Sula lifted her head and joined Nel in the grass play. In concert, without ever meeting each other’s eyes, they stroked the blades up and down, up and down. Nel found a thick twig and, with her thumbnail, pulled away its bark until it was stripped to a smooth, creamy innocence. Sula looked about and found one too. When both twigs were undressed Nel moved easily to the next stage and began tearing up rooted grass to make a bare spot of earth. When a generous clearing was made, Sula traced intricate patterns in it with her twig. At first Nel was content to do the same. But soon she grew impatient and poked her twig rhythmically and intensely into the earth, making a small neat hole that grew deeper and wider with the least manipulation of her twig. Sula copied her, and soon each had a hole the size of a cup. Nel began a more strenuous digging and, rising to her knee, was careful to scoop out the dirt as she made her hole deeper. Together they worked until the two holes were one and the same. When the depression was the size of a small dishpan, Nel’s twig broke. With a gesture of disgust she threw the pieces into the hole they had made. Sula threw hers in too. Nel saw a bottle cap and tossed it in as well. Each then looked around for more debris to throw into the hole: paper, bits of glass, butts of cigarettes, until all of the small defiling things they could find were collected there. Carefully they replaced the soil and covered the entire grave with uprooted grass.
Neither one had spoken a word.
They stood up, stretched, then gazed out over the swift dull water as an unspeakable restlessness and agitation held them. At the same instant each girl heard footsteps in the grass. A little boy in too big knickers was coming up from the lower bank of the river. He stopped when he saw them and picked his nose.
“Your mamma tole you to stop eatin’ snot, Chicken,” Nel hollered at him through cupped hands.
“Shut up,” he said, still picking.
“Come up here and say that.”
“Leave him ’lone, Nel. Come here, Chicken. Lemme show you something.”
“Naw.”
“You scared we gone take your bugger away?”
“Leave him ’lone, I said. Come on, Chicken. Look. I’ll help you climb a tree.”
Chicken looked at the tree Sula was pointing to—a big double beech with low branches and lots of bends for sitting.
He moved slowly toward her.
“Come on, Chicken, I’ll help you up.”
Still picking his nose, his eyes wide, he came to where they were standing. Sula took him by the hand and coaxed him along. When they reached the base of the beech, she lifted him to the first branch, saying, “Go on. Go on. I got you.” She followed the boy, steadying him, when he needed it, with her hand and her reassuring voice. When they were as high as they could go, Sula pointed to the far side of the river.
“See? Bet you never saw that far before, did you?”
“Uh uh.”
“Now look down there.” They both leaned a little and peered through the leaves at Nel standing below, squinting up at them. From their height she looked small and foreshortened.
Chicken Little laughed.
“Y’all better come on down before you break your neck,” Nel hollered.
“I ain’t never coming down,” the boy hollered back.
“Yeah. We better. Come on, Chicken.”
“Naw. Lemme go.”
“Yeah, Chicken. Come on, now.”
Sula pulled his leg gently.
“Lemme go.”
“OK, I’m leavin’ you.” She started on.
“Wait!” he screamed.
Sula stopped and together they slowly worked their way down.
Chicken was still elated. “I was way up there, wasn’t I? Wasn’t I? I’m a tell my brovver.”
Sula and Nel began to mimic him: “I’m a tell my brovver; I’m a tell my brovver.”
Sula picked him up by his hands and swung him outward then around and around. His knickers ballooned and his shrieks of frightened joy startled the birds and the fat grasshoppers. When he slipped from her hands and sailed away out over the water they could still hear his bubbly laughter.
The water darkened and closed quickly over the place where Chicken Little sank. The pressure of his hard and tight little fingers was still in Sula’s palms as she stood looking at the closed place in the water. They expected him to come back up, laughing. Both girls stared at the water.
Nel spoke first. “Somebody saw.” A figure appeared briefly on the opposite shore.
The only house over there was Shadrack’s. Sula glanced at Nel. Terror widened her nostrils. Had he seen?
The water was so peaceful now. There was nothing but the baking sun and something newly missing. Sula cupped her face for an instant, then turned and ran up to the little plank bridge that crossed the river to Shadrack’s house. There was no path. It was as though neither Shadrack nor anyone else ever came this way.
