh, William!” Wife grabbed my shirtcollar like a longshoreman, pulling down my chin. “You’re so clever at seeing invisible things—ideas—you can never see the obvious until it draws back and dropkicks you: I’m pregnant, dummy!” She let my shirt go and pulled her covers over her middle. “And I want you to know I don’t like it one bit!”
“You’ll survive,” I said.
Wife gave me a side-glance, then smiled and moved closer to kiss me. “We always do.”
This was hardly the turn of events I’d expected; I had prepared myself for oppression by preliving episodes of disappointment, obstacles, and violent death; I felt a shade disappointed that everyone in the White World wasn’t out to get me. (The truth, brothers, is that it was pretty vain to think oneself that important: hubris, thinking, I, one fragile thread, made that much difference in the fabric of things.) With no self-induced racial paranoia as an excuse for being irresponsible, I turned—and Wife turned—to the business of Minty’s recovery. For someone who suffered so, and still felt stupendous pain, she was cheerful, and this made her optimism in me—her faith in us—all the more difficult. Wife and I prepared an extra bed (not a pallet) for her in the guestroom. The first week after her arrival we insisted she stay in bed until Dr. Undercliff, off to see his patients in Greenville, returned. “I don’t take charity!” Minty told me. “You know that. If I can’t work, then I will go back to Colonel Woofter.” Wife and I stood to one side, watching her pull out the sofa, pointing triumphantly at lint and whore’s wool in the corners. “See! It’s filthy in here! Andrew, you never could clean.” She winked at Wife. “He just wipes in front of things.” She sailed into a soap-and-water campaign that shamed our earlier efforts to clean the cabin. Her meals were no less meticulous. Minty, like a mobile library, carried hundreds of recipes from Cripplegate’s quarters, dishes I’d not had in years. Patiently, as if she were talking to a child, she explained to Wife, “You never fixed him Salt Fish Cakes? He loves Salt Fish Cakes! But you got to go easy on the hot pepper. They give him the hot squirts and running shits.”
Soon enough we learned that the best way to handle Minty was to keep out of her way. And what else did she know? Needlework was a sealed book to Wife (our lopsided coverlets testified to that), but Minty, on the other hand, could conjure hoop-dresses from old cleaning rags. She took over Wife’s education. And mine. Told me how to landscape my postage-stamp-sized property, how certain chemicals—and in what combination—would coax grass from the bald patches, where to plant cherokee-rose hedges to hide the cabin’s bad features. Minty, as you may have guessed, would never implement these ideas. They would be done. But….
Bear with me.
When the pellagra, a wasting disease, worsened, spreading to her lungs, Minty never quite caught her breath again, which made her angry at herself, and anger stole what wind she could draw. Midway through her first week with us she began, though she hated this, sleeping ten hours to build enough strength to work three. Wife stayed at Minty’s bedside, reading to her, while I taught. We watched her in shifts. Perhaps you don’t understand. When Minty complained (which was rare), when she said the new sores on her legs burned, when some nights she experienced roaring headaches that became screaming fits, uncontrollable crying (her head under her pillow so we could not hear), when her hands had, finally, to be tied lest she bite off her fingers, I would come in, anxious and afraid to see her, toss my books on the table, then, entering the guestroom in my stocking feet, press my cheek firmly against hers. Nay, I said nothing. I made no sound. Minty would smile—I smiled right back. She knew what I meant: We were old, cashiered warriors, Minty and me, romantics who knew the risks. But, remarkably, we were not alone. With Peggy, whose fear of sharing love was tested, then transcended, we made it through more bad nights than I care to recall. Take my word on this: I believed, as I believed nothing else, that together we could see her safely to a world where no soul catchers, no driver’s pistol-cracking whip, would ever caa her into darkness again.
“Minty,” I said to her the second week. “The doctor is back from Greenville. He will be here this evening.”
“Help me dress, Andrew.”
She turned her head toward me, weaker than I’d seen her in days. Blanket creases were impressed on both sides of her face. All day she had screeched like a madwoman—sometimes she was a madwoman, wan and hollow-eyed. Often, she clawed her covers, so sensitive was her skin to the coarse nap. Life in her was low, but a smile played across Minty’s lips when I sat beside her.
“Peggy ain’t here, is she, Andrew?”
The heat from her hands, in mine, worried me. “She’s gone to get her father. They’ll be here shortly.”
Her eyes shuttered, she squeezed my hands tightly, and my throat grew thick. “She’s no slouch. When you told me you was married, I thought, what? Can’t nobody spoil this silly nigguh as good as me.” She had to rest a moment. Wait for wind. “Now, she ain’t no rose garden. She can’t see nothin’ unless it bites her nose, but, well, I approve.” She patted my hand. Then Minty opened her eyes in surprise. She sat up a little and looked at me. “Why you cryin’? What’d I say?”
“Nothing….” I left my head, for a moment, on her side, her hand on my hair. Then I heard Undercliff’s carriage. My voice was shaky, strange to me. “They’re outside now. You make yourself pretty.”
“Sure.” She frowned. “Then maybe I’ll swim the English Channel.”
On the porch, Undercliff, puffing, head down, paused on the stairs, his right foot planted on the porch, his left on the last step but one and, wheezing, had both hands on his right knee.
“William….”
“Don’t tell me.” I helped him into the sitting room. “I have been redefined from the simply Annoying to the Very Annoying.”
“You flatter yourself,” said Undercliff. “I am working on a special category for you, the social equivalent to Cerebral Hemorrhage.” Standing behind him, Wife helped the doctor remove his coat, then brought the teapot to the kitchen table. Undercliff stood, facing the fireplace, warming himself. He looked back at me over his shoulder. “Peggy has told me about this girl, William. You wish for me to pay for her freedom?”
