The week after the hearing, the twins fell sick with something like the flu. It started with Winna and soon Wilson had it, fever and rashes and a cough that kept the house awake. Nan thought Winna wasn’t taking to the cow’s milk that Elma had started feeding her in a bottle. She couldn’t keep it down. Elma worried it was whatever virus had sickened Dr. Rawls and his wife and the rest of the town, trapped in the stale air of the house. But none of the grown folks got sick, and Oliver said it was the kind of late-winter illness that all babies got, that they would be stronger for it in the end, that it would pass. The winter had indeed and at last come to roost, a cold fog settling over the wiregrass country for a week. It was the kind of weather that would make most folks want to stay inside, and that was what Nan and Elma and the babies did, as Oliver came and went.
When he wasn’t there, they ignored the knocks on the door. It was a kind of thrill. More thrilling was the ingenious idea Elma had to simply remove the telephone from its hook, which prevented it from ringing altogether. It did give a plaintive tone at all hours, and at first it drove both girls mad. The dog howled and rolled on the floor. They tried to put the radio on to cover the noise, but the only program they got clear during the day was the local news, and that was far worse. Before long they found they got used to it. It was like the sound of the wind, or the teakettle whistling, or the steady hum of cricket frogs. It was a force that kept other sounds away. When Elma finally had the idea to drape a coat hanger over the hook, and her new coat on it, they’d been indoors for three days, and the knocks had mostly ceased. The coat hung there on the kitchen wall, tricking the telephone silent.
When Oliver was there, he answered the door and sent folks away. The sheriff, despite Nan’s fear, didn’t come again. They were reporters, mostly, and neighbors come to pry. The Dampiers and the Cavanaughs and Mrs. Stovall, the neighbors who shared the party line, came to complain of the Rawlses’ code ringing at all hours of the day. Long, short, long, long. Wasn’t anyone there to pick up the phone? Did they need a secretary? Answer the ring, or they would! It was worse than when the twins were born, and now it had followed them here to the house in town. Elma blamed herself for wishing a neighbor might bring a casserole by.
It was Juke’s knock Nan most feared, and it was Freddie’s knock for Elma. Both men were free now, free to knock on any door they pleased. Nan and Elma felt safer when Oliver wasn’t there to open the door. He meant well. But what protection was he?
He knew himself what little he could do. When he’d returned to Florence before Christmas, when his father was still alive, his waiting room had been full. Slowly his patients had been dwindling, and now, after the hearing, they’d dropped to half their number. One evening, coming home for supper in his wheelchair, a man driving a pickup truck veered his car toward the sidewalk. The wheel of the truck came within inches of the wheel of the chair. Just as quickly, the truck jerked back onto the road and sped off.
It wasn’t a green Chevy. That truck Freddie Wilson had abandoned under a bridge in Jeff Davis County not long after he drove out of town. But Oliver read the plate number. He repeated it in his head as he wheeled himself home, and when he got there and found his wife’s coat hanging from the telephone, he lost his nerve. What would the sheriff do, if he reported it? It might have been the sheriff who’d tried to run him off the road.
He didn’t tell the sheriff and he didn’t tell Elma. Instead, every morning, he drove the three blocks to the office. He didn’t come home for the midday meal. He told Elma if she needed him to call.
Problem was, when he didn’t come home for dinner, he couldn’t collect the mail, which Mr. Horace delivered like clockwork every day between twelve and twelve thirty. The dog rose to sniff at it as it fell through the slot and onto the mat.
One evening he came home and Elma had opened a letter from the bank. It had the word “foreclosure” in it. She showed him with a painted fingernail.
“You’ve opened my mail.”
“It’s addressed to Dr. Manford Rawls.”
“That’s right. I’ve taken over his mortgage. He ain’t going to open this letter, is he?”
“I reckon not. But I reckon I’m alive as you.”
“You may open any envelope with your own name on it, Elma.”
Elma blinked. She put the fingernail in her mouth and nibbled at it. They were both remembering the letters she’d sent to this address. The distance from the farm to the house had seemed a long one, as long a distance as then to now.
“My mistake,” she said.
All the banks were threatening foreclosures. That was what he told her. They were all bluster. “Only man more frightened than a man who owns a house is the man who holds the note on that house.”
The next day he came home and the mail was still on the mat. She hadn’t even picked it up. He stepped over it. It piled there for three days until finally Nan collected it and put it in the basket on the table.
