1All night a lasting sleep had escaped him and he had had only catnaps, bouncing between wakefulness and a sleep that was akin to wakefulness. He thought he had heard the rooster at first light, but he was not certain, as he was not certain when his wife had gotten up and gone downstairs. When he woke fully late in the morning, he sat up on the side of the bed and twisted his head from side to side to throw off sleep, like a man up from a swim, shaking off water. Absently, he watched the sun that was warm at his feet, the living dust, and then he closed his eyes and sat quiet for a time, his hands in his lap, one in the bowl of the other. Before he woke the last time he had heard a woman laughing. That was certain. The sound, the memory, harsh, vexing, was with him still, as he sat silent, as if the woman were now at his side, laughing in his ear.

2“You up?” his wife called from downstairs. “Are you up?”

3“Yes,” he said. “What?”

4“I say yes. Yes, I’m up!”

5“Then come down when you ready. There’s people about, wagons and such. Bailey’s here waitin’ for you, and me and Priss done all that we have to. So come down.”

6He plunged his face into a large bowl of water on the chest of drawers, his nose touching bottom. He shaved and washed his torso. After he put on his pants and socks and shoes, he patted baking soda under his arms and put on the blue shirt Miriam had placed on the back of the chair. In his head, as he moved about, he said his prayers, the same ones he had been saying each morning since that unremembered childhood day his father had stood him between his legs and taught them to him. Except now and again in his life, like the afternoon he was married or the morning he put his father in the ground or the day he moved into the Farmers Palace, he hardly thought about what the words meant. They had to be said, as the morning bathing ritual had to be done, and that was all he had ever needed to know. . . . Forgive us our trespasses, he recited, as we forgive those who trespass against us. . . .

7Downstairs, he found Miriam at the sink, singing to herself a song she had brought up from childhood. The humid kitchen was thick with the smells of cooking food. There were steaming, rumbling pots on each of the stove’s burners, half-empty baskets of vegetables scattered about the room; corn shucks, potato peelings, and the mangled leaves of greens overflowed a large metal can at the door. A fire roared in the oven and the blue bandanna on Miriam’s head was black with sweat. Through the wide-open back door he could see Priscilla, the woman he had hired to help out, on the porch steps, peeling potatoes, and a bold hen just behind her peered in the screen door at him, at the chaos. And he saw for the first time that the sun was higher than he had expected.

8“Mornin’,” he said in a low voice.

9“Well, good mornin’ to you,” Miriam said, turning and looking uncritically at him. “Bailey’s straightenin’ up in there and Priss and me done got things pretty well here.” She looked about the room. “Looks bad but thas good. When they start comin’, won’t be no holdup. There’s coffee ova there. You hungry? I can get you somethin’ from one a these pots.”

10He shook his head slowly. “Coffee’s all I want. I really didn’t mean to sleep so late . . . Thomas bring the liquor and them kegs?” He poured a cup of coffee and stood to drink it.

11“Yes, he brought ‘em ‘bout eight. Said he’d see you next week.”

12“Where Bailey?” He gulped the coffee.

13“Yonder, I said, in there waitin’.”

14Handing her the cup, he went from the kitchen through a narrow hall to the large front room full of tables and chairs. Going behind the bar at the right, he watched Bailey who stood at the window, his hands behind his back, his head framed by the oval composed of the words THE FARMERS PALACE painted on the window. From inside the orange letters were reversed. In the right-hand corner of the bottom of the window, in lettering also reversed, were the words Hezekiah T. Battle, Proprietor And Owner.

15He said nothing, but Bailey seemed to sense him and turned.

16“Mornin’. It goin’ all right?” Hezekiah asked.

17Bailey gave a slight nod. “Mornin’. I swept the floors, dusted. Every table got a salt and pepper, a bowl a sugar.” He came to the bar and rested his closed hands upon it. “What kinda day you think it’ll be? There gonna be more town folk than farmas?” He was a very small man, a bulkless frame of a man. He had come up several years before from South Carolina to settle in that hamlet, having worked in cotton fields for some fifty years before his body told him No one morning and refused to go down another furrow. His back was stooped, and though he was given to drinking too much at times, Hezekiah knew him as a man who could be trusted.

18“Oh, there’ll be plenty a farmas,” Hezekiah said, coming from behind the bar. “There’s some that still have goods to sell, and then there’s those that’ll come out just ‘cause it’s harvest and much of the work’s behind ‘em.” Hezekiah smiled. “They don’t miss a ant’s chance to celebrate, and this is the first time they had a place to celebrate in.” At each end of the bar he sat a clean spittoon. Moving from table to table, he repositioned the seasonings and ashtrays, less than an inch or so from where Bailey had put them. It was busy work, because he did not know how to tell Bailey he had done a good job.

