After Oliver and Nan and Wilson had left her at the farm, Elma drew some water from the well, found some splinters of lightered wood for the stove, and started a stew. She felt the kitchen rise up around her. She took off her shoes and felt the wood floor find the shape of her feet. She sighed. “Okay, Winna girl. Winna Jean Bean.” She put the baby down alone on the rag rug, gave her two wooden spoons to play with. The pantry was all but empty, but she found some gnarled potatoes and went about sawing off their eyes. The kitchen filled with the damp earthy smell of potato skins. Under it was lye soap and cinnamon and lamp oil and Nan. She’d been home for five minutes and she was crying over the potatoes. The paring knife shook in her hands. Winna beat the floor with the spoons. El-ma. El-ma.
“Little drummer girl,” Juke said, coming in the door.
Elma jumped. She let the knife clang onto the hunt-board slab.
“Scared me, Daddy.”
Juke wiped his boots on the mat and hung his straw hat by the door. He looked thinner, his shoulders narrow, his cheeks sunken. Glory’s cooking had fattened him up last spring and now it was spring again and there was no one to keep him fat.
“You staying?”
“For a while.”
“How long?”
She wiped her face on her apron. “Till the trial, I guess. Till all this passes.”
He came into the kitchen and knelt down next to Winna Jean. “She likes them spoons. Got her a good ear.” He worked one of the spoons out of her hand and tickled her under the chin with it, then handed it back to her. “Tell you what,” he said to Elma. “I don’t like Nan running off with that husband of yours.”
“They ain’t running off,” she said, though she could think of no better way of putting it. “Oliver goes there sometimes, to get well. Wilson’s awful sick. Oliver can keep a watch on him.”
“And why ain’t you go with them?”
Elma turned back to the slab and picked up the knife and resumed her peeling. “Someone’s got to cook for you. You look like skin and bones.”
“I been eating poor,” he admitted.
“Besides,” she said, working up her nerve, “he ain’t my child. You made sure everyone in that courthouse knows it.”
He stood up, but she couldn’t see him. She was chopping the potatoes, her left hand planted on her right, her body rocking with each chop. He went for the tobacco tin in his chest pocket.
“Why’d you tell, Daddy?”
When he didn’t answer, she turned around and looked at him over her shoulder. His eyes were a rheumy river green, the crow’s-feet etched deeply around them. When she’d last seen him, at the courthouse, it had been winter, and now the skin between his cheeks and his ears was red and raw, like side meat.
“All that time you made me tell a lie, Daddy. And then you went and told. You made a liar out of me.”
“Aw, girl. You ain’t proud of your daddy, talking himself out of jail? Look at me. I’m standing here before you, ain’t I?”
Elma shook her head. “‘Proud’ ain’t the word.”
He stuffed his mouth with chaw and said around it, “Well, you do what you do to get out of trouble.”
She turned her back again. Through the kitchen window, Uncle Sterling was leading April and Anna out to pasture. She thought: Tell him. Warn him.
She went on chopping. Winna went on drumming. She hoped her father would say something else. When he didn’t, she said, “Neither one of us out a trouble yet.”
* * *
For two days it went on like that, the three of them in silent orbit around the farm. On Saturday, Juke trapped a possum—he had no gun anymore to hunt with—and Elma made a potpie of it. Easter Sunday, Sterling caught some trout and Elma fried them. They shared the meals but took them under separate roofs, Elma delivering them out to Sterling in the shack, Sterling saying, “Thank you kindly.” Each time she knocked on his door she was fixed on saying, “Sterling, I come to talk some sense into you.” Or “I know what Mr. Wilson put on you, Sterling. But I know you wouldn’t hurt a fly.” That was the way to do it, she reasoned—appeal to his good nature.
Then she’d remember the note Nan had left her with. Look after him. Look after Sterling. Elma had nodded, hadn’t she? Wasn’t that a promise? Wasn’t that her word?
But now she was on the farm and she saw how powerless she was to stop either one of them from harming the other. What was she to do? Raise a white flag? Throw herself between them? She couldn’t be everywhere. There was a baby to care for. There were meals to cook. That was what she could do, after all. Feed them, keep them alive.
And watch them. Through the kitchen window, she tracked their figures across the field, her father to the outhouse, Sterling to the barn. She cut herself twice, looking out that window when she should have been looking at what she was cutting. The second time, cleaning the last of Sterling’s fish late Monday morning, she cut a deep gash in the web between her finger and thumb. She tore off a strip of her apron and bandaged it, but still her hand shook. Her vision went white and she held tight to the table’s edge. The paring knife lay on the cutting board, red with her blood. How easily she had opened up the poor fish! She would leave it its head, the little gems of its eyes, its frowning mouth. Suddenly her eyes found all the sharp things, all the things in the kitchen that might make someone bleed—the knives, the cleaver, the corkscrew. She gathered them all up in what was left of her apron, left Winna Jean on the floor, and went out to the well. She dumped it all like scrap metal, the blades flashing as they sliced the surface. She watched the water ripple and then go smooth again. Very far below, she could see her reflection, and the blue sky above her.
Someone might fall down that well and drown. Her father had warned her about it when she was a child.
She whipped her head about the farm. Someone might get trampled by a mule, or fall from a hayloft, or get hanged from a tree.
What was she to do? Throw every blade on the farm down the well? The hacksaw? The hoes? How was she to cook without a knife?
She could see Sterling in the west field, plowing away from her. She went to the shack and let herself in. In the drawer, she found a single knife, a carving knife Ketty had once used. It was rusty but its blade was sharp.
Back in the kitchen in the big house, Winna sat perfectly still on the rug.
“I know,” Elma said. “That was dumb.”
Winna said, “Da da da.”
Then she heard an engine out on the road. It didn’t sound like a regular automobile engine. It was puttering. It was more than one engine, then a lot more. A horn sounded, then another. She put the knife down, picked up Winna, and went out to the front porch.
A chain of vehicles was making its slow way west down the newly paved Straight. Elma might have thought it was a parade, or a funeral procession, but what was holding up the traffic, at the head of the line, and turning now into the driveway of the crossroads farm, was George Wilson. He was riding a denim blue Caterpillar tractor. Pulling in behind him, his arm hanging out the window of his green Chevy truck, was Freddie.
“Oh, good Lord,” she said.
They had seen her already. There was no hiding in the kitchen. She stood there frozen on the porch while they pulled around the house into the scrubgrass yard. By the time it occurred to her to go through to the back porch and ring the dinner bell for her father, two other trucks had pulled in behind them. Jeb Simmons and Bill Cousins stepped out, a son tagging along with each. How long had it been since George Wilson had been to the farm? Now he was climbing off a tractor in a pair of Sears, Roebuck overalls—overalls!—that looked like they’d been ironed and starched, or else come straight out of the mail. Elma had never before seen him in anything but his white suit and vest and tie, which might have been the only thing more preposterous to ride a tractor in. She might have laughed about it with Nan, if Nan had been there.
Freddie stepped out of the truck and ashed his cigarette into the dirt. He was wearing the blue silk eye patch his grandmother had bought him. With his other eye he squinted up at her on the back porch. “Morning, Mrs. Rawls.”
She was surprised at her own relief. Get it over with, she thought. “Freddie.”
“What’d you do to your hand?”
She looked at the bandage across her left palm. It had pretty well soaked through with blood.
“Fish got me. What’d you do to your eye?”
Freddie took a pull from his cigarette and looked off. “Rooster got me.”
“Morning, Mrs. Rawls,” his grandfather said. “Freddie come to drive me home once I leave this tractor here.” The other men chimed in with their greetings. They’d seen George Wilson on that tractor and they had to put their hands on it themselves. Well, she knew how to be in front of men, didn’t she? She knew how to hold their attention. But they were looking at her differently now. Drink Simmons did not look her up and down, she thought, so much as through her. She set her jaw.
“My daddy’s coming.” She didn’t mean it as a warning, but it sounded like one. They could look at her all they wanted. She’d stand there all day as long as someone else was there on the farm with her to break up the deathly silence she’d been living in. The sun beat down on them. Juke and Sterling came in from their separate fields and they all shook hands as though all was forgotten, and Elma thought maybe it was.
“Morning, Juke.”
“Mr. Wilson.”
“Fine morning.”
“Jeb. Bill. Morning to you.”
“Sterling.”
“What you got there, Mr. Wilson?”
“L15.” He patted its rump. “1929 model. Four cylinders. Come all the way from Illinois.” He put the s on the end. Then the men gathered around the tractor like women gathered around a newborn. All the attention that had once been paid to the twins now turned to the Caterpillar tractor. So this was how it would be: not Parthenia Wilson’s empty porch chatter but the men’s version of it, grunts and whistles and well-I’ll-be’s. Elma cared not a lick about that tractor, but her whole body filled with gratitude for it, its dull hulk, its dumb distraction. “Nearly three tons of metal in there, boys.” George Wilson bragged that he couldn’t find a truck big enough to haul it. In fact, the tractor was powerful enough to do the hauling. The only time they’d had a tractor out to the farm before, one they’d borrowed from Ben Hill County—remember?—was when they’d had to haul some drunk’s wrecked truck out of the creek, and that tractor didn’t have half the horsepower of this one. Bill Cousins had a rusted-out Case C back on his farm that was older than the war, and home to a family of uppity squirrels. A tractor that plowed and tilled, that did the work of mules and horses—that was something new. Elma slipped back into the house and made a pitcher of tea and left it on the porch—they could help themselves—and then went back inside to the fish she was cleaning. For a long while the men stood scattered in the yard, the chickens clucking, the guineas honking, more neighbors arriving, the men taking turns squatting to gaze up into the machine’s private parts. They spent some time hitching the disk harrow to its rear. Once they got that accomplished, the engine groaned and sputtered and died. Bill Cousins sent his son back to his farm for some tool or another. Elma hummed as she watched them through the window. She didn’t sing but she hummed. The knife was too large to bone the fish properly—her perfectly good boning knife was at the bottom of the well—but she let herself hum. Stupid girl, throwing away a perfectly good knife. It was a regular day, the sun was beating down, the men’s voices pleasant in the yard.
“That’s your daddy out there,” she said to Winna Jean. “Wonder if he’ll come in and see you.” It was a pleasant sort of worry, that old worry about Freddie. “He’s a dog,” she said. “I’m sorry to say it.” There it was. That was all there was to it.
“Da da da,” said Winna.
The tractor roared to life again, its engine full-throated now. Even Elma looked up to admire it. The men clapped. She couldn’t hear what they said after that. The tractor was too loud. But she remembered something. The drunk who’d wrecked his truck in the creek? It wasn’t a truck. George Wilson hadn’t even been there. It was a tractor he’d wrecked, and it had crushed his legs underneath. That was the way the story went. Elma had been a little girl. After that, her father had said you couldn’t catch him near a tractor.
Now she watched her father climb onto it. He looked like a boy on a horse too big for him. It bucked out ahead of him once, and he held on to his hat and went off into the field, the disk harrow scraping its comb of rusty teeth behind him. The fields had been plowed but not yet tilled.
She remembered sitting in her father’s lap over that harrow, in the seat that rode high on a pole over the disks. She remembered her surprise when her father had taught her that a round thing could be sharp. He’d drawn the tip of his thumb across one of the blades, showing her the bead of blood.
* * *
“Sterling,” George Wilson said after he sent Juke off, after the other men had gone home, “let’s have us a hunt.”
“I want to go hunting,” the white boy complained.
“Not this time, Freddie.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Set in the truck. You can carry me home in an hour.”
Freddie kicked one of the tires, then got in. From a locked box in the truck bed, Mr. Wilson removed two guns. One of them was a Savage 99 hammerless rifle. The other, a Winchester twelve-gauge shotgun, he handed to Sterling. The wood was worn, the metal barrel oily with fingerprints. Sterling had to turn it over a few times before he believed it was his.
“Told you I’d get it back for you.” He gave Sterling a small smile. “Just took me a fair while.”
It was a good feeling, setting off into the piney woods with the gun his father had taught him to hunt with, the handsome black dog bounding along at their side. He saw his little brothers, whose names were Thaddeus and William, running ahead of him in the woods with their walking sticks. He felt his father’s arms around his arms, his father’s cheek against his cheek, showing him how to draw up along the stock. Mr. Wilson had convinced him that he didn’t need it, and so he’d convinced himself that he didn’t want it, that a gun was impersonal. But a gun was personal, he thought, now that it was in his hands. Nothing was more personal than this gun.
“You said I didn’t need no gun,” he said, looping the strap around his neck.
“What you aim to kill supper with, then?”
Sterling followed Mr. Wilson into the woods along the road. Their boots crunched over the needles. From behind them, in the north field, they could hear the distant drone of the tractor.
“We really aim to kill supper?”
“Sure.” Without taking his eyes off Sterling, Mr. Wilson aimed his rifle into the head of a slash pine and pulled the trigger. A skittish flock scattered out of the treetops, but nothing fell to the ground. The dog barked, pleased. “Go ahead, Sterling.”
Sterling aimed his gun up into the tree and squinted along the sight. But between Mr. Wilson’s shot and the dog’s bark they’d scared off anything around. “Ain’t nothing to shoot at.”
“That’s all right. Shoot anyway.”
Sterling looked to the old man. The old man nodded. Then Sterling looked back to the sight and shot up into the tree. He forgot what a kick it had. It nearly knocked him off his feet.
“Very good. You’re a good shot, Sterling.”