Her running was swift and determined, but when she was close to the three little steps that led to his porch, fear crawled into her stomach and only the something newly missing back there in the river made it possible for her to walk up the three steps and knock at the door.
No one answered. She started back, but thought again of the peace of the river. Shadrack would be inside, just behind the door ready to pounce on her. Still she could not go back. Ever so gently she pushed the door with the tips of her fingers and heard only the hinges weep. More. And then she was inside. Alone. The neatness, the order startled her, but more surprising was the restfulness. Everything was so tiny, so common, so unthreatening. Perhaps this was not the house of the Shad. The terrible Shad who walked about with his penis out, who peed in front of ladies and girl-children, the only black who could curse white people and get away with it, who drank in the road from the mouth of the bottle, who shouted and shook in the streets. This cottage? This sweet old cottage? With its made-up bed? With its rag rug and wooden table? Sula stood in the middle of the little room and in her wonder forgot what she had come for until a sound at the door made her jump. He was there in the doorway looking at her. She had not heard his coming and now he was looking at her.
More in embarrassment than terror she averted her glance. When she called up enough courage to look back at him, she saw his hand resting upon the door frame. His fingers, barely touching the wood, were arranged in a graceful arc. Relieved and encouraged (no one with hands like that, no one with fingers that curved around wood so tenderly could kill her), she walked past him out of the door, feeling his gaze turning, turning with her.
At the edge of the porch, gathering the wisps of courage that were fast leaving her, she turned once more to look at him, to ask him…had he…?
He was smiling, a great smile, heavy with lust and time to come. He nodded his head as though answering a question, and said, in a pleasant conversational tone, a tone of cooled butter, “Always.”
Sula fled down the steps, and shot through the greenness and the baking sun back to Nel and the dark closed place in the water. There she collapsed in tears.
Nel quieted her. “Sh, sh. Don’t, don’t. You didn’t mean it. It ain’t your fault. Sh. Sh. Come on, le’s go, Sula. Come on, now. Was he there? Did he see? Where’s the belt to your dress?”
Sula shook her head while she searched her waist for the belt.
Finally she stood up and allowed Nel to lead her away. “He said, ‘Always. Always.’”
“What?”
Sula covered her mouth as they walked down the hill. Always. He had answered a question she had not asked, and its promise licked at her feet.
A bargeman, poling away from the shore, found Chicken late that afternoon stuck in some rocks and weeds, his knickers ballooning about his legs. He would have left him there but noticed that it was a child, not an old black man, as it first appeared, and he prodded the body loose, netted it and hauled it aboard. He shook his head in disgust at the kind of parents who would drown their own children. When, he wondered, will those people ever be anything but animals, fit for nothing but su
bstitutes for mules, only mules didn’t kill each other the way niggers did. He dumped Chicken Little into a burlap sack and tossed him next to some egg crates and boxes of wool cloth. Later, sitting down to smoke on an empty lard tin, still bemused by God’s curse and the terrible burden his own kind had of elevating Ham’s sons, he suddenly became alarmed by the thought that the corpse in this heat would have a terrible odor, which might get into the fabric of his woolen cloth. He dragged the sack away and hooked it over the side, so that the Chicken’s body was half in and half out of the water.
Wiping the sweat from his neck, he reported his find to the sheriff at Porter’s Landing, who said they didn’t have no niggers in their county, but that some lived in those hills ’cross the river, up above Medallion. The bargeman said he couldn’t go all the way back there, it was every bit of two miles. The sheriff said whyn’t he throw it on back into the water. The bargeman said he never shoulda taken it out in the first place. Finally they got the man who ran the ferry twice a day to agree to take it over in the morning.
That was why Chicken Little was missing for three days and didn’t get to the embalmer’s until the fourth day, by which time he was unrecognizable to almost everybody who once knew him, and even his mother wasn’t deep down sure, except that it just had to be him since nobody could find him. When she saw his clothes lying on the table in the basement of the mortuary, her mouth snapped shut, and when she saw his body her mouth flew wide open again and it was seven hours before she was able to close it and make the first sound.
So the coffin was closed.
The Junior Choir, dressed in white, sang “Nearer My God to Thee” and “Precious Memories,” their eyes fastened on the songbooks they did not need, for this was the first time their voices had presided at a real-life event.
Nel and Sula did not touch hands or look at each other during the funeral. There was a space, a separateness, between them. Nel’s legs had turned to granite and she expected the sheriff or Reverend Deal’s pointing finger at any moment. Although she knew she had “done nothing,” she felt convicted and hanged right there in the pew—two rows down from her parents in the children’s section.
Sula simply cried. Soundlessly and with no heaving and gasping for breath, she let the tears roll into her mouth and slide down her chin to dot the front of her dress.
As Reverend Deal moved into his sermon, the hands of the women unfolded like pairs of raven’s wings and flew high above their hats in the air. They did not hear all of what he said; they heard the one word, or phrase, or inflection that was for them the connection between the event and themselves. For some it was the term “Sweet Jesus.” And they saw the Lamb’s eye and the truly innocent victim: themselves. They acknowledged the innocent child hiding in the corner of their hearts, holding a sugar-and-butter sandwich. That one. The one who lodged deep in their fat, thin, old, young skin, and was the one the world had hurt. Or they thought of their son newly killed and remembered his legs in short pants and wondered where the bullet went in. Or they remembered how dirty the room looked when their father left home and wondered if that is the way the slim, young Jew felt, he who for them was both son and lover and in whose downy face they could see the sugar-and-butter sandwiches and feel the oldest and most devastating pain there is: not the pain of childhood, but the remembrance of it.
Then they left their pews. For with some emotions one has to stand. They spoke, for they were full and needed to say. They swayed, for the rivulets of grief or of ecstasy must be rocked. And when they thought of all that life and death locked into that little closed coffin they danced and screamed, not to protest God’s will but to acknowledge it and confirm once more their conviction that the only way to avoid the Hand of God is to get in it.
In the colored part of the cemetery, they sank Chicken Little in between his grandfather and an aunt. Butterflies flew in and out of the bunches of field flowers now loosened from the top of the bier and lying in a small heap at the edge of the grave. The heat had gone, but there was still no breeze to lift the hair of the willows.
Nel and Sula stood some distance away from the grave, the space that had sat between them in the pews had dissolved. They held hands and knew that only the coffin would lie in the earth; the bubbly laughter and the press of fingers in the palm would stay aboveground forever. At first, as they stood there, their hands were clenched together. They relaxed slowly until during the walk back home their fingers were laced in as gentle a clasp as that of any two young girlfriends trotting up the road on a summer day wondering what happened to butterflies in the winter.
1923
The second strange thing was Hannah’s coming into her mother’s room with an empty bowl and a peck of Kentucky Wonders and saying, “Mamma, did you ever love us?” She sang the words like a small child saying a piece at Easter, then knelt to spread a newspaper on the floor and set the basket on it; the bowl she tucked in the space between her legs. Eva, who was just sitting there fanning herself with the cardboard fan from Mr. Hodges’ funeral parlor, listened to the silence that followed Hannah’s words, then said, “Scat!” to the deweys who were playing chain gang near the window. With the shoelaces of each of them tied to the laces of the others, they stumbled and tumbled out of Eva’s room.
“Now,” Eva looked up across from her wagon at her daughter. “Give me that again. Flat out to fit my head.”
“I mean, did you? You know. When we was little.”
Eva’s hand moved snail-like down her thigh toward her stump, but stopped short of it to realign a pleat. “No. I don’t reckon I did. Not the way you thinkin’.”
“Oh, well. I was just wonderin’.” Hannah appeared to be through with the subject.
“An evil wonderin’ if I ever heard one.” Eva was not through.
“I didn’t mean nothing by it, Mamma.”
“What you mean you didn’t mean nothing by it? How you gone not mean something by it?”
Hannah pinched the tips off the Kentucky Wonders and snapped their long pods. What with the sound of the cracking and snapping and her swift-fingered movements, she seemed to be playing a complicated instrument. Eva watched her a moment and then said, “You gone can them?”
“No. They for tonight.”
“Thought you was gone can some.”