“I will be in your debt forever, Father-in-law.”
Undercliff winced, his face wrinkling.
“You are already in my debt forever.” He walked to the table and poured himself tea. “And do not call me that, I’ve just eaten a fine meal at the Club, and I should like to keep it down.” Wife gave a groan, which her father ignored. “I am not in the habit of buying pigs in pokes. If she is as wonderful a young woman as you say, the best thing since indoor plumbing, then perhaps—I only say perhaps—I will help you.” He finished his tea, set his cup on the hob, and pulled down his vest. “May I see her now?”
The doctor spent the better part of an hour with Minty, the guestroom door locked. Wife and I waited in the yard. Now and again, Minty let fly a muffled scream. I took a step toward the door.
“I know he wouldn’t deliberately hurt her, but the way he pulls weeds….”
Wife slipped her arm around me, shifted her weight, and steered me behind the house. “Walk with me,” she said. “You’ll feel better.” And so I did. But, for my part, the examination worried me. Minty had not eaten all day. She smelled sour. Sweat. A seaweed odor, as if her cells were breaking down into more basic elements. Wife and I walked in silence, the moon above us high, the air clean, the perennial red dust settling. Feeling her warmth, the mystery that she was to me now—being within being—I walked, saying nothing. Then Wife stopped, struck by a thought. She could write her Aunt Olivia in Boston. There, Minty could find work. Make her way as a freewoman. She’d grow rich, given all she knew. Wife’s decision so pleased me I lifted her into the air, my arms snugly nestled under her small, hard buttocks, then twirled her dizzily until we both dropped, lips locked, in the high dry grass. Everything, friend, was winged. Covered with grass, I turned her back, eager to tell Minty immediately. Yet, with each stride we took nearer the cabin, she brushing dirt from my hair, the screams increased in volume. Undercliff appeared briefly outside on the porch, then hurried back in.
“William,” said Wife. “You’d better go ahead.”
I broke into a run, thinking, “Not now,” ran, fell up the stairs, turning my ankle, then limped into the cabin. Undercliff stood outside the guestroom, blood spattered on his vest, his trousers. My pulse sped up. Blood was at his feet. On the bottom rail of the door, as if Minty had tried to walk and had fallen. I could not control my voice. “How is she?”
Dr. Undercliff started; he had not been conscious of me until I spoke. “William….” He rubbed his eyes. “She has suffered this affliction longer than most….”
“You can’t help her?”
He stepped back from the door, making room for me. “There is still time to speak to her, if you have anything to say.”
I advanced into the guestroom with one foot always forward, not wanting to face this, afraid, aye, of what I thought I would see: so many profiles of Minty spun before me, like flashcards—a frightened girl condemned to stay forever in the shopwindow, on the Block; a servant whose laughter affected me like straight gin, so gay it was at times, so Galilean in its goodness; and another Minty I did not recognize, reduced to rotting flesh. He face was dark, her mouth hopeless. “Minty?” Seeing her shook a low, queer, animal sound out of me. She was disintegrating. Sugar in water. Form into formlessness. Her left leg had separated from her knee, flowed away like that of a paper doll left in the rain. Frail light from the lantern nearby etched checkered shadows on her blanket. Shadows were deep in the swales of her skin. She had bitten off her middle finger. Undercliff had torn her sheets and bound it. Her untied hair splashed behind her on the bed. The envelope of her skin expanded, stretched, parted at the seams.
“Minty?” I pressed my lips to her cheek. Warm. “You’re going to Boston.” The room was spinning. She began to rouse slowly, lifting her head. Fire like spiraling flame shot through my heart, and all of me strained toward her. “You hear me, don’t you?” Her eyelids quivered, showing white surfaces gone gray. Milky pupils large as dimes. Her face was distant and strained and incomplete. Cracked lips sucked back against her gums, she focused dimly on my face. “Andrew?”
“Yes! I’m here.”
“Tell me,” she said, “that you love me.”
“I do,” I said. “I do!”
“Very much?” she asked.
“Very much.”
Her right hand reached out, tentatively, touching my face. She licked her lips. Something in Minty relaxed.
“You said Boston….”
“Peggy knows someone there.”
My chest, I felt, was on fire. “We’re leaving tonight.” Undercliff, Wife, and, I thought, a third figure, stood in the doorway; I knew that without turning, felt their pressure shift the room’s pressure. “As soon as you can travel….” I remembered, at that moment, how Wife spoke of eastern beaches, their colors, which I knew had been planned at the instant of Creation to complement Minty, blues and browns to contrast the warm hues of her skin; and I saw her there, washing herself clean of the petroleum stench of the marketplace. She would have children—I’d never approve of their father, no man was good enough, and I’d nag whomever she chose—children all stamped with her strange beauty; I saw her stand a freewoman, washing her hair, then she stepped lazily back….It was gone. A gush of black vomit bubbled from her mouth onto my hand. The Devil came and sat on Minty, his weight pressing open the valve to her bladder and bowels. I raved, all my eloquence empty, refusing to release her hand. In my chest there commingled feelings of guilt I could not coax into cognition.
Over my shoulder fingers moved to close Minty’s eyes, then settled firmly on my shoulder: Undercliff, I thought, yet it felt like my father’s hand. Or Reb’s. I let it lift me to my feet. The doctor had not moved from the doorway. Nor Peggy. And the voice that belonged to the fingers upon me was made from the offscum of other voices.
“Andrew,” said the Soulcatcher, “We got business.”