The lean-to was full of leaves, which Amy pushed into a pile for Sethe to lie on. Then she gathered rocks, covered them with more leaves and made Sethe put her feet on them, saying: “I know a woman had her feet cut off they was so swole.” And she made sawing gestures with the blade of her hand across Sethe’s ankles. “Zzz Zzz Zzz Zzz.”
“I used to be a good size. Nice arms and everything. Wouldn’t think it, would you? That was before they put me in the root cellar. I was fishing off the Beaver once. Catfish in Beaver River sweet as chicken. Well I was just fishing there and a nigger floated right by me. I don’t like drowned people, you? Your feet remind me of him. All swole like.”
Then she did the magic: lifted Sethe’s feet and legs and massaged them until she cried salt tears.
“It’s gonna hurt, now,” said Amy. “Anything dead coming back to life hurts.”
A truth for all times, thought Denver. Maybe the white dress holding its arm around her mother’s waist was in pain. If so, it could mean the baby ghost had plans. When she opened the door, Sethe was just leaving the keeping room.
“I saw a white dress holding on to you,” Denver said.
“White? Maybe it was my bedding dress. Describe it to me.”
“Had a high neck. Whole mess of buttons coming down the back.”
“Buttons. Well, that lets out my bedding dress. I never had a button on nothing.”
“Did Grandma Baby?”
Sethe shook her head. “She couldn’t handle them. Even on her shoes. What else?”
“A bunch at the back. On the sit-down part.”
“A bustle? It had a bustle?”
“I don’t know what it’s called.”
“Sort of gathered-like? Below the waist in the back?”
“Um hm.”
“A rich lady’s dress. Silk?”
“Cotton, look like.”
“Lisle probably. White cotton lisle. You say it was holding on to me. How?”
“Like you. It looked just like you. Kneeling next to you while you were praying. Had its arm around your waist.”
“Well, I’ll be.”
“What were you praying for, Ma’am?”
“Not for anything. I don’t pray anymore. I just talk.”
“What were you talking about?”
“You won’t understand, baby.”
“Yes, I will.”
“I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.”
“Can other people see it?” asked Denver.
“Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away. Even if the whole farm—every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there—you who never was there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. So, Denver, you can’t never go there. Never. Because even though it’s all over—over and done with—it’s going to always be there waiting for you. That’s how come I had to get all my children out. No matter what.”
Denver picked at her fingernails. “If it’s still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies.”
Sethe looked right in Denver’s face. “Nothing ever does,” she said.
“You never told me all what happened. Just that they whipped you and you run off, pregnant. With me.”
“Nothing to tell except schoolteacher. He was a little man. Short. Always wore a collar, even in the fields. A schoolteacher, she said. That made her feel good that her husband’s sister’s husband had book learning and was willing to come farm Sweet Home after Mr. Garner passed. The men could have done it, even with Paul F sold. But it was like Halle said. She didn’t want to be the only white person on the farm and a woman too. So she was satisfied when the schoolteacher agreed to come. He brought two boys with him. Sons or nephews. I don’t know. They called him Onka and had pretty manners, all of em. Talked soft and spit in handkerchiefs. Gentle in a lot of ways. You know, the kind who know Jesus by His first name, but out of politeness never use it even to His face. A pretty good farmer, Halle said. Not strong as Mr. Garner but smart enough. He liked the ink I made. It was her recipe, but he preferred how I mixed it and it was important to him because at night he sat down to write in his book. It was a book about us but we didn’t know that right away. We just thought it was his manner to ask us questions. He commenced to carry round a notebook and write down what we said. I still think it was them questions that tore Sixo up. Tore him up for all time.”
She stopped.
Denver knew that her mother was through with it—for now anyway. The single slow blink of her eyes; the bottom lip sliding up slowly to cover the top; and then a nostril sigh, like the snuff of a candle flame—signs that Sethe had reached the point beyond which she would not go.
“Well, I think the baby got plans,” said Denver.
“What plans?”
“I don’t know, but the dress holding on to you got to mean something.”
“Maybe,” said Sethe. “Maybe it does have plans.”
Whatever they were or might have been, Paul D messed them up for good. With a table and a loud male voice he had rid 124 of its claim to local fame. Denver had taught herself to take pride in the condemnation Negroes heaped on them; the assumption that the haunting was done by an evil thing looking for more. None of them knew the downright pleasure of enchantment, of not suspecting but knowing the things behind things. Her brothers had known, but it scared them; Grandma Baby knew, but it saddened her. None could appreciate the safety of ghost company. Even Sethe didn’t love it. She just took it for granted—like a sudden change in the weather.
But it was gone now. Whooshed away in the blast of a hazelnut man’s shout, leaving Denver’s world flat, mostly, with the exception of an emerald closet standing seven feet high in the woods. Her mother had secrets—things she wouldn’t tell; things she halfway told. Well, Denver had them too. And hers were sweet—sweet as lily-of-the-valley cologne.
Sethe had given little thought to the white dress until Paul D came, and then she remembered Denver’s interpretation: plans. The morning after the first night with Paul D, Sethe smiled just thinking about what the word could mean. It was a luxury she had not had in eighteen years and only that once. Before and since, all her effort was directed not on avoiding pain but on getting through it as quickly as possible. The one set of plans she had made—getting away from Sweet Home—went awry so completely she never dared life by making more.
Yet the morning she woke up next to Paul D, the word her daughter had used a few years ago did cross her mind and she thought about what Denver had seen kneeling next to her, and thought also of the temptation to trust and remember that gripped her as she stood before the cooking stove in his arms. Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?
She couldn’t think clearly, lying next to him listening to his breathing, so carefully, carefully, she had left the bed.
Kneeling in the keeping room where she usually went to talk-think it was clear why Baby Suggs was so starved for color. There wasn’t any except for two orange squares in a quilt that made the absence shout. The walls of the room were slate-colored, the floor earth-brown, the wooden dresser
the color of itself, curtains white, and the dominating feature, the quilt over an iron cot, was made up of scraps of blue serge, black, brown and gray wool—the full range of the dark and the muted that thrift and modesty allowed. In that sober field, two patches of orange looked wild—like life in the raw.
Sethe looked at her hands, her bottle-green sleeves, and thought how little color there was in the house and how strange that she had not missed it the way Baby did. Deliberate, she thought, it must be deliberate, because the last color she remembered was the pink chips in the headstone of her baby girl. After that she became as color conscious as a hen. Every dawn she worked at fruit pies, potato dishes and vegetables while the cook did the soup, meat and all the rest. And she could not remember remembering a molly apple or a yellow squash. Every dawn she saw the dawn, but never acknowledged or remarked its color. There was something wrong with that. It was as though one day she saw red baby blood, another day the pink gravestone chips, and that was the last of it.
124 was so full of strong feeling perhaps she was oblivious to the loss of anything at all. There was a time when she scanned the fields every morning and every evening for her boys. When she stood at the open window, unmindful of flies, her head cocked to her left shoulder, her eyes searching to the right for them. Cloud shadow on the road, an old woman, a wandering goat untethered and gnawing bramble—each one looked at first like Howard—no, Buglar. Little by little she stopped and their thirteen-year-old faces faded completely into their baby ones, which came to her only in sleep. When her dreams roamed outside 124, anywhere they wished, she saw them sometimes in beautiful trees, their little legs barely visible in the leaves. Sometimes they ran along the railroad track laughing, too loud, apparently, to hear her because they never did turn around. When she woke the house crowded in on her: there was the door where the soda crackers were lined up in a row; the white stairs her baby girl loved to climb; the corner where Baby Suggs mended shoes, a pile of which were still in the cold room; the exact place on the stove where Denver burned her fingers. And of course the spite of the house itself. There was no room for any other thing or body until Paul D arrived and broke up the place, making room, shifting it, moving it over to someplace else, then standing in the place he had made.
So, kneeling in the keeping room the morning after Paul D came, she was distracted by the two orange squares that signaled how barren 124 really was.
He was responsible for that. Emotions sped to the surface in his company. Things became what they were: drabness looked drab; heat was hot. Windows suddenly had view. And wouldn’t you know he’d be a singing man.
Little rice, little bean,
No meat in between.
Hard work ain’t easy,
Dry bread ain’t greasy.
He was up now and singing as he mended things he had broken the day before. Some old pieces of song he’d learned on the prison farm or in the War afterward. Nothing like what they sang at Sweet Home, where yearning fashioned every note.
The songs he knew from Georgia were flat-headed nails for pounding and pounding and pounding.
Lay my head on the railroad line,
Train come along, pacify my mind.
If I had my weight in lime,
I’d whip my captain till he went stone blind.
Five-cent nickel,
Ten-cent dime,
Busting rocks is busting time.
But they didn’t fit, these songs. They were too loud, had too much power for the little house chores he was engaged in—resetting table legs; glazing.
He couldn’t go back to “Storm upon the Waters” that they sang under the trees of Sweet Home, so he contented himself with mmmmmmmmm, throwing in a line if one occurred to him, and what occurred over and over was “Bare feet and chamomile sap,/Took off my shoes; took off my hat.”
It was tempting to change the words (Gimme back my shoes; gimme back my hat), because he didn’t believe he could live with a woman—any woman—for over two out of three months. That was about as long as he could abide one place. After Delaware and before that Alfred, Georgia, where he slept underground and crawled into sunlight for the sole purpose of breaking rock, walking off when he got ready was the only way he could convince himself that he would no longer have to sleep, pee, eat or swing a sledge hammer in chains.