“Uncle Paul ain’t brought me none yet. A peck ain’t enough to can. He say he got two bushels for me.”
“Triflin’.”
“Oh, he all right.”
“Sho he all right. Everybody all right. ’Cept Mamma. Mamma the only one ain’t all right. Cause she didn’t love us.”
“Awww, Mamma.”
“Awww, Mamma? Awww, Mamma? You settin’ here with your healthy-ass self and ax me did I love you? Them big old eyes in your head would a been two holes full of maggots if I hadn’t.”
“I didn’t mean that, Mamma. I know you fed us and all. I was talkin’ ’bout something else. Like. Like. Playin’ with us. Did you ever, you know, play with us?”
“Play? Wasn’t nobody playin’ in 1895. Just ’cause you got it good now you think it was always this good? 1895 was a killer, girl. Things was bad. Niggers was dying like flies. Stepping tall, ain’t you? Uncle Paul gone bring me two bushels. Yeh. And they’s a melon downstairs, ain’t they? And I bake every Saturday, and Shad brings fish on Friday, and they’s a pork barrel full of meal, and we float eggs in a crock of vinegar…”
“Mamma, what you talkin’ ’bout?”
“I’m talkin’ ’bout 18 and 95 when I set in that house five days with you and Pearl and Plum and three beets, you snake-eyed ungrateful hussy. What would I look like leapin’ ’round that little old room playin’ with youngins with three beets to my name?”
“I know ’bout them beets, Mamma. You told us that a million times.”
“Yeah? Well? Don’t that count? Ain’t that love? You want me to tinkle you under the jaw and forget ’bout them sores in your mouth? Pearl was shittin’ worms and I was supposed to play rang-around-
the-rosie?”
“But Mamma, they had to be some time when you wasn’t thinkin’ ’bout…”
“No time. They wasn’t no time. Not none. Soon as I got one day done here come a night. With you all coughin’ and me watchin’ so TB wouldn’t take you off and if you was sleepin’ quiet I thought, O Lord, they dead and put my hand over your mouth to feel if the breath was comin’ what you talkin’ ’bout did I love you girl I stayed alive for you can’t you get that through your thick head or what is that between your ears, heifer?”
Hannah had enough beans now. With some tomatoes and hot bread, she thought, that would be enough for everybody, especially since the deweys didn’t eat vegetables no how and Eva never made them and Tar Baby was living off air and music these days. She picked up the basket and stood with it and the bowl of beans over her mother. Eva’s face was still asking her last question. Hannah looked into her mother’s eyes.
“But what about Plum? What’d you kill Plum for, Mamma?”
It was a Wednesday in August and the ice wagon was coming and coming. You could hear bits of the driver’s song. Now Mrs. Jackson would be tipping down her porch steps. “Jes a piece. You got a lil ole piece layin’ ’round in there you could spare?” And as he had since the time of the pigeons, the iceman would hand her a lump of ice saying, “Watch it now, Mrs. Jackson. That straw’ll tickle your pretty neck to death.”
Eva listened to the wagon coming and thought about what it must be like in the icehouse. She leaned back a little and closed her eyes trying to see the insides of the icehouse. It was a dark, lovely picture in this heat, until it reminded her of that winter night in the outhouse holding her baby in the dark, her fingers searching for his asshole and the last bit of lard scooped from the sides of the can, held deliberately on the tip of her middle finger, the last bit of lard to keep from hurting him when she slid her finger in and all because she had broken the slop jar and the rags had frozen. The last food staple in the house she had rammed up her baby’s behind to keep from hurting him too much when she opened up his bowels to pull the stools out. He had been screaming fit to kill, but when she found his hole at last and stuck her finger up in it, the shock was so great he was suddenly quiet. Even now on the hottest day anyone in Medallion could remember—a day so hot flies slept and cats were splaying their fur like quills, a day so hot pregnant wives leaned up against trees and cried, and women remembering some three-month-old hurt put ground glass in their lovers’ food and the men looked at the food and wondered if there was glass in it and ate it anyway because it was too hot to resist eating it—even on this hottest of days in the hot spell, Eva shivered from the biting cold and stench of that outhouse.