“You can thank me for that pie,” the white Smith said to the black one. He squinted at Sterling with his single, sky blue eye. “My grammy sent it for me special.”
The latrine had been finished and they were putting it to use, as Crow had suggested. Around their ankles were their striped pants and their chain, the ball hanging out the privy door like a watchdog. Sterling thought it must have been a white man invented the two-seater so he could have another man to talk to, even when he cleared his bowels.
“I left her a message, like smoke signals, like the Indians done. Like the Hardy Boys. You know who the Hardy Boys is, don’t you? Can’t you read?”
Sterling shook his head, and Freddie shook his. “They’s adventure boys. They do secret codes and such. Anyway I left my grammy a secret code. Know what I done?”
Sterling was paging through an issue of Progessive Farmer, which he indeed could not read but it was something for the men to put their eyes on before using it to wipe their behinds.
“She used to sing me a hymn when I was a boy.” Now Freddie raised his voice up big and sang, “‘Crown Him with many crowns! The lamb upon His throne!’”
They both took stock of where they were sitting and Sterling shook his head and laughed despite himself and Freddie laughed so hard he had to spit. “We’s just lambs on our thrones, ain’t we? Boy howdy!” He spit again in the dirt they’d just dug. “You know that one, Blacksmith? ‘Crown Him with many crowns’?”
Sterling shook his head.
“My grammy, she used to sing it to me while she made me a crown out of flowers. They was them little yellow flowers like daisies, but with black eyes? They grown all up on the hill of the mill village.”
“Black-eyed Susan,” Sterling couldn’t help but say, and by the time he said it he was sorry he had, because Ketty had grown them.
“That’s them. She used to make me a whole bunch of crowns from black-eyed Susans. And she would put the crowns on my head and sing ‘Crown Him with many crowns’ and call me her lamb. Boy howdy, every boy should have him a grammy like that. You remember last week when we was back in the mill village, cutting back that ditch weed?”
Sterling nodded. It seemed like a long time ago and far off.
“They was all them black-eyed Susans on the hill, and I made up three little crowns, tiny as like to fit on a kitty cat, and I put em in the mailbox.”
“What mailbox?” Sterling said.
“My grammy’s mailbox. We wasn’t but right acrost the street from her house.”
“Thas her house on the hill there?”
“Thas my house. Ain’t I told you it was?”
Sterling put down the magazine. His stomach hurt all of a sudden.
“I knew she’d know it was me. I seen her on the porch watching all of us, but she didn’t see me back. Boy, I’m just about as clever as Joe Hardy.” He laughed again. He had a laugh that made Sterling want to claw out the boy’s remaining eye.
“Thas your house, and you playing games, son? Why you ain’t call out for her right there?” It pained him to think the boy was playing games in front of his own house. And yet wasn’t that what he was doing himself? He had been playing games a year ago when he had stood there frozen in the rain, refusing to go home. He had been playing games for thirteen years before that, finding reasons to stay in Georgia.
“I’m a wanted man. Wanted for far worse than that fool warden got me for.”
Sterling wondered what the fool warden might do if he put the white boy’s head in the privy.
“Did you do it? What you’re wanted for?”
“Hell no,” the boy said. “I ain’t no killer. I ain’t even kill a nigger.”
“It’s you that’s wanted for killing that man?”
“Thas right.”
“Why you wanted for it?”
“’Cause Jesup done laid it on me! My only crime was knocking up the wrong whore.” Freddie pointed an arm out the privy window. “Just over yonder. I used to have her park my truck under them trees, and we’d go to town.” He whistled. “We give them birds a mighty show!”
“You telling me you one of the daddies?”
Freddie nodded hungrily. “Guess which one’s mine. The darky or the white?” He gestured out the window again. “I like to think it was me who laid my seed in her first. Had I known a darky had got to her, I would a driven out a here like a bat out a hell.”
“You knew her,” Sterling said. “Elma Jesup.”
“Hell yes I knew her. In the Bible way! You sounding like you know her too.”
“Naw,” Sterling said.
“You sure, Blacksmith?”
“Naw. I don’t know no white girls.”
“Thas good, Blacksmith. They trouble.”
“I don’t know no one.”
Sterling looked out at the pines. He believed the boy because he needed to. The boy had had no part in killing that man. Juke Jesup had done it. Yes, of course he had. He felt his ancient hate rise up out of bed.
“‘Crown Him with many crowns!’” the boy sang. He said, “I’m fixing to show my grammy my face when I’m good and ready.” His body let out a sound like hell raining down, and then he laughed again. “Lordy, lordy, them blackberries done run like jam clean through me.”
* * *
Ketty would grow black-eyed Susans to make a poultice for the foot when somebody stepped on a spur or a rock or a spider. She made a poultice out of them when she’d cut out the baby’s tongue, packing them into the baby’s gums like her own cured tobacco leaves, then wrapping the rag across her mouth and around her head. It amazed Sterling what a body could get used to. You could get used to having no tongue, and you could get used to your baby having no tongue. Seemed it might grow back like a lizard’s tail.
It didn’t grow back. It was bloody and then it was black and then it was pink again. It was just the stem of it left, like a weed whose root you couldn’t pull all the way out of the ground.
Not long after that, Ketty woke up one black midnight to go on a call. When Nancy was young and still nursing, Ketty would take her with her, strapped to her body. She’d deliver one baby with another suckling on her tit. More than once, when a mother had trouble with her milk, Ketty would offer the newborn her own breast. But now Nancy was weaned and Ketty left her behind, in bed with Sterling, and she was crying a terrible tongueless cry and barking a terrible spiteful cough. She was sick with something like the croup. He hoped it was the croup. Sounded like her lungs were coughing up their wrath. He got up and walked her down the length of the shack, and then he got to remembering something Ketty had done with Elma, which was to wrap her up in a blanket and bring her on the porch, and let the cold night air settle into her lungs.
It was March and a fine night for such a remedy. As there was no rocking chair on the porch of the shack, which wasn’t a raised porch but just a few planks flat on the ground, and since Sterling was falling asleep on his feet, he lit a lantern and went to the porch of the big house and settled in a chair. He had a full mustache then and the baby liked to pet it. He thought how strange it was that the women had gone from the farm, that they were two men, he and Juke, with little daughters in their care. Nancy’s lungs filled with the dewy air and cleared and as he rocked her she settled into something like sleep in his lap. He was feeling pleased with himself. He put his nose and mouth to the back of her little neck, no bigger than a corncob, and breathed her in. The cricket frogs chirped.
The door to the breezeway, the one off the bedrooms, swung open. There stood Elma, five years old, in bare feet and nightdress, her hair a red cloud above her. “Where’s my daddy at?” she said.
Now the cold night air burned in Sterling’s own lungs. He tried to think. He could not remember a wagon coming for Ketty. He could not remember the sound of its wheels. Perhaps he had slept through it. It was such a common sound, as common as the baby’s cries, the guineas’ fussing in the yard. But the cold feeling stayed with him, a ghost in his chest.
“He ain’t inside?” Sterling said. He didn’t whisper, because he wanted to hear his own voice in the night, so he might not be so scared.
Elma shook her head. She did not look scared. If he could have, he would have asked the girl to hold his hand, but he was as afraid for her as he was for himself, of what he might discover. He said, “Go back to bed. I’ll find your daddy. He’s probably checking on the hogs,” because it was the first thing came into his mind. In fact, he did go first to the barn, and looked in on the cows, but the cows were asleep, as were the guineas and chickens and the hogs under the house. The people were the only folks up. There was no truck on the farm yet, and the only way Jesup would make it to town was in the wagon or on a mule, and both mules were there in the barn, asleep as well.
Sterling walked with his lantern in one hand and the baby in the other, holding her close to his chest. He might have put her down on the bed now, but he felt safer with her there over his heart, felt that she was some kind of protection. He looked in the privy and the cotton house and the sugarhouse and the shed. He looked back in the big house, thinking maybe Elma had been wrong, that she’d missed her daddy in his own bed. He’d never been in the man’s room before, rarely went any farther than his porch. What he found was a room so empty it left him breathless, not just empty of the man himself but of everything else, save for a bed and a dresser and on top of it his wedding picture in a frame and a tobacco tin and a hat. He tried to remember if the man had another hat he wore but couldn’t. He couldn’t say why it disappointed him that Jesup’s room was as empty as his own shack. He supposed he’d expected that, even if his own room wasn’t full of fine things, a big house belonging to a white man would be, even if it was a man he hated.
Sterling told Elma he’d stay there on the porch and wait for her daddy, that she could go back to sleep. He had no shotgun, Jesup having taken it from him, so he sat in the rocker with the baby. It was coming on dawn, the martins waking in the cane field, when headlights came up the Straight, slowed at the driveway, and turned up it. Sterling moved with the baby to the front porch and watched in the near dark as Jesup stepped out of the passenger door and Ketty stepped out of the back. The car was still running, the headlights laying across the porch steps and Sterling’s legs as he came down them. By the bottom step, he could see that it was George Wilson sitting in the driver’s seat, and he was waving him over. Sterling went to the car window as Jesup and Ketty passed through the headlights to the porch, where they stood in their coats as one broad-winged creature, silent and dark.
“Evening, Sterling,” George Wilson said.
Sterling said good evening.
“Or shall I say good morning?” George Wilson smiled. “I was returning Mr. Jesup home when we found your old lady up the road a piece. Says she was walking home after a granny call. Says the Negro wagon busted up. Says the wagon lost not one wheel but two. Says the wheels just rolled right off into the ditch and disappeared. What do you make of that, Sterling?”
Sterling said, “I’m much obliged to you for returning her, sir.”
“Lucky we come across her,” he said. “There’s boars, Sterling. One of my men on a farm up the road killed one last week.”
Sterling said again he was much obliged.
“They’ll attack at the knees, Sterling. Bring down a full-grown man just as easy as a woman.” George Wilson looked at the baby in Sterling’s arms. She was awake again and fussing, and Sterling was rocking her, and now she was barking her wrathful cough. “A woman is safest on the farm, don’t you agree, Sterling? Where she can tend a crying child?”
Sterling agreed that yes, she was.
“I need a man to be well-rested to do a day’s work on the farm.”
“Yes sir,” said Sterling.
George Wilson tipped his hat and readied himself to reverse the car.
“Mr. Wilson,” Sterling started.
“What is it?”
“He took my shotgun, sir. Mr. Juke. I can’t keep away no boars if I ain’t got a gun. A man needs a gun, sir.”
Mr. Wilson looked to the porch, where Ketty and Juke Jesup still stood, an undivided mass. Sterling wished to God he could see their faces.
“I’ll speak to him, Sterling.”
“Thank you kindly, sir. Sir?”
“What is it, Sterling?”
“Mr. Juke was with you all evening?”
George Wilson looked thoughtful for a moment. Then he smiled. “We had friendly business at the mill,” he said. “You get some sleep, Sterling. Settle your mind.”
Then he reversed the car and the headlights slipped down the driveway and out of sight.
* * *
Sterling’s mind would not settle. Ketty had gone cold and quiet as a stone, as though it were her own tongue she’d cut out. He’d ask her about the cows, or tell her about the fields, or praise a meal, and she would turn away from him, let him see the broad blank face of her back. She turned her back also to the baby, let her crawl all over the farm while she went about her chores. Once she lost sight of her. Ketty and Sterling searched the two hundred acres, and Juke joined in, cursing them both, and Sterling was sure she’d crawled down into the creek and drowned. It was Elma who found her down in the woods, where she’d gotten into some blackberry bushes. Her face and hands were stained blue-black. Ketty had scooped her up and pounded her diapered behind, then kissed her stained face. Sterling felt satisfied: now his wife would be more vigilant. But the next day the baby was crawling over the acres again. She crawled over to him in the yard, where he was trimming the hooves of one of the mules. Her knees were worn white, and covered in ant bites.
If Ketty was going to turn her back to them both, and sleep on the floor, if she was going to stay out all night delivering babies while she left her own at home with him, and if he said Good morning or Goddamn and her answer was the same, if still she showed her back to him, he might as well tell her his mind.
“You got plenty of time for other folks’ younguns,” he said. “You gone all day, all night, I’m plowing a field with a baby on my back. Mule’s leading me and I’m leading her. Ain’t nothing but a swayback mule to you. Ain’t I nothing but a mule?”
Ketty answered that it was God’s say how long it took a baby to come into the world.
“How my to feed her?” Her answer—the fact that she’d answered him, spoke words to him—animated him more. “While I’m plowing a field? Know how long it takes to feed a baby grits with a spoon? How my to do it? We got two men on this farm and it ain’t nearly enough as it is. I ain’t got time to feed no baby with no spoon.” He realized he was holding the baby, and he handed her to Ketty. “You make me a mule of a man, Ketty. Folks look on me like a mule. I won’t have it.” He told her he had cousins in Baltimore who had a bunk for him at the steel mill. He had no cousins, though he had heard from a field hand who did that the mills up north needed workers. There was a war on. Every day, men were leaving Georgia. Why not him? He told Ketty, “You keep doing me like that, I like to up and leave.”
Ketty’s answer was to bundle up the baby, next time she made a call, and take her with her. Never again did she leave the baby behind in Sterling’s care.
That did not bring him peace. Now his bed was empty of the baby too. He did not like spooning her corn grits but he liked having her there in the bed beside him, petting his mustache, her little chest rising and falling, her mouth dribbling drool as she fell asleep.
Sterling’s shotgun was not returned to him. He plowed the west field and Jesup plowed the north. Their mules seemed to know not to look each other in the eye.
* * *
She’d gone mad, he concluded. She had cut out their daughter’s tongue not to save her life, as she claimed, but to keep her silent. All that clay had poisoned her mind.
Later, when he learned it was cancer that killed her—it was an old friend of his mother’s who sent him a letter in the turpentine camp, a letter he’d had to ask another man to read him—he thought maybe she’d meant well after all. He wondered how early it had got hold of her. Maybe it wasn’t the toxic Georgia clay that had made her crazy but the cancer gnawing holes through her tongue even in those years, or through her mind. When he thought of it this way—it was the sickness in her, it wasn’t her fault—his own heart softened against her memory. He lay in the camp now, so close to the farm he could smell the manure and name the mule who made it, and wondered not for the first time if she was buried there, on the farm where they had had their honeymoon and where she had hardened her heart against him. Had Jesup buried her himself? Or was she laid into the ground by her own people?
But she’d had wildness in her even before she came to the farm, he had to remember. She had come to him like a jenny in heat, no stranger to the ways of men. He was no fool. When he’d courted her as a young man, they’d once hung their arms over the fence that divided the Youngs’ farm from that of a white man, a mule breeder, and they petted the horses and donkeys and fed them apples and carrots. Sterling looked at the animals with envy—he’d worked in George Wilson’s field all day and was hungry himself for apples and carrots. But Ketty looked on them with a kind of benign and earthly accord, her hands stroking their black lips and pink gums, their pink tongues. And the white man, the man who all day long paired animals to his liking, in ten-gallon hat and dungarees and a gold belt buckle, from over the fence he treated the animals with the same sensual calm, putting his fingers in their mouths, putting his mouth even on theirs, and beside Sterling’s timid indifference Ketty and the white man were like mother and father to the animals they loved and knew so well, like lovers, and Sterling startled and fled from the thought that that was what they were.
He liked to think that he had tamed her. When they married and moved to the crossroads, she didn’t pay visits to the tobacco farm, didn’t even suggest them, though her people, or at least her friends, folks she called Auntie This and Uncle That, still lived there, still had a log rolling each spring and a corn shucking each fall, still carved chairs, raised babies, smoked tobacco into the night. It was as though it was a life she was resigned to leave behind. She had chosen to make a new life with Sterling. They never spoke of the mule breeder. Sterling had managed to put him out of his mind, until the night she returned home with Juke Jesup in George Wilson’s car, and they stood together on the porch in the shadow of dawn, in the same complicit silence.
That was March. The baby’s cough calmed. She had a birthday. Ketty took the baby with her when she went off the farm and even as she went about it, carrying her on her back in the flour-sack sling as though to show Sterling just what she was capable of. The baby came to walking late, so much time did she spend in that sling, but then she did walk and she learned to cling to her mother’s knee.
One morning as the summer waned, Sterling woke to find them gone. It was late, the sun was up, the animals moaned hungrily from the barn. Fear rose in his throat: that they had gone for good. That Ketty had turned her back to him a final time, taken the baby and gone back to the Youngs’ farm, never to return.
But then he saw that their things were there in the shack with him still: a basket of sack diapers, the baby’s silver spoon, the bottle of almond oil Ketty wore in her hair. He scrambled down to the floor and lifted the loose floorboard by the stove: there was her coffee tin of white clay. She would not leave for good, not without taking those things with her. She had strung up an old sheet for privacy, so she could wash in the zinc tub and change clothes without his eyes on her, and now he stood and moved the sheet aside and saw that the few dresses that she owned still hung from the wooden rod in the corner. At their feet, hiding under their skirts, was her satchel. Her birthing bag, she called it. In it she kept all the instruments she used, God knew what they were for, to help a baby into the world.
Now his relief came back up his throat, burning with acid. He thought he might be sick. Because if she didn’t have her birthing bag with her, if she wasn’t delivering a baby, where was she?
She was not on the farm. No one was. The wagon was gone and so was Clarence. He spoke to the animals who were left just to hear his voice, trying to keep the worry out of it, as though it were they who needed reassurance. “Look like the world done emptied out, Mamie girl.” He tried to put his mouth to hers, as he had seen the mule breeder do years ago. She snuffed at him, shook her mane.
They had all left. Jesup had taken all the womenfolk from the farm. Sterling’s darkest fantasies had not accounted for such a possibility. He had imagined him taking Ketty. They would go drinking and dancing at the juke, where Jesup had years ago derived his name, stealing from Sterling his people’s very pleasure, the only fun God allowed them in this town, on this earth. Now he had stolen his woman too, and they might have a regular room next door for all Sterling knew, perhaps he paid Easter Moore for a room without requiring the use of one of her daughters, for he had found the woman he wanted, he had brought her with him. He imagined them in a room in the Easter Hotel, the windows boarded, keeping out the eyes of the world, and under the lurid electric bulb—for Jesup would want the light on, he would want to see the woman beneath him—they would have each other. In his mind they had each other in the ways of blacks and whites, mules and hogs, on the bed, on the filthy floor, in the back of George Wilson’s car—what was George Wilson doing, driving them home?—in fields and in pine woods, in the toilet at the juke, where as a young man Sterling had read on the walls all the ways of women and men, all the ways Jesup and his woman would betray him, because they wanted their own pleasure and above all they wanted his pain. He had found his way from the barn to the shack now, he found that he was naked and kneeling on the bed and that his face was wet with tears. His hand reached for the almond hair oil on the table beside the bed, and it was slick and smelled of Ketty and helped him to do what he found his hand wanted to do. He was alone, she had left him, even the animals didn’t love him.
Every Saturday night, after she washed her hair in the zinc tub and before she wrapped it in a rag, she massaged the oil into her scalp. She had let him do it himself once or twice, massage her head in his hands, his nose on the nape of her neck, the sharp smell of almonds.
In all those visions he had not imagined that they might love each other, Juke and Ketty. That they might take their daughters and leave the farm. That they might take his family, and make their own.
He was a fool. He stood and dressed. His hands were still slick from the oil, from his own wretched fluids; he wiped them on his pants. He seized the birthing bag from the floor. Why had he not thought to look in it? The zipper was old and stuck but he got it open and sunk in his hands and extracted from the bag’s evil teeth a scarf, silk, long, endless, blue, and another, red, and last a string of pearls, long, endless, his eyes kept seeing them and seeing them as his hand drew them out, pearls as big as marbles, the loop big enough to lasso a bull with. Where had she gotten them. How long had she hidden them. Ketty did not have fine things.
He stormed out of the shack, across the yard, up the back steps of the big house. All of their things were there too: the Bible, the dishes. Where were they. How far had they gone. Why had they left behind the coffee tin of clay, why had they left him behind. He tried Jesup’s bedroom door and found it was locked. It had a lock. Hadn’t Sterling just been there? Hadn’t he just checked the knob? Or was he sleeping again, fool with his eyes closed, he’d let them leave right under his nose. With his shoulder he threw himself at the door, again and again, it was a bead-board door, made of long flimsy planks, he could shoulder it open if he tried. Then he realized it opened out and not in, and then he pulled the knob toward him with all his force and pulled the knob straight off the door. He landed on his back. In one hand he held the knob and in the other, he realized, the pearls, which he had wound around his wrist like a tourniquet. He stood up, dropped the knob, fingered the hole where the knob had been, forced the lock open. He had in his mind that he might find another scarf, some gift he intended for her, a trinket that would connect him to the ones he had already found.
But the room was as empty as it had been the first time he’d stepped into it. The calm of the empty room settled over him. The day had moved on and a sunbeam came in the window and gold flecks of dust fell across it. On the dresser was the wedding picture, the tobacco tin, the hat. It was the straw hat he wore in the field. Sterling remembered now that he had another one, a plaid cap he wore to town. He felt the sense return to him. You are confused, he told himself. The day was moving on. There were animals to feed. Had he fed the animals? Had he fed himself? “Eat something,” he said aloud. He realized he was saying it to Jessa, that he was looking at her in the gold frame. In the frame she and her groom wore carefree smiles. She was looking back at Sterling with urgent eyes that betrayed her smile, they were warning him, they were keeping him there.
He turned and saw the dust drifting over the bed. It was as though Jessa’s eyes, her hand, had turned his head. He had not considered the bed. The man’s bed. A white man did not bring a colored woman into his bed.
He stepped forward. The bed was made neatly. It had a look about it like it had not been slept in for some time. At its head was a single pillow, flat as the blanket, in a white pillowcase. Look here, check here. The pillow was stained slightly with the yellow wax of Juke Jesup’s ear. A hair lay in the middle of it. Sterling pinched the hair between his fingers and held it up to the light. Rust red. He dropped it to the floor. Then he bent down as though to kiss a child good night and inhaled the scent of the pillow. The smell was so familiar, as familiar nearly as the smell of his own nostrils, the taste of his own mouth, that it took him a dizzy moment to place it. Almond oil.
Right under his nose.
What Sterling felt as he moved from the room, as he went out into the yard, was a righteous satisfaction. That he had been right, that his suspicions were confirmed, that he had married a woman who made love to a white man under his nose. It was a terrible and harmonious feeling, a feeling that he had been brought back to his senses, that his senses were whole again. Out of his eyes he saw the farm and it was more vivid, truer; he saw that the animals had known, that Mamie had not been rebuffing him, that she too had been giving him a gentle warning, that she pitied him.
When the wagon came up the Straight—so she hadn’t left him, so in that way he’d been wrong—Sterling was waiting on the front porch. It was a colored man driving, not Juke, a man who seemed to Sterling familiar from church or town, but no matter. The baby was on Ketty’s knee. Sterling raised a hand to the man as his mule turned into the drive. Around his wrist and across his palm he still gripped the strand of pearls. He waited until the wagon had turned around and made its slow way back up the road to town, and then he took the baby from its mother and put it in the rocker on the porch. He led Ketty into Jesup’s room and pushed her onto the bed and lashed her with the pearls, on her face until she covered it, then across her forearms and knees as she drew them up, then her hips as she turned, then her back. He lifted her skirt and yanked down her drawers and lashed her bare behind. He could hear his voice hollering. He was saying, “You make a mule out of me.” He said, “Right under my nose.” The pearls were a poor whip, he couldn’t grasp them firmly or dig them deep, and finally the string broke and the pearls flew, scattering across the bed and the wood floor.
In his mind too, a line snapped. He looked around. Through the window the sun had changed. The room was soft now with shadows. He did not know what day it was, what time it was.
Outside, the sun was low and the day was mild and Jesup was standing in the drive. The baby was in his arms. Behind them, behind the mule, little Elma sat in the wagon.
“What’s that ruckus?”
“Ain’t nothing,” said Sterling, coming down the porch steps.
“What you doing in my house?”
“That there’s George Wilson’s house. And inside it I been showing my woman how it’s gone be and it ain’t none of your concern.”
“You laying your hands on that old girl? Boy, didn’t I tell you how to treat a woman?”
“I’ll take my child now.”
“Devil you will.”
“Right under my nose. Y’all been making a mule out of me. I won’t be no mule no more, no sir. I’ll take my child.”
“You ain’t in your head, Sterling. You talking like a fool. You been getting in my hooch?”
“I’m in my head for once. I ain’t no mule no more. I see it clear. I smell it.” Sterling inhaled deeply. “I done smelled her in your bed.”
“You been in my room, boy? You been in my bed?”
“You ain’t denying it, then.”
“You can do what you please with your own woman. That’s within your right. But you ain’t dare set foot in that house.”
“I seen the things you gave her. I seen em with my own eyes. She ain’t even visiting on babies, I bet, most times.”
“What all things?”
“The necklace! The scarfs! All the fine things! Where else she get em?”
Jesup came closer and put the baby down on the bottom porch step beside Ketty’s handbag. She had dropped it there when Sterling had hauled her inside. It was leather, mahogany colored, with a brass clasp. “Fool,” Jesup said. “I ain’t give her nothing. Don’t you know I ain’t got nothing to give? They’s from Mr. Wilson, these things. He done give em to her. Half the croppers in the county be wearing his old lady’s castoffs. Old man do a nice thing like that, and you take it out on your woman? You a bigger fool than I thought.”
Sterling was shaking his head. “Ain’t nothing to do with Mr. Wilson,” he said. “I done smell something foul on this here farm. She ain’t even visiting on a baby today. I smell it.”
Calmly Jesup opened the bag. Sterling expected it to be full of more fine things, but Jesup unwrapped from the sackcloth inside a scissors, a thermometer, a forceps.
The screen door slammed and Ketty came out to the porch. She came weakly down the steps, holding the railing, and picked up Nancy from the bottom step. She passed by Sterling as though she didn’t see him. Without speaking, she turned and carried the baby to the shack. Both men watched her back as she went. They heard the door slam.
Jesup helped Elma down from the wagon. He said, “Go play in the house.”
She did. Jesup said to Sterling, “George Wilson told me to keep the farm niggers in line. That includes you. He put me in charge, Sterling. I got to do as told.”
Sterling answered softly, “Yeah, you do as told. You as much a mule as me. You Mr. Wilson’s mule.”
He readied himself for a whipping. Worse. Would he do it now, or come back with others? He didn’t think he would shoot him, but he was resigned to it, ready. His eyes went to the white man’s belt, to the chinaberry branch, to the wagon reins. Was his shotgun in the wagon? Still Clarence waited in the drive. Now it was Sterling’s eye the mule avoided. Perhaps he knew what was coming even better than Sterling, for Jesup wasted no time with a weapon or a mob but hit him with his fist. The punch landed over his left eye. It laid him down on the ground. The sun hung far above him. His eyes were closed, but he could sense the sun there as the white man kicked him in the ribs and in the face, and then Sterling found that he’d turned over like a gopher tortoise, like Ketty; like the animal he was, he protected himself. He braced himself for more, and when none came, he looked up. He could open only his right eye. Through it he saw Jesup chasing the wagon down the road. Clarence had got spooked and fled.
That was what he would do, Sterling thought. He would flee like the mule he was.
He limped to the shack. Ketty was making coffee at the stove. Nancy sat on the bed, sucking her fingers. He went past them both and tore down the sheet Ketty had strung up. On the sheet he threw everything that was his in the shack. Then he tied up the ends and hoisted it on his back. Ketty had turned her back to him and now he would turn his back to her. It wasn’t he who was left on the farm, he saw. It was he who was meant to leave.
He bent down to the baby on the bed, meaning to give her a kiss, meaning to whisper to her low, so her momma couldn’t hear, “I’d take you with me if I could.” Gently he tugged her fingers out of her mouth. Then he saw it wasn’t just her fingers she was sucking on. She had something in there, tucked in her gums, an acorn or rock or marble. He fished a finger into her tongueless mouth and felt it. He couldn’t get a hold of it. She gagged. She fought him with her little teeth. He beat on her back, hard, twice, and then out came the object, slick with drool. A pearl.
She was fine. She hadn’t swallowed it. But in his face she saw his fear, and she cried.