Sterling lowered his gun.
“You want to talk more, Mr. Wilson? Without anyone about?”
Mr. Wilson held his gun loosely, as though he might decide to shoot up into a tree at any time. “You’re a clever one too, aren’t you. Clever and strong.” He began walking again, and Sterling and the dog followed, and they were walking together side by side, like they were out for a Sunday stroll. The woods were dark, but the light came down through the leaves onto their shoulders, and George Wilson told Sterling that he was to kill Juke Jesup with the Caterpillar tractor.
“With the tractor?” Sterling stopped.
“That’s right.”
“How my to do that?”
George Wilson spun his hands. “A Caterpillar is a dangerous machine. All those moving parts. The tracks. All manner of accidents happen with a tractor. Specially a tractor unbroken by an unschooled field hand.”
“You want me to—to ram him with it?”
“Three tons of metal. It won’t take much more than a bump, I reckon. That thing can lay a body flat. I’ve seen it happen myself.”
Sterling closed his eyes. He tried to picture it. He felt the rumble of the machine and the skeletal crunch of Jesup’s body under the steel tracks.
It was possible. But maybe he’d jump out of the way. Maybe the tractor would be too slow to catch him. It was so slow it had held up traffic all the way down the Straight, and then they couldn’t even keep the thing running. It might conk clean out. It was about as probable as killing someone with a mule.
“A tractor?” He couldn’t mask his disappointment. He looked down at his useless gun. “Ain’t a gun more particular?”
Mr. Wilson smiled. “You want to try to explain that to the sheriff, go on and shoot him.” He resumed walking, and Sterling followed. “I want to show you the land you fixing to come into, Sterling. I don’t aim to turn it loose, mind you. The profits we’ll divide. But in all respects it will be yours to work as you like. There’s a mighty creek down that bank,” he said, pointing, as though Sterling had not bathed in that creek for years of his life. “The soil’s fine as you’re like to find in Cotton County, not too rocky. Juke’s let that west field run over with ragweed. Put all his time in the gin. I gave him too much control. I confused him.” He shook his head, disappointed. “I let it happen.”
“Ain’t your fault,” Sterling said, because he thought it was what he wanted to hear.
“Ain’t no one’s fault,” said Mr. Wilson.
Sterling paused, because Mr. Wilson was panting and he thought he needed a rest. “Well, it’s Jesup’s fault, ain’t it?”
Mr. Wilson looked up into the trees. A triangle of sunlight came to rest on the bridge of his nose. “I suppose so. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s his. It’s all his fault, is one way to see it. Not just back to the Negro he killed.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the gourd tree. “From the time he was a boy, he was bringing trouble to this land. See that sandhill that way?” He pointed. “That big flat rock across it? Come here.” He led Sterling to it and they stood over it and looked. “My boy String, I came across him once, he was watching a little baby gopher tortoise burn alive on this rock. I said, what in Hades you doing, child? John taught me, he says. John Jesup—he was John then—liked to come out here and turn the turtles on their backs. When they were little enough and it was hot enough, they’d fry on that rock in ten minutes. I turned the poor thing over. A tortoise gets stuck on its back, another tortoise’ll come and right it. Flip it over. You seen that? Tortoises. But a boy, a certain kind of boy sees a creature in trouble and he doesn’t right it. He just goes on and lets it burn.” George Wilson could see his son there on the sandhill. Barefoot, sunburned, towheaded. “The devil was in Jesup even then. And he introduced the devil to my boy. String got it in his head to go off to the war. Lord knows he didn’t have to. Got it in his head he was gone make his own path. Should have been Juke that went. I should have run that family off the farm.” He shook his head. “Instead I tried to right him. I thought I could save him.”
Sterling was crouching, peering into the burrow, and now he stood and looked at George with sympathetic eyes. “You got your hands dirty,” he said, sounding as though he meant to agree.
“I never get my hands dirty,” said George.
Sterling looked at him for more. Below and just out of their view, the creek trickled on.
“That’s your job here, Sterling. Are we agreeing now? I’m a man of my word. I trust you are too.”
They didn’t shake on it. George saw no need. Sterling nodded, and that was good enough.
“What’s the other way of looking at it, Mr. Wilson?”
“Beg your pardon?”
“You said it was one way of looking at it, that it was all Jesup’s fault.”
George paused, short of breath again. Leaned over with his hands on his knees. He hadn’t worn overalls since he was a boy, and he felt like a child now. And yet he liked them, he liked Sterling, and though he’d pretended he’d had no partiality to it, he loved this farm where his children had grown tall. He should have been content to be a farmer. String had resented moving to town. They should have stayed and worked the land, the way George’s father had. But his brothers had shamed him with their talk of railroads, turpentine, sawmills. The cotton mill had been his life’s work and now it would be his death.
“I ain’t got many more breaths in me, Sterling. Doc Rawls, before he died, said it’s brown lung disease. What do you think of that?”
“Mr. Wilson.” Sterling put out his hand and for a moment it grazed George’s shoulder. “I’m awful sorry.”
“Couldn’t be pneumonia, cancer, no. Something respectable. Brown lung. Ain’t nothing to be done for it. Ain’t that something.” That he was afflicted with the same disease that struck down his lintheads, a disease he’d brought on himself, breathing in his own toxic cotton dust, was a cosmic affront to his dignity—as great as losing String and Freddie to the devil. If that wasn’t God’s work, he didn’t know what was.
“I reckon it’s God’s fault. God’s joke. I reckon He’s got Him a wicked sense of humor.”
He had done his best to play God. He had never, unlike his grandson, deigned to kill a man by his own hand, though he had hired, arranged, seduced, dispatched, and dispensed with them—men and women—and had given orders to Doc Rawls to end more than one life before it began, which his wife would find more godless certainly than the decades of petty indiscretions, which she excused, and perhaps more godless even than killing a man who’d already lived part of his life. That the unlived lives belonged to his own offspring—well, if he could control that, if he could save a child from the vagaries of God, then he might also save himself from suffering their loss.
“Look,” said Sterling Smith. He was crouching again, and slowly George Wilson lowered himself to the sandy ground and was crouching beside him. Through a fan of wiregrass, a gopher tortoise came lumbering out of its burrow. “Hey there,” Sterling said, keeping his voice low. “You Tiny? You ain’t so tiny anymore.” Carefully he lifted the animal with two hands, inspected its belly, and returned it to the ground. “Maybe you Tiny’s brother. Or her son.” What did it matter? It was a tortoise; they were all tortoises. He gave the animal a stroke under its chin, like he might pet a dog’s snout, and George saw that his own hand was reaching out to do the same, and he was filled with the slow, easy burn of love for the tortoise, and bitterness and awe, that this creature should live so many long years of contentment on this land, that it should survive from the hundreds of eggs its mother laid, that it had outlived its neverborn siblings and would outlive him.
“Your daughter,” George said to Sterling. “Nancy.”
Sterling looked up but didn’t stop his petting.
“Where is she?” He had been hoping to see her. He had been hoping she, God help him, would see him, an old man in overalls. He had been hoping in some way to confirm with his own eyes what the doctor had called to tell him the day before.
“She on a trip to the polio springs with Dr. Oliver.”
“She’s with him there?”
“Yes, sir. Baby Wilson was sick. She wanted to stay with the doctor, I reckon.”
Baby Wilson. George understood that the child was his grandson, but the name knocked out what air was left in his lungs. He’d raised three daughters—he didn’t need any others—and had produced a dozen grandchildren, none of whom had ever set foot on any of his farms. But here on this farm, there would be not just Nancy but her children, and their children, and their children.
“She’ll stay on the farm with you?”
“Yes, sir. I hope she will.”
“She’s a good little nurse.”
“Midwife,” said Sterling.
“Like her mother. Ketty,” George reminded him.
He had not ended the girl’s life before it began. No number of scarves and jewels could convince Ketty to submit to the doctor’s knife. So the girl was born and Ketty had taken her own knife to her, and goddamn if George hadn’t had a feeling about that child, and didn’t have a feeling toward her now, a daughter he would never know. He had wanted to know what God knew so that he might leave her something, a roof over her head, crops in the field, so that he could go to his grave knowing the farm would be carried on by his kin, and so that he might take Juke Jesup’s last piece of pride—not just removing him from the big house but putting a Negro in it, the Negro whose wife they had both thrashed about with. (He did not count Winnafred among his grandchildren. He had discovered her existence too late to cut down that tree at the root. If she was a Wilson, she was also a Jesup, and for that reason she would inherit no love from him. She would be Freddie’s blood to bear.)
But now, looking at the big Negro, at his empty, ignorant face, this man who thought his daughter was his, his pity for him only grew. It made not a lick of sense—Ketty had belonged to Sterling, not to Juke; it should have been Sterling he tried to hate. And yet it was easier, wasn’t it, to hate the man who’d done the same sin he had, taken Ketty from her husband’s bed. One man he’d provide for and he was the one who’d kill the other. There would be no waiting for the court to settle its verdict, no allowing for the comfort of a jail cell. As long as he breathed, George Wilson would do God’s business himself.