19“I guess so,” Bailey said, watching Hezekiah. “Any more here you need for me to do? Miriam said she could use me out in the kitchen.”

20“It’s all right. I’ll take care the rest.”

21He sat on the high stool behind the bar, alone in the room, surveying it. People passed before the window. Some of the men peered in, their hands shading their eyes, and seeing him sitting there, they waved, gestured with their hands and heads that they had this, that or the other to do and would be in soon. He raised his hand perfunctorily to them, and a moment after he had lowered it he could not remember if he had raised it at all, or to whom he may have raised it. He could hear the racket of pots and pans and plates out in the kitchen, Priscilla’s screeching at the hens, and Miriam’s childhood song above it all.

22He came down from the stool and stood at the window. The world—men and dust, horses and loaded buckboards and wagons—moved past him, close, just on the other side of the glass. The year before he had been out among them. Now he was inside watching them, his hands behind his back, his face close to the window like some child’s. He went back to the stool, and as had been happening more and more, he thought of his aunt. The train trip up to Philadelphia months before had been spent regretting that he would not ever lay eyes on her again. “You all the mother I ever knowed,” he had said to her the last time they were alone together. He was 23 and she had already been gone six years. “Don’t leave here again.” Sometimes he had dozed on the train, but the sound of the tracks and wheels, metal on metal, would wake him. Then he would take out the lawyer’s letter that had summoned him to Philadelphia. “In the matter of the estate of the late Harriet Battle Tate, you are requested . . . before the day of 19 March 1938 . . . .” He had not even known she was dead until he read it in the lawyer’s words. The dead do not hear apologies, not in the way they need to be heard, and so his grief and guilt were compounded. And when he had read the letter again, or simply ran his fingers over it like a blind man, he would turn his face to the window, lest the other passengers see him, know what he had done. He was a solid bear of a man in that seat a bit too small for him, and the train, all the way up there, swayed him gently from side to side.

23The bear got lost in Philadelphia, could not find the lawyer’s office, though a redcap had told him it was only a few blocks from the station. Each person’s directions seemed to take him in circles. When he managed to find the office, he was very tired and sweat cascaded down over his face and he felt his collar and tie were choking him to death.

24The visit with the lawyer was brief. And though they had not seen one another in some twelve years, his aunt had left him everything her store owner husband had left her, the money in the bank, the money from the liquidated property. After signing all the papers, he was again on the streets. He was not hungry, even though he had not eaten since leaving Virginia the night before, but he bought two apples from a woman on a street corner. He bought flowers from another woman, and after hailing a cab, he went up to the Negro cemetery. They—whoever it was—had laid her near a fence, beside Simon, where the grass was thickest, a few yards from a road no one used anymore. There was some indication that the place was tended, but he knelt and pulled up the few weeds around the graves. He divided the flowers and gave half to each. All that his father had said about his aunt, that he himself had believed, however partially, seemed in that place as dead and as gone as all of them were. “Don’t leave. Stay. Please,” he had said to her that last time they were alone, sounding like his father who had always spoken as if there was no bond at all between her and the man she married.

25Somehow, he missed the train going back home. He sat in the station all night, too tired and grievous even to sleep. And when he arrived home, the letter with the check was waiting for him, as if it had not been inconvenienced by missed trains.

26“What should we do?” Miriam asked the third morning after his return. “What should we do?” They sat at the kitchen table. It was Sunday, but they were not going to church.

27“You’ll have to tell me,” he said. The check, paper and life, lay on the table between them. “I still don’t know why nobody up there got in touch with me. It’s like she died old and alone and nobody knowin’ a thing about it. I shoulda tried to get in touch with her years ago.”

28“Maybe. If you could have.”

29“I could have. He was dead all that time. I was old anough to know betta, you know that.” He seemed about to cry. “He called her a whore, started callin’ her that the day she told him she was getting’ married and leavin’. He kept callin’ her that till the day she left. I don’t think I ever saw her once durin’ those last days when she wasn’t cryin’. She fixed our food and she’d be cryin’. Bent over the washtub scrubbin’ clothes, she’d be cryin’. If I touched her shoulda to get her ‘tention ‘bout somethin’, she’d go all to pieces. I never once tried to think how it was for her those last days, never stepped around and saw it from where she was standin’. All I knew was that she wanted to marry and leave and I didn’t want her to go and neither did my daddy. He was the one doin’ all the talkin’, callin’ her that name, and it was like ‘cause I was silent I was callin’ her that, too. I used to hear that word in my sleep ova and ova like a song you cain’t get shet of. Maybe he believed it or maybe it was just somethin’ to call her to make her stay, to keep things like they’d always been.”

30“Hezekiah, why you ain’t neva told me none a this before?” There was an edge of sadness in her words.

31He raised his eyes and looked at her. “Miriam, I woulda been shamