The wagon came slow. Two horses, one black, one white, led it down the dirt road. It was December, early enough in the morning so that the blades of grass were still webbed with frost. The eyes of the men in the fields lifted from the ground to watch the wagon make its steady course away from town. Women on porches held their hands over their brows, shielding their eyes from the feeble winter sun. What sort of a wagon was it, and where was it headed? It was as tall as a train car and half as long, each side enclosed with bars, and inside, if the women squinted, they could see the men in their striped uniforms, lying in their bunks stacked two deep and three high, some supine, some leaning on an elbow and looking out, and then they could catch their eyes, dull and dark, staring back. They were the men who had been seen along the Twelve-Mile Straight before, leveling the ditches, dragging their feet in their chains, but never in a wagon headed west, to the place where the dirt road ended, where the Creek River drip-dropped into a trickle. Driving the wagon was Lloyd Crow, a shotgun across his lap, and as he passed each house he nodded his greeting. Another shotgun guard, Hank Talvey, hung off the back. Two bloodhounds trailed behind. By the time the wagon reached the farm farthest down the Straight, then kept on, the two croppers in the field were scratching their heads.
“What in Hades they after?” one asked the other.
The other man lifted his hat at Lloyd Crow and watched the wagon disappear over the little hill. He said, “I heard it, but I didn’t believe it. I do believe they gone pave the Straight.”
Inside the cage were a dozen men, the four white across the top and the eight Negroes in the bunks below. The youngest was a boy of fourteen, who’d stolen a crate of milk from the porch of a white woman in the Third Ward. The oldest was old as the pines. He claimed to be a Civil War vet, forced to fight for the Confederates; they said he was sentenced to ninety-nine years and a dark day. That was why his uniform was the color of a paper bag, while everyone else was in stripes. He liked to be called General, though the warden refused. Every prisoner was to be called by his last name. Problem was, now there were two Smiths on the crew—a white boy, in the camp but two weeks, and a Negro, next oldest to the General, in the camp two years. The older Smith was forty years old if he was a day, silver in the stubble of his cheeks, but still round with muscle, shoulders near as wide as a shovel laid across them. The man had been called Smith until the white boy had turned up, and then the warden said the white boy would be called by his last name, the colored man by his first. The colored man was proud to be known by his Christian name, but thought any man should be given the same respect as others. So last week at breakfast, when the warden called him, he made the mistake of saying, “Call me Smith.” He’d thought, too late, to add, “Sir.” The white Smith had shrugged his shoulders, mouth full of breakfast, and the warden had taken the colored one for a stretch on the Georgia rack. The rest of the crew could hear the rope’s tightening and the man’s hollering over their grits and coffee. It was not his first time on the rack nor in the sweatbox—he had a mouth on him he couldn’t keep closed—but it was the first time he passed out, chin hanging to his chest. When he came to an hour later, after the ropes around his handcuffs were loosened, he’d messed himself, and was made to clean his pants in the creek. A week later, his shoulders still ached where the arms had nearly been pulled from their roots.
Now they were set for a new camp. That’s what they’d been told. The older Smith tried to keep his eyes on the coming work. They were to leave behind the warden and his rack and his sweatbox, even the cursed cage where they slept. They’d been chosen, the twelve of them, to build a settlement at the abandoned end of the Twelve-Mile Pass, to help the men from Macon who’d won the road contract. Soon the contractors would bring their trucks and their scrapers and pavers, and the chain gang would bring the sweat. “Good-bye, boys,” the warden had said. “Remember: bad boys make good roads.” They would raise the tents they would eat in and sleep under, as well as a kitchen tent and a blacksmith shop and latrines, made from the land’s own pines. As the wagon bumped over the road, he tried to think of it as noble work that was waiting for them, as though they were pioneers cutting through the wilderness. Better than digging ditches. He hoped he wouldn’t have to dig latrines. That was cotton-picking awful work. And he had picked some cotton in his day. He had picked cotton, and dug latrines, and logged pines, and chipped turpentine. He had not made it to the steel mill up north. He had not even made it out of Georgia.
Always there was something keeping him back. Seasonal work, picking cotton or peanuts or peaches, another opportunity he couldn’t pass up, another chance to fill his pockets with enough to get where he needed to go. The freights were full of folks heading north, but also full of reasons to stay a little longer, a little longer—folks who knew a fellow who knew another who was looking for workers. Their brains were rotted by liquor, but they were full of ideas. He was different. His mind was clean of poison. Back then, he’d had only one idea, which was to put miles of road between him and the woman who had broken him. Whether he did that in a steel mill or a turpentine camp didn’t matter much to him.
Only thing was that once you were in the camp, there wasn’t any getting out. Same as sharecropping, worse. Turpentining, you were in over your ears. The overseer paid you up front, then owned your ears and your eyes and the feet you stood on till you earned them back. They were no better off than slaves buying their freedom. Those who fled the camp fled to Florida. It was harder to get dragged back over the state line. He thought about following them.
Then he’d gotten word from a neighbor back home. His woman had passed. He had not seen her in more than ten years. And now their daughter was without a mother. When he fled, he fled home.
He was not ten miles from Florence when two deputies on horses had rounded up a whole train car of hoboes and filled the jailhouse with them. He was tired by then of running, and glad for a dry roof, a bed that stood still. That was more than two years ago. He had been released after a year, only to be picked up again, a day later, for vagrancy. Then back to the county camp he went. He had to give back the eight-dollar set of clothes he’d been given on his release. Back to the camp, back to the mosquitoes and the shackle sores and the stink of shit in the pan under the cage, worse than any smell on the farm. After he was back the second time, there was always something kept him there. A loose tongue. A fight with a fellow convict. “Impudence” was the word in the warden’s logbook. He couldn’t read but the warden told him so. Sometimes the warden took him for a stretch. Sometimes he just stretched out his sentence. Three months became six. Six months became a year.
Now it was the end of 1930, and he had dug every ditch in Cotton County. Hard times had gotten harder. The road gang was filled with men who had stolen bread and coats and tomatoes off the vine, some asking to be caught. He too found himself resigned to it. He had lost sight of the farm. He could no longer call it clear into his mind. He could not remember what his woman’s cooking tasted like, no more than he could remember his mother’s. In the camp at least there were three meals, salt pork and corn pone and enough sorghum syrup to make you sick.
His stomach was full of that syrup now, too sweet. When the road ended, the horses found some shade to settle under and the shade made the cold colder and the cold made him sleepy. The supply truck hadn’t yet arrived. “Y’all just sit tight,” said Lloyd Crow, stepping down from the wagon. “Don’t you go anywheres.” There was nothing to do yet without the supplies—the tents and stakes and hammers, the saws to fell the trees—so they waited in their bunks. They’d been given no coats, only wore their union suits under their clothes, and striped knit caps already dusty from the road. They lay and listened to the creek and the birds. He heard a robin call, and through the bars saw its orange breast among the trees. He did not like to look at the trees, though. He had seen enough pines for a lifetime. He closed his eyes. With nothing to distract him, he thought he could hear the fish swimming in the creek. Had it been summer, he’d have liked to take a swim in that creek himself. He daydreamt awhile about summer, and then maybe he really was dreaming—he was dropping into sleep. Already he could hear the General, in the bunk below, begin to snore. When was the last time he’d been idle enough to fall asleep before the day began? When was the last time he’d been out in the country at this hour without a shovel or pickax in his hand?
At the turpentine camp, it was a hack he carried, chipping away the face of pine after pine, the gum filling box after box. The work was no harder on his hands than farm work, but it was harder on the mind, his eyes hanging the same distance from the same bark hour after hour. Maybe he wasn’t made for mill work after all. On the farm, at least, there had been more kinds of work than he could keep up with—wood to chop, mules to feed, rattlesnakes to scare from under the peanut stack. There was a gopher tortoise liked to hide under there too. It was coming back into his mind now. Elma had fancied the tortoise her pet. He’d found the animal dead on its back under the drying peanuts. A rattler had got her, or else she’d fallen over from old age. He’d buried her in the woods down by the creek, where Elma couldn’t see.
He was old as that old gopher now. Would the girls recognize him, if they got close? He’d recognized them, even from a distance. Wasn’t it them? With his eyes closed, he saw their two figures, women now, standing on the porch set back from the road, shielding their eyes from the sun as they’d watched the wagon pass. In their arms, they each held a baby. At their feet, two dogs barked at the hounds.
Nancy. She had been little more than a baby herself when last he’d seen her. Now she looked like her mother. Slimmer, slim as a telephone pole. But that was Ketty’s high round forehead and square shoulders and proud mouth, and that was the way Ketty stood, still and stiff as a tintype. Again he felt the wagon pass by, the wheels turning, the porch growing more and more distant, and though the farm was but a few miles down the road, he felt it was years and years behind him, that he would never get back to it, that he would never see the woman on the porch again, and he had to remind himself that it was his daughter, not his wife, and that he’d been the one to leave them.
He chased them from his mind. Opened his eyes. Better to see the cursed pines.
“Looky.” The prisoner in the bunk above was hanging his head upside-down. It was the new white boy named Smith. Their ankles were shackled as well as their wrists, but the white men’s were loose enough to stretch. Something was wrong with the boy’s right eye. It was closed, or nearly closed. His other eye was a baleful shade of blue. In his hands he held a length of string.
First thought the older Smith had was to get the string around the boy’s neck. Instead he asked, keeping his voice low, “Where you find that?” It wasn’t cheap twine but good cotton string, the ends of which the boy now knotted together to form a loop as wide as his chest.
“Out in the yard before we set oft. Central camp’s not far from the mill. Figure I got me some cotton mill string.”
“Mighty nice string,” he allowed. The two guards were in the sandy clearing a good twenty yards from the cage, pacing out the campsite. “What you set on doing with it?”
He thought the boy might have something clever in mind. One-eyed boy, you had to wonder what kind of trouble he found. Choke the guard with it, or pick the lock of his shackles. Could you pick a lock with string? When the boy said, “You ever play cat’s cradle?” he had to keep down a laugh. The boy’s hands darted twice through the loop, forming a crisscross. When he was a boy himself it had brought to mind the legs of an ironing board. The sight of the shape now filled his lungs. He had taught Elma to play the game, their hands swooping in and out of each other’s like birds.
He couldn’t help himself. He found his fingers remembered what to do, pinching the string, ducking under, coming up for air. It was hard enough to do with his hands cuffed, harder still with fingers stiff from the cold. The white boy’s wrists hung heavy. Their fingers did a clumsy dance. But the white boy laughed an approving laugh. “Thas right,” he muttered. “Now you on the trolley!”
It was foolish, playing with the boy hanging down from his bunk like that. Crow spotted them from a good distance. He climbed the steps to the cage and unlocked the hatch.
“What you boys busy with?” He came up the aisle. “Hand it over, Sterling.”
Sterling did.
“You boys doing child’s play? Y’all need some men’s work?”
When the trucks arrived just before noon, Mr. Crow handed him and the white boy a pair of shovels and walked them out to the woods with a ball and chain. “Privy, boys. Two-seater. Then y’all Smiths can do your child’s play together in the shitter. Blacksmith and whitesmith.” Crow laughed. “How you like that?”
Crow wasn’t half the devil the warden was. He was dark as a crow, with oily black hair he slicked back under his hat and an oily black mustache. He liked to say he was half Cherokee, half Mexican, and half American. He liked to tease the men, called them women’s names, Sissy and Mother and Sally. He joined them for hymns and prayers on the Sundays the preacher visited the county camp. Sterling had been on his crew once before, on this road, just after Elma’s babies were born—the Gemini twins, folks called them—and Crow had let him pick a handful of blue hound’s tongue from the ditch they were digging and leave it in the mailbox. Sterling had not laid eyes on the girls then, and he wondered if they’d ever reached Elma. He wondered if the Buffalo nickels he’d sent to that box had ever reached Nancy. He’d stolen them from a white boy, the son of the overseer at the turpentine farm, shook them right out of the pockets of his dungarees drying on the line. Figured his debt to Georgia was steep enough anyhow, too steep to pay off.
* * *
“Sterling Smith,” said the one-eyed white boy. “You got people in these parts?”
They were meant to dig a hole six feet deep and three across, big as a grave, and they weren’t but six inches in. The clay was cold, packed solid. Digging it was like digging concrete. To the boy’s left, Sterling said, “Ain’t got no more people.”