“I trust you’ll take good care of this land, Sterling.”
“Like it was my own, sir.”
They left the tortoise to its burrow and began to walk again. The dog went ahead of them. Where the woods thinned into the west field, George took one more shot into the trees. Still nothing fell.
“That’s all right, sir,” Sterling said, because it seemed to him that Mr. Wilson had been trying this time, and that he was disappointed. Again Pollux barked, now disappointed too.
“Not like it was your own, Sterling. It will be yours.”
“Sir?”
“I’ve changed my mind. What good will profits do me when I’m gone? The farm will be yours, Sterling, and Nancy and Wilson’s, if you get this business done.”
Sterling did not know how to answer. They traced the edge of the west field, heading toward the house, and Sterling thought, this could have been cane, this could have been peanuts, five acres for tobacco.
* * *
Freddie Wilson heard the first two shots and he knew that he had time. His ears were not tuned enough to recognize that the shots came from two different guns, but they could tell that whoever fired them was in the woods, far off, far enough. Juke Jesup was far off too. Through the windshield of the Chevy, through his one good eye, Freddie could see him on the tractor floating along the distant edge of the north field. Months ago when Freddie was on the run, under the railroad trestle where he abandoned the truck, he had splintered the windshield handsomely with the Savage 99, making like the Meredith police had done it after he robbed the cotton bank. Later, after his grandfather drove him out to reclaim the truck, he’d tell folks in the mill village that that gunshot was how he’d lost sight in his eye, and though the truth was out, he did still like the sight of that shattered spiderweb, a bull’s-eye big enough to put his finger through, which he did now. His grandmother had said to get the windshield fixed, but he didn’t want to.
With his left foot, he eased open the truck door and stepped into the dirt. He put out his cigarette under his shoe. He didn’t close the door. It was late afternoon, the shadows lengthening across the yard, the chickens and guineas giving him hungry looks. He might have cussed at them or thrown rocks, but he needed to be quiet. He needed to get back around the front of the house without Elma seeing him. The kitchen window faced the yard and the north field beyond it. Silently he went up the porch steps and through the screen door and into the kitchen. Her back was to him. She was facing the window, humming, stirring something in a bowl, her hand still bandaged. On the slab he could see flour, sugar, two broken eggshells. She was wearing a dress and an apron and no shoes. Her hair was in a long red braid down her back and Freddie’s thought was that it would be easy to grab.
He was so intent on her that it took him a few moments to see the baby on the floor. It sat on the rag rug, looking back at him. In its mouth was a wooden spoon, sticky with what looked like cake batter. He made up his mind in the time it took to take four steps toward it that he would pick it up, and then he did. He had never picked up a baby before. His thought was that she—it was a she—was heavy and soft and warm.
“Pretty baby.”
Elma turned, her braid whipping over her shoulder.
“She smells like cake.”
Elma left the bowl she was stirring and marched over. She had a smudge of flour on her forehead. “Put her down.”
“You making me a cake, little wife?”
“Put her down, Freddie.”
“Why? I’m just saying hello.” The baby’s eyes were wide but she didn’t cry. “Ain’t you want me to come meet her? Say how do you do?”
Elma reached for the baby, trying to pull her from his arms. He stepped back, turned around, did a little dance.
“Give her to me!”
“I’m just having a little dance with my daughter. She’s my daughter, ain’t she?”
Elma stood with her hands on her hips. “What if I said she ain’t?”
Freddie laughed. “Whose is she, then? The darky’s?”
“What if she’s my husband’s? I ain’t your little wife, you know.”
He went on laughing. “Your husband’s? The cripple?”
“He’s father to her. More than you could be if you tried.”
“So you changing your story again, are you? Just making up lies to suit you?”
“Freddie, please.”
“That’s my daughter you lying about. Saying she was a nigger twin. That’s low, Elma. That’s real low.”
She stood still, breathing heavily. He could see her mind turning over.
“I wouldn’t have done it, if it hadn’t been for you.” He nodded toward the rocking chair in the front room. “You sat right there in that chair and said you was raped by that nigger, Elma.”
She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. Her hands were on her hips but they were trembling.
“I’m sorry,” she tried. “I’m sorry, Freddie.”
“Oh, you playing nice now!”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Please give her to me.”
“She ought to be ashamed, this poor child. Her momma being a lying whore.” He made a sweet face at the baby. She still had the spoon in her hands. Freddie’s thought was to take it from her and put it in his own mouth and lick it, and he did. “Mmmm. That’s good. That’s sweet.” Then, her hands free, the baby reached up and grabbed his eye patch and popped it like a slingshot. It snapped against his eye.