* * *
It was the middle of March before the Twelve-Mile Straight was paved, two weeks later than George Wilson had ordered it, but the road gang was two men shy. The people of Cotton County drove up and down it for no other reason than to take a drive in the country air. By then, the week of winter had passed and the air smelled sun baked again, the pear blossoms, the cherry blossoms already blanketing the sidewalk of Main Street. In the country it was beardtongue and bee balm and bird’s foot violet rushing into the open windows of the cars, and no dust, no clay in their tires. No matter that the road still dead-ended. There was no reason to visit the county camp, except to see where Freddie Wilson had been hiding in plain sight. The whiskey operation George Wilson had established was not in plain sight; it was buried in the pines deeper yet; he himself had only been there once, on a horse borrowed from Lloyd Crow, though Lloyd Crow knew nothing of George Wilson’s purpose, knew only to say yes when asked. The cars approaching the end of the road caught sight of the distant tents under the pines and then turned around, so many times that they wore a roundabout path in the scrubgrass ditch.
On the way back to town, they took another look at the crossroads farm. Some saw Juke Jesup behind a mule and a plow, readying the west field for corn. “Fool’s back to plowing like the rest of us.” Some went on and said more, the white sharecroppers and their sons and wives, the folks in the mill village. “Got him an outside child. Mulatto boy. Drinking nigger juice all these years and it finally ketched up with him.”
Some saw the Negro behind the other mule, the older plow, readying the west field for cotton. They didn’t know who he was. They only said, “That man got a death wish.”
At Estelle’s beauty shop on Pearl Avenue, the women with their heads under the heated domes said, “That girl try to come in here other day.”
“Try to tell me that child was hers. Try to say they Gemini twins!”
“Mildred believed it.”
“You believed it yourself. You said it was a miracle.”
“I said it’s possible. I read a science book on it. I didn’t believe they was twins. Just look at them!”
The men who knew Juke Jesup, the ones who had been there under the gourd tree, didn’t care who was daddy to what baby. They sat in their open truck beds and said, “Y’all seen it same as me. You know it was Mr. Juke put that poor mule under him.”
“Yeah, but it’s Freddie cut him down. Y’all seen it.”
“Ain’t matter now. Mr. Juke been charged and Freddie boy free.”
“Mr. Juke get all charged up. Ain’t right.”
Some of the ones who’d been there, others, didn’t talk about it at all. It had been out of the papers for months. That was how they liked it. Now it was back in.
With Nan in town now, colored folks didn’t have much reason to go all the way down the Straight. But those who passed the farm didn’t say the word, either. They said quietly, after they were a good ways past, “Guess Mr. Juke got what coming to him. Had it coming to him ten ways.”
“Ain’t got it yet,” they said. “Ain’t been tried.”
Ezra and Long John and Al hadn’t worked on the farm since harvest. Al’s wife, Cecilia, said to him, “Mr. Juke’s gal crying wolf after all. Think she fancy with her lying mouth. I told you that girl crying wolf.”
“You didn’t either,” Al said. “You and Ezra and John say he found him the wrong white girl.”
“Well, he did now, didn’t he.”
“Poor child of God,” Al said. “Ain’t killed for nothing but to cover Mr. Juke.”
“Tell you what, you ain’t gone back to work on that farm.”
“Ain’t Mr. Juke’s right to call on me no more. He’s George Wilson’s nigger now.”
* * *
It was gossip because Nan and Elma would confirm nothing to the press, not to the gossip columnists, the society pages, not to Q. L. Boothby, though not because he didn’t try. Nan and Elma did not answer the telephone and did not answer the door. They would neither confirm nor deny.
At the Florence Cotton Mill, where Freddie Wilson had been reinstated as foreman, they were sending the press away as well. Beau Richard had been demoted to second foreman, a job George Wilson created on the spot; he said the job had been interim foreman, but as a matter of goodwill, he’d extend his salary. The job of the second foreman, Beau Richard learned, was to stand in front of the mill with a shotgun and turn the press away. He had a thing or two to tell the newspapermen who came and aimed their cameras at him, but he’d seen what happened to his friend Bob Pruitt and so he held his tongue.
At the crossroads farm, Juke Jesup did not invite the reporters to sit on his porch. He did not offer them gin. Was it true that there had been no rape of his daughter?
“You the law?”
“No, sir. I’m from the Albany Times.”
“Then I got nothing to say I ain’t said already.”
Some of the papers noted another fellow on the farm, a broad-shouldered Negro who kept quiet in the field. Nobody recognized him any more than they’d recognized Genus Jackson. Some of them looked into the court papers. Name was Sterling Smith. But none of them put Sterling Smith and Nancy Smith together. They saw the smoke coming out of the chimney in the little shack.
* * *
The folks from Rocky Bottom and the Fourth Ward, they didn’t have business out on the Straight, but the truth was, they didn’t call on Nan anymore, even in town. She was closer now, six miles in, more likely to get to a quick-birthing mother. But they didn’t want to knock on the door of the doctor’s house, not after all that was said about her. Some weren’t sure she was in there. Some thought, even if she was, they didn’t want to get mixed up in all that. Girl had gotten too close to white folks, and they’d poisoned her, poor child. Wasn’t her fault. But they didn’t trust her to deliver their own child now. They wanted a clean colored girl, hands like her mother’s, steady, smart.
One night a father went looking for her at the farm, not knowing she’d left for the doctor’s house. He was part Creek; he lived in a cabin in the Indian village in Meredith; the news hadn’t gotten to him yet. (Even if it had, he didn’t care for news. He was not a superstitious man.) It was the shack door he knocked on in the middle of the night, and Sterling opened it.
“I believe it’s my daughter you looking for. She ain’t here. She stay in town now.”
“Whereabouts?”
“She deliver your child before?”
“No sir. Her mother did. Five-year-old boy. Three-year-old girl.”
“That’s my woman did that. Ketty.”
“That’s right.”
“Tell you what. I’ll go with you. I’ll take you there.” He held the door open while he took his hat and coat off the hook by the door, and he followed the man to his horse and jig. The five-year-old boy sat holding the reins.
It was close to one o’clock in the morning when they reached the house on Main Street. Everyone was in bed. But the part of Nan that still lived in the country, the part that was still midwife and always mother, lay near the surface of sleep. She heard the horse slow to a stop even before the dog did, and by the time the knock came and Polly was barking, Nan was up on her feet. The babies slept on, but Oliver and Elma appeared at their bedroom door. Someone put a light on. The knock came again, louder. It wasn’t the Florence Messenger calling, not in the middle of the night. It was Juke or it was Freddie or it was the law.
“It’s Sterling!” came a voice through the door.
Nan looked at Elma. Their eyes went wide with relief.
“Well, let him in,” said Elma.
Oliver opened the door. There was Sterling and the Indian father, whose name was Footsie Davis. They both took off their hats.
“Sorry to bother you folks so late,” said Sterling. “This father got a need for your services, Nan.”
It was determined that Nan would go, and that Sterling would go with them. But Oliver said they’d better take the car, if it was the third child coming and they were headed all the way to Meredith. They’d better take the car and Oliver had better drive it, for it was a funny car with hand gears, and besides, he might be needed to help.
They drove out under the half-moon, Sterling, Footsie Davis, Oliver, Nan, the child Ketty had delivered, whose name was John. The horse, whose name was Willie J, the J standing for nothing, stayed behind with Elma and the twins, yoked to the pear tree in the front yard. They’d left fast and Nan had forgotten a coat, so Sterling, in the backseat beside her, offered his. She nodded, though she wasn’t cold. He draped it around her shoulders. There. They’d found a way to talk yet. They were like a courting couple, Oliver thought, looking in the rearview, and then he raised his voice as he spoke to Footsie so they might have some privacy.
It was an olive army coat issued by Cotton County, still stiff, but it smelled like him, musky, and like the wood smoke of the shack. Was it her father she was smelling, or Genus? “You so popular,” he said, “I got to come see you in the middle of the night, just to get an appointment.”
Nan smiled.
“I been trying to see you. Since I get out. But longer than that, I mean. I been trying to see you since I heard what happened to your momma.”
Nan’s smile turned confused.
“Since before that, even. I wanted to send for you. I’ll tell you about it all sometime, if you’ll let me.”
Nan nodded.
“All right then. I got a lot to say. Got a lot to ask.” He closed his eyes and turned away. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Reckon we got to figure that part out. We take it slow.” He clapped his hands, one clap. “All right! I’ll start with something small.” He leaned over and shielded his mouth with his hand. “This here the first time I been in a automobile. Not counting no police wagon.”
He had her smile back.
“That’s our first secret. You and me, girl.”
She was thinking of the bargain she’d made with God. She thought maybe she could accept Juke’s being free if it meant her father was free too, in the backseat of this car with her on this night.
“Look like it’s tomorrow now. Look like you got a birthday, girl.” And Nan realized it was true: it was tomorrow, and it was her birthday. She was fifteen. “Look like you ain’t the only one come into the world today.”
At the cabin, the men watched her from a distance. It was a one-room house, the mother on the only bed, one child in it with her and another coming fast. It had been a good thing they’d taken the car. It had been needed more than Oliver, who helped only to catch the baby, and only, he knew, because Nan let him. It was as though the baby, another girl, was Oliver’s own child; that was how glad he was to catch her. All of the men cheered, and the mother, whose name was Eluhu, wept with joy and relief. The little boy John fell asleep at his mother’s feet. The little girl, whose name was Ketty Ann, fell asleep at her mother’s side. The mother declared that the baby would be called Nancy Mae. It was the first time a baby had been named for Nan, though only she knew that. All of the men cheered again. And then the mother ordered all of them out.