“They dead?”
“All about.”
The boy asked Sterling how he ended up on the chain gang. Sterling started to tell him, thinking out a way to answer without answering. The first time, on the train, there was nothing to be done. But the second time, a year ago—he’d been let off the gang with his eight-dollar clothes, and he’d walked to Young’s, where he stood under the leaky tin awning, rain coming down around him, no money in his pocket to go inside—would he have gone inside, if he’d had the money?—smoking his last earthly cigarette. Standing there. Free. Why stand there frozen, getting rained on? Why didn’t he walk straight to the farm, to his daughter? He remembered the stroke of her little fingers in his mustache. Her little heart pumping like a bullfrog in her chest as she slept against his. And yet all night he’d talked himself into and out of it, running through the scenarios. It was too late, he told himself. Ketty was already gone. Nancy was already grown. What if Nancy was gone too, and it was just Juke left there? What if he’d have to leave again, tail between his legs? He’d finally fallen asleep in the ditch along the railroad tracks, under a blanket of a rusty piece of sheet metal, and at dawn he’d woken, relieved, to the approaching clip of the peace officer’s horse.
“What about me?” the white boy cut in.
“What about you?”
“You want to know bout how come I end up here?”
He had worked beside white men who liked to talk. Another white man might guess they’d had no tongues to speak of, but put them next to a Negro, their tongues went loose, like their aim was to fill you up with words.
“Reckon I got time to listen.”
“Held up the cotton bank in Meredith.” They’d had a good rhythm worked out, swinging their shovels so they wouldn’t knock each other over, but now the boy stopped swinging and rested his chin on the handle of his shovel, waiting for Sterling’s response.
“Boy, you got to warn a fellow.”
“Watch your mouth. Ain’t no boy.”
“What you hold up the bank with? A slingshot?”
“Rifle. Savage 99. Woulda used it too, if it ain’t get choked up.”
“You make out with any money?”
“Oh, yeah. Whole hill a money.” The boy started digging again. Sterling followed. “Guard shot at my truck, but I made out anyhow. That’s how come my eye got shot.”
“Your eye got shot out?”
“Oh, yeah. Clean out.”
“Huh. What’d you do with the money?”
“Buried it.”
“Where?”
“Fool, think I’m a tell you that?”
Sterling dug. Where the shovel touched his hands, his skin burned with cold. He’d have traded his breakfast for a pair of gloves.
“But what if I told you I ain’t need to hold up no bank?”
“What you rob it for, then?”
“For fun, nigger. Christ almighty, ain’t niggers ever have no fun?”
Sterling’s hands tensed around the shovel.
“Well, I reckon I was feeling risky. Ain’t you ever feel like finding trouble? Just to see how hot it is?”
“I ain’t got to look for no trouble. It find me itself.”
“Ain’t the worst I done,” said the boy. “Nor the most fun.”
From the woods twenty yards off, Lloyd Crow eyed them sideways. Sterling kept his own eyes on the dirt. He would lower himself into the ground, inch by inch. If he ignored the boy, maybe he would stop talking.
“You know the Wilson farm? The original Wilson farm, back at the crossroads?”
Now Sterling lifted his eyes. Could he see it on him? Did the white boy know him?
“We done passed it this morning. The one with the gourd tree you can see from the road?”
“I reckon,” Sterling said, his voice hoarse.
“That’s the place where them Gemini twins were born. You know the Gemini twins?”
Sterling shook his head, though he did.
“Lordy, lordy. The Gemini twins. They was born to the white whore lives there. Darky baby and a white one. Reckon we seen em when we drove past.”
“Thas some mouth you got on you, son. Talking bout a lady that way.”
“If she was a lady I’d say so.”
“I heard . . . well . . .” Sterling had heard about the mob killing but had not known it had taken place on the farm. He’d thought the man had been killed in the mill village. “I heard there was—”
“Heard she was nigger-raped?” The white boy was smiling. “You right about that. Heard that cropper Juke Jesup dragged the nigger all over the county. You know who Juke Jesup is, don’t you?”
Sterling said nothing.
“Oh, he’s just about the lowliest nigger lover in Cotton County. Runs a blind tiger. Ain’t you heard of Cotton Gin? That’s Juke Jesup’s Cotton Gin. Lowliest nigger lover. Nigger killer too. Raised up a nigger girl on his farm like his own. You reckon they all living fine now? On that farm? Going on like the Lord don’t have a care for it, them niggers and crackers living unnatural under the same roof?”
Sterling tried to keep quiet, but his tongue got loose. He said, “I heard of that kind before. ‘Nigger lover.’ Spect I ain’t never met one. Spect this fellow ain’t gone be the first neither.”
The boy laughed. “You fixing on making his acquaintance?”
“Don’t suspect I’ll have the chance. Not unless he ends up on this here road gang. Sound like that’s where he belong.”
“Spect it is, spect it is.” The boy’s shovel slipped, and he swore. He started to sing a little song. It was a song they sang on the road, one he must have picked up in his two weeks digging ditches. When Sterling didn’t join him, he said, “I ain’t sore at you. For losing my cotton string. I got more where that come from. I got enough cotton to last me my lifetime. Fact, my daddy was called String.”
String. Sterling did know that name. Rich white boy. His landlord’s son.
The boy stopped digging again, and now Sterling followed his shovel over to the ground, landing on his knees, his weight thrown off.
“You got to give a warning, son. You want Crow to find us on the ground?” He rose to his feet. “You reckon that’s a way to find some fun?”
“What if I told you my people own most a this county? All the cotton? This dirt we digging?”
The boy shook a shovelful over Sterling’s shoes. It caught in his shackle. Sterling kicked it back best he could in his chains. They were good shoes, given to him by the county on his last release. Those they had let him keep.
“Don’t do that again, son. I like to knock you over with this here shovel.”
The boy laughed. “That right? You aim to end up on the rack again?”
“It’d be worth it, just to knock that smile off your face.”
“You ain’t know who you talking to, nigger.”
“I don’t have a care for who your people is. In here you digging a privy.”
“What if I told you my name weren’t no John Smith?”
Sterling tried the name in his mouth. “John Smith. I heard that name somewheres.”
The white boy laughed. “My the only man in this camp ever get any schooling?”
“That the name you give the warden?” Sterling said. “You mean your name ain’t even Smith?”
The white boy did a little dance, holding the shovel in the dirt for balance, the chains around his ankles jumping, nearly pulling down Sterling with the weight. For the first time Sterling caught clear sight of the boy’s boots. They were covered in dirt, but they were fine. Looked like they were made of crocodile hide.
“How bout George Frederick Wilson the Third?” said the boy. “You heard that name somewheres?”
* * *
Sterling Smith had dug the ditch down the Twelve-Mile Straight and he had dug the ditch down the road he had grown up on. It was String Wilson Road now, but it had no name but a number when he lived there with his mother and father and two brothers in a shack owned by George Wilson. They worked sixty good acres of peanuts and cotton and corn. They had a dog named Spot and a horse named Gilda Gray. They had piney woods to hunt in. They had a log cabin church an hour’s walk up the road. His parents were churchgoing people, and Sterling was the one who gave them grief. When he came home drunk, or with a black eye, or talked back, or was too rough with a brother, or too lazy in the field, his parents didn’t raise a hand to him. Instead they both dropped to their knees—never one, always both, as though they had four legs and one heart for the Lord—and prayed. When he was small, they made him drop to his knees too. And he would. He would pray. When he grew older, and wandered farther and farther from the farm, to town, to the juke joint, he stopped dropping to his knees. He closed his eyes and sat down to a sandwich his mother had made, or he walked back out the door he’d come through. He was daring one of them to raise a hand. Sometimes he thought by the looks they exchanged that they were daring each other, that neither one of them wanted to be the first. His brothers got bolder, daring each other to be as daring as Sterling, practicing their black eyes on each other. One night the two brothers, roughhousing, knocked the kerosene lamp into the fireplace and burned the house down, his mother and father and the two brothers in it. At eighteen, Sterling was the oldest. He’d been getting shinnied up at Young’s, and by the time he’d returned to the farm, he was drunk enough to wonder where the house had been put. He didn’t have another drink after that.
George Wilson had built a new shack for a new cropper family, and found work for Sterling at the crossroads farm down the road. “Old man’s got him but one son. They can use all the help they can get.” The old man was hard and sad and left him alone, had no harsh nor kind words for him. The son was the same age as String and the same age as Sterling. He was the white boy who liked to dance with the best girls at Young’s, went by the name of Juke. Sterling had seen him there across the room. When he had enough liquor in him, he’d cast a look of disapproval or maybe even of disgust across the women’s glistening, sweet-smelling heads, but Juke had not returned the look, had not even caught it, had buried his face in a girl’s neck. After he stopped going to Young’s and started at the farm, Sterling tried to give the white boy the same look across the yard they now shared, but still the white boy didn’t return it, didn’t even catch it. He gave Sterling the instructions his father had given him, gave him a pat on his back, said, “Lord keep the sun low and the sweat cool,” and set off into the north field, Sterling into the west.
For a year Sterling had the shack to himself. He woke early every Sunday to walk the three miles up the road to the log cabin church, where he dropped to his knees and prayed. It was there he met a girl in a blue dress. He asked her if could he see her home safe, and she said yes. She was the kind of girl, he thought, his parents would want for him, a girl who would take care of him now that there was no one else. She had never set foot in Young’s joint; she delivered babies on the Young tobacco farm. She was an orphan herself, her father long gone, her mother dead, and together they were no longer alone. They were married in that church, about the same time Juke Jesup married his bride in theirs. For a wedding gift George Wilson gave the men a pair of sweetheart hogs. Sterling’s was called Bob and Juke’s was called Honey. Bob they slaughtered that winter, and in the spring Honey had a litter and Jessa and Juke readied themselves to have a baby too.
Ketty had a wide waist and a full chest and long, strong legs: she wasn’t plump so much as sturdy. Sterling thought a man should have a woman the wind couldn’t blow over. Her body softened when she carried Nancy, and stayed soft afterward. “You my buttermilk biscuit,” Sterling would say, both hands on her broad backside, inhaling the sweet almond oil in her hair. Some mornings he smoothed a little of the oil in his mustache, just so he could keep her smell under his nose all day. When he was walking rows in the field, he’d spot her churning on the porch, or carrying a basket of tomatoes from the garden, her hips flared out on either side of her apron, and the sight of her would keep him plowing ahead, one foot in front of the other, the thought of her weight on top of him, pressing him to the mattress. At the end of the day there was supper and there was his pipe and there was Ketty.
He could feel her weight still. When he tried to now, lying awake in the new camp, he could conjure every button on her blue dress.
The tents had gone up quickly. His ankles were still chained and under the thin cotton blanket he could find little warmth. In the distance, the coyotes howled at the boars and the hounds howled at both of them. The fire Lloyd Crow stoked outside the tent was no more than the cruel promise of heat, and so he slept in his cap and his boots as the other men did, and that was the worst insult, not the fact that he had no gloves or coat but the fact that he couldn’t take off his shoes after a long day of work. When he was a boy, he and his brothers had gone barefoot most years. His mother had wrapped newspaper around their feet in the winter, but he didn’t remember his feet getting cold; he remembered the hot water bottle she slipped under the blanket, his feet and his brothers’ feet punting it around in the night. And he remembered summer, chasing his brothers barefoot in the yard, the wiregrass smooth, the white clay sun warmed, his feet tough as hides.
Now at least in the camp there was God’s breath blowing through the night, the same air his daughter now breathed not six miles down the Straight. Was she awake now? Where did she sleep? He wondered if the white boy was right, if she had been raised in the house by Juke. Of all the scenarios he had conceived after he’d learned of Ketty’s death—that she would be sent back to the tobacco plantation, that she might find work as a house girl in town—he had not bet on Nancy continuing on at the farm, and he was reminded of all the years he had missed, the life, the whole life, that she must have formed in his absence. He wondered if his child remembered him, and if she didn’t remember him, if she’d been told of him, and if she’d been told of him, what she’d been told. What would he say for himself if he could, knowing she might be able to say nothing in return?
He wondered too, and realized he’d been wondering it for some time, since he’d seen her there on the porch wearing Ketty’s face, whether the baby on her hip was her own, and he turned his mind from the thought and from the one that followed.