But this was not a normal woman in a normal house. As soon as he had stepped through the red light he knew that, compared to 124, the rest of the world was bald. After Alfred he had shut down a generous portion of his head, operating on the part that helped him walk, eat, sleep, sing. If he could do those things—with a little work and a little sex thrown in—he asked for no more, for more required him to dwell on Halle’s face and Sixo laughing. To recall trembling in a box built into the ground. Grateful for the daylight spent doing mule work in a quarry because he did not tremble when he had a hammer in his hands. The box had done what Sweet Home had not, what working like an ass and living like a dog had not: drove him crazy so he would not lose his mind.
By the time he got to Ohio, then to Cincinnati, then to Halle Suggs’ mother’s house, he thought he had seen and felt it all. Even now as he put back the window frame he had smashed, he could not account for the pleasure in his surprise at seeing Halle’s wife alive, barefoot with uncovered hair—walking around the corner of the house with her shoes and stockings in her hands. The closed portion of his head opened like a greased lock.
“I was thinking of looking for work around here. What you think?”
“Ain’t much. River mostly. And hogs.”
“Well, I never worked on water, but I can pick up anything heavy as me, hogs included.”
“Whitepeople better here than Kentucky but you may have to scramble some.”
“It ain’t whether I scramble; it’s where. You saying it’s all right to scramble here?”
“Better than all right.”
“Your girl, Denver. Seems to me she’s of a different mind.”
“Why you say that?”
“She’s got a waiting way about her. Something she’s expecting and it ain’t me.”
“I don’t know what it could be.”
“Well, whatever it is, she believes I’m interrupting it.”
“Don’t worry about her. She’s a charmed child. From the beginning.”
“Is that right?”
“Uh huh. Nothing bad can happen to her. Look at it. Everybody I knew dead or gone or dead and gone. Not her. Not my Denver. Even when I was carrying her, when it got clear that I wasn’t going to make it—which meant she wasn’t going to make it either—she pulled a whitegirl out of the hill. The last thing you’d expect to help. And when the schoolteacher found us and came busting in here with the law and a shotgun—”
“Schoolteacher found you?”
“Took a while, but he did. Finally.”
“And he didn’t take you back?”
“Oh, no. I wasn’t going back there. I don’t care who found who. Any life but not that one. I went to jail instead. Denver was just a baby so she went right along with me. Rats bit everything in there but her.”
Paul D turned away. He wanted to know more about it, but jail talk put him back in Alfred, Georgia.
“I need some nails. Anybody around here I can borrow from or should I go to town?”
“May as well go to town. You’ll need other things.”
One night and they were talking like a couple. They had skipped love and promise and went directly to “You saying it’s all right to scramble here?”
To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay. The “better life” she believed she and Denver were living was simply not that other one.
The fact that Paul D had come out of “that other one” into her bed was better too; and the notion of a future with him, or for that matter without him, was beginning to stroke her mind. As for Denver, the job Sethe had of keeping her from the past that was still waiting for her was all that mattered.
PLEAS
ANTLY TROUBLED, Sethe avoided the keeping room and Denver’s sidelong looks. As she expected, since life was like that—it didn’t do any good. Denver ran a mighty interference and on the third day flat-out asked Paul D how long he was going to hang around.
The phrase hurt him so much he missed the table. The coffee cup hit the floor and rolled down the sloping boards toward the front door.
“Hang around?” Paul D didn’t even look at the mess he had made.
“Denver! What’s got into you?” Sethe looked at her daughter, feeling more embarrassed than angry.
Paul D scratched the hair on his chin. “Maybe I should make tracks.”
“No!” Sethe was surprised by how loud she said it.
“He know what he needs,” said Denver.
“Well, you don’t,” Sethe told her, “and you must not know what you need either. I don’t want to hear another word out of you.”
“I just asked if—”
“Hush! You make tracks. Go somewhere and sit down.”
Denver picked up her plate and left the table but not before adding a chicken back and more bread to the heap she was carrying away. Paul D leaned over to wipe the spilled coffee with his blue handkerchief.
“I’ll get that.” Sethe jumped up and went to the stove. Behind it various cloths hung, each in some stage of drying. In silence she wiped the floor and retrieved the cup. Then she poured him another cupful, and set it carefully before him. Paul D touched its rim but didn’t say anything—as though even “thank you” was an obligation he could not meet and the coffee itself a gift he could not take.
Sethe resumed her chair and the silence continued. Finally she realized that if it was going to be broken she would have to do it.
“I didn’t train her like that.”
Paul D stroked the rim of the cup.
“And I’m as surprised by her manners as you are hurt by em.”