“Ow!” It didn’t hurt, but it startled him so much he dropped the spoon and nearly dropped the baby. Elma went to catch her but he whisked her away. He took four steps to the rocking chair and put the baby in it, roughly.
“Don’t hurt her!”
He turned back to Elma and blocked her path. Then he reached around and grabbed her by the braid, hard. With his hand on the base of her neck, he pushed her toward the kitchen table. He bent her over at the waist and pressed her face to the surface. “You wanted to be nigger-raped, did you?” He leaned down and spoke low so that he could feel his hot breath wet in her ear. He needed to be quiet still. “You lying whore. No one’s going to believe a word you say. Not this time.”
“Please, Freddie.”
“Don’t holler. Don’t you holler. Don’t you even talk,” he whispered, lifting her dress. “Or I’ll take her. I’ll kidnap me that baby.”
Winnafred sat in the rocking chair, her feet in her hands. She tasted the sweet batter in her mouth. She heard the unfamiliar motor of the tractor outside. She felt the chair rocking and sensed that if she moved forward or back she would spill out, so she sat still. She watched with concern as her father raped her mother, though she would not know the word for what she was seeing for many years, and by the time she did, she would have no memory of what she saw, would have no memory of ever having seen her father at all. Her parents’ eyes were closed. Her mother was quiet, as told, making only the low sounds people make when trying not to sound as though they’ve hurt themselves. Her father was louder, making the same sound but without restraint or regard, which was perhaps why he didn’t seem to hear the tractor motor come to a shudder and stop, and a few moments later, the third gunshot from the woods. He struggled against her, the table moving, inching, bucking across the kitchen floor, pushing the rag rug along with it, nearing the west wall of the room that faced away from the window, away from the door. When her grandfather entered the house, her father had worked the table, and her mother over it, into the corner. In one silent stride, her grandfather saw what was happening. In five more he was across the kitchen, and her father, blind as he was in his right eye, didn’t see him. She watched Juke’s eyes find the carving knife on the tabletop where it lay beside the boned, watchful trout. Winna watched and the fish watched as Juke approached Freddie from behind, trying to find the best angle for the knife. He would have to be careful. He plunged it between Freddie’s shoulder blades, Freddie still pressed to Elma, Elma still pressed to the table. He dragged the knife down Freddie’s spine, gutting him, and then he pulled it out. Freddie’s body went slack. It fell forward onto Elma like a flour sack. Then she did scream.
A number of things happened one after another. Elma slid herself out from under Freddie. She stood, stumbled. Her skirt fell. Freddie’s body clung to the table, his upper half lying across it where hers had been. The knife had gone clean through him and the blood poured both ways, out his front and out his back, pooling under him and onto the table, flooding the back of his shirt. It had darkened the back of Elma’s dress. Her braid was wet with it. Her hands were red with it, the bandage soaked through. Seeing all the blood, she began to cry, and only then did Winnafred, in the rocking chair, cry herself. Elma ran to her and lifted her and held her, and then the blood was on the baby’s dress too.
Juke was breathing heavily, leaning over, his hand on one of the chairs. “Tractor died,” he said. The knife was slick with blood but still in his hand. He expected Freddie to stand up and come at him any second, but he just lay there with his arms outstretched on the table, his cheek and patched eye pressed to it, his good eye, round and blue and unseeing, staring up at him. His pants lay around his boots; his white ass pointed toward the door.
That was the scene the dog came upon. Pollux was there first, her wet nose on the screen door, scratching. She had not barked, or if she’d barked, the people in the big house had not heard her. She barked now, the smell of blood strong in her nose. Juke took a step toward the door, the knife still in his hand, then stopped. What was there to be done now? He looked at Elma and said, “Ain’t nothing else to be done.”
“Daddy,” she said. “Daddy.”
“It’s all right. Ain’t nothing else to be done.”
They listened to the footsteps come up the porch stairs. It was George Wilson who came up next. He pushed open the screen door and Pollux bolted in. George’s eyes went from Freddie’s body to Juke with the knife to Elma and Winna to Freddie again. Frantically the dog sniffed Freddie’s boots, his pants, his bare behind. The blood dribbled from the table to the floor. Then Sterling came up and looked in through the door. “Holy Lord,” he said.
“Come in here and get this dog away!” George Wilson said.
Sterling came in and slipped in the blood and took the dog by the scruff of the neck and dragged her out, saying, “Holy Lord, come on, girl, oh holy Lord.” Sterling stayed on the porch with her. He and the dog looked back in.
George stood inside the door. The hunting rifle was still slung over his shoulder. They all were still for perhaps half a minute, listening to the blood drip to the floor. Then he took a few shuffling steps toward the table, went down on one knee, and put his face close to Freddie’s. Freddie’s eyes did not blink. Blood leaked out of his mouth.
“You done this,” he said to Juke. He sounded as though he hoped for some other explanation, but there was the knife in his hand, the blade red with his grandson’s blood.
“He was raping her.”
George stood up. He looked to Elma. If he doubted this, his face didn’t show it.
“You knifed him. You done it.”
“Son of a bitch was raping my daughter. You would have done the same. Anyone would.”
Sterling’s eyes and the dog’s eyes looked in on them through the screen.
“For pity’s sake, honey.” His voice broke. “You went and done it.”
Juke swallowed. His hand had seized around the knife and a pain shot through his wrist but still he held on.
“Don’t come closer,” Juke said, his voice low.
“Juke. For pity’s sake, Juke.”
Juke’s eyes flew from George’s to Elma’s and back. “Ain’t nothing else to be done.”
George shook his head. He looked up to the ceiling. He called for Sterling.
“Yes, sir,” said Sterling through the screen door. It was coming on evening and the day had darkened behind Sterling and they could see little more than his silhouette and that of the shotgun crossed in front of him.
“Come in here, Sterling.”
“Sir?”
“Come back in here and do what I asked you, Sterling.”
A moment passed. The screen door didn’t open. “I don’t want to let that dog in, sir.”
“Come in and leave the dog out, Sterling. Come on and get it over with. You can use your gun.”
George was watching him and Juke was watching him and Elma was watching him. Winna was crying and at Sterling’s feet Pollux was whining. Sterling looked in at the brightly framed room, the pond of blood under the table, Juke with his knife and George Wilson with his gun. He saw the frightened child in her mother’s arms and he saw his own baby daughter, the last time he’d seen her before he left, choking on a pearl from her mother’s necklace.
“I ain’t coming back in, sir.”
Elma watched him disappear into the shadows of the breezeway. He was there, and then he was leaving, and then he was gone.
You could just leave, she thought. You could just go.
“For pity’s sake,” George Wilson said. “All right. All right, then.” He shook his head with disappointment. “Make me get my own hands dirty. I will if I have to.”
Juke did not beg. Elma did not beg. She thought about begging. She thought about stepping in front of her father. He wouldn’t kill her too. He wouldn’t kill a baby.
Grimly, George Wilson cocked his gun. “Go on,” he said to Elma. “Take that baby out of here.”
Elma closed her eyes. Parthenia Wilson had told her that it was a woman’s job to keep men from shedding each other’s blood. But Elma was too late. Freddie’s blood was already drying on her back. Men would shed each other’s blood, and it was a woman’s job to slip out from under it, to step out of the way.
She opened her eyes. She looked at her father. She did not take her eyes off of his as she put one foot closer to the door, then another. Slowly, another step, another, she carried Winna across the room. She cupped her hand to the back of the baby’s head. She might have closed her eyes and made a run for it, but she went slowly, eyes open, so she might have to remember the fright on her father’s face. She backed out of the kitchen, leaned back into the screen door. It swung open. She took one more look at her father. She nodded at him. He nodded back. And then she was outside in the evening.
Sterling was standing in the doorway of the shack. Once she saw him she did close her eyes and she did run. As she ran she pressed one of Winna’s ears to her chest and covered the other with her hand. They were halfway across the yard to the shack when the shot came.
Elma stopped. She turned and looked back at the big house.
Another shot.
In the doorway of the shack, Pollux stood, alert. She barked twice.
Then Elma went to Sterling. The dog went back to eating the dried fish Sterling had given her. The shack did not have a lock, but when they were all inside Sterling closed the door and pushed one of the spindle chairs under the knob. He held a hand out to her and she took it. They did not know what to pray for, but together they dropped to their knees.
They did not know who the second bullet was meant for. But after some time the screen door did open and George Wilson came out of the big house carrying a large bundle in his arms like a groom carrying a bride. It was his grandson, swaddled in the blood-soaked rag rug. His legs were in his pants now and they dangled crookedly from the rug. Slowly George came down the porch stairs, taking feeble, uncertain steps. From the window of the shack, Elma and Sterling watched him lay Freddie in the bed of the Chevy truck like a sleeping child. The driver’s door still hung open. George Wilson got into it, started the engine, turned on the headlights, and in no hurry to get to town, drove off the farm.