Ketty had not wanted a child. She had not expected to live long, the women in her family all dead by forty. Her own mother had been born on the same day as a mule on the tobacco farm, and they’d been given the same name, Ruby. The mule had outlived the woman. Why bring a child into a world like that? Where a woman couldn’t hope to live as long as the mule in the barn?
Sterling believed the Lord didn’t intend to keep two married folks without a child. He did all he could to give her a baby, but she had her woman’s ways. She knew the times she was ripe, and those were the times she was good at keeping away from him. Some nights she slept on the floor or the porch just to keep her distance. She said it was because it was hot, or cold, or because she was expecting to be called to a delivery and didn’t want to wake him. But Sterling worried her love for him was waning. The blood began to warm in his heart, down his arms, between his legs. At night he let his seed go in the sheet, but it didn’t ease the burning in his veins.
Then old man Jesup went to walk with the Lord and Jessa followed right behind him. He was a mean old man and Sterling had not mourned him. But Ketty had loved Jessa. They’d come to the farm around the same time, two girls who’d emerged dazed from childhood to find themselves wives on the fog-draped, dead-end road with its strange scattering of shacks, the nighttime buzz of cricket frogs that was either miraculous or murderous, depending on the minute. They seemed to prefer the company of the other—in the kitchen in the big house, brushing the other’s hair on the porch—to the company of their husbands, who smelled like mules, who after a long day planting or picking spoke mostly through grunts, who grunted at the dinner table as they did in their beds, grunting grunting over them. Sterling could only guess what the women talked about. He was sure they laughed at them behind their backs. Maybe they aped them. One night while Sterling was grunting over Ketty she had to keep herself from giggling, and when Sterling had asked her what she was laughing at she said, “Nothing,” like she was trying not to remember. He hadn’t been able to carry on, had pulled on his pants and taken his corncob pipe out to the porch and cursed her.
He grieved for Bob, who’d been turned to pork before Honey even went to litter. And Honey went on happily lolling in the mud. Bob was needed no more.
When Jessa died, Ketty went quiet. She went into the big house to take care of Jessa’s baby. She stayed there for months, until the baby was big enough to sleep well enough through the night without a bottle. Elma reminded Sterling of a baby fox, with a tuft of fox-colored fur on her head and cunning fox eyes and a cry like a fox’s, high and full of panic. He didn’t cotton to that baby.
“Look too much like her daddy,” he told Ketty. Juke Jesup had lost his wife but he had a child of his own and now he had Ketty too, Ketty carrying buckets of warm milk to the house, Ketty washing diapers in the creek.
Ketty said Jessa would want her to be a mother to the baby. “If I had milk in my breasts, I’d feed her myself,” she said.
And Sterling had said, “Got to have a baby to have milk. And got to sleep in my bed to have a baby.”
After that, she slept in the big house for a week. Said Elma had the croup, though all Sterling could hear was that fox cry in the middle of the night. He couldn’t sleep. His mind got to where he thought maybe it was a real fox, getting into the chickens. He rose from his bed and took his shotgun and shot out into the dark, meaning to scare the fox away, but he shot a chicken instead, and it was so full of buck all they could eat from it was a wing. It was a mother, its nest full of eggs gone cold. Juke fed the eggs to Honey and her pigs. He took Sterling’s shotgun and Sterling said, “Take it. Took everything else.”
It had been his father’s gun. A Winchester twelve gauge, one of the few things to survive the house fire. Sterling and his brothers had shot squirrels with it and possums.
For a while Sterling was bad off, so down he thought he might die. It was the cows’ milk, he thought; it had gone blinky. For a week he stopped drinking the milk, stopped eating at all; he couldn’t stand to be holed up in the privy with Juke Jesup, who was sick too. They sat side by side, letting the sickness pass through them, mumbling to themselves, blaming Ketty. “She left that milk out too long in the barn,” they said. “Her head’s empty,” they said.
When finally the Lord saw to it to plant a seed in Ketty’s belly, Sterling’s sickness eased. He was so relieved to be alive that for a while he was happy. He thought she might be his alone again. Stop messing with the white folks in the big house. Elma was a girl of four by then, no need for bottles or diapers, though she followed Ketty like a puppy, running along behind her in the yard. Ketty would send her out to the men with the water jug. Slowly Sterling did cotton to her, took to bouncing her on his knee, singing this is the way the ladies ride, holding on to the collar of her dress while she giggled. She called him Uncle Sterling.
That was when Ketty started eating dirt. At first it was just a little here and there, which she’d snatch up when she went down to the creek and nibble from her palm like a handful of nuts. She said it was a thing pregnant women were known to do. Her mother had done it and her mother before her. It helped with the nausea and it helped with the cravings. But then it seemed the dirt became a craving of its own. She still chewed tobacco leaves when she could, but since she’d left the tobacco farm, it wasn’t so easy to get her hands on. The dirt was everywhere, and it was free. She would come back from the creek with an old coffee tin filled to the brim with white clay. “That ain’t natural,” Sterling had worried, and Ketty said, “What’s more natural than God’s own earth?” She hid the tin under a loose floorboard. Sterling could hear the board squeak in the night, and then her munching like a mouse beside him.
When the baby was ready to be born, Ketty delivered it herself, like a momma mule dropping a foal in the barn. The baby was tongue-tied. “Ain’t latching right,” Ketty said. When Nancy was but three days old, Ketty went to her satchel and took out her scalpel and ran it over the flame on the stove. Sterling snatched the baby from the bed, thinking Ketty meant to harm her. It was the first time he’d seen such a look in her eye. “I’m just fixing to loosen it,” she said, and with the same quiet resolve with which she’d carried Elma to the barn to suckle from the cow’s teat—“She got to eat, don’t she?”—she slipped the scalpel under the baby’s tongue and gave it a nick. “Just a nick,” Ketty said, “for your own good,” and the baby howled and her mouth dribbled blood but she clamped it down on Ketty’s breast and she stopped howling and she ate.
It scared him, was the truth. Ketty’s way. She knew more about the ways of the body than he could ever hope to know.
That was what put the thought in her mind, he reckoned. What if she just loosened it a bit more? And a bit more? She knew how to wield a scalpel, how to carve up women when they needed it. “She don’t need that tongue,” she’d said. “What good’s it gone do her?” The baby wouldn’t wean, nursed around the clock, and Ketty wasn’t like other mothers, she had work to do, she had calls to go on, she couldn’t have the child stuck to her all the livelong day. “She gone suck me dry. I got nothing else for her.” Sterling had said hush, don’t talk crazy. He told her all the dirt she ate was making her mind feeble. But their daughter had just turned a year old when Sterling came upon them in the sorghum cane, Ketty kneeling under the gourd tree, knocking the earth with a shovel. It was spring. The baby was hanging on her back in its sling, her eyes swollen with tears, a poultice tied behind her head and across her mouth like a gag. Around the bloody rag her cries were like little goat mews, the kind of cries a baby makes when it’s cried out. “That’s geranium oil it’s soaked in,” Ketty said, as though that explained it. “It’s done. I done buried it. She’ll be all right now. I gave her something to dull her head. She’ll be better off without it.”
Sterling had wrenched the shovel from her hands. He might have struck her with it if the baby hadn’t been on her back. He wrenched the baby from her sling and lifted the rag from her mouth and cursed her mother. He went to the icebox on the porch and chipped off a diamond of ice and fed it to her, but with no tongue, the baby couldn’t get her mouth around it. It dripped down her chin. Ketty stayed out in the field until dark.
“Crazy woman,” said Juke, looking on. “Y’all both lost your sense. Y’all both belong in Milledgeville.”
Sterling didn’t know where to put his rage. He was embarrassed. The white man was standing over him, and Sterling held his mutilated child. When Ketty came back to the shack, the baby finally asleep in her cradle, he beat her to the floor. He’d never done such a thing before. She looked ready for it, unsurprised. He closed his eyes and saw his parents dropping to their knees, his unsurprised parents, dropping down to the floor with Ketty.
Next day Juke saw the mark on her jaw and said, “Fool, you ain’t need to raise a hand to no nigger gal. Don’t you know?” He laughed and shook his head. “They already come into the world bruise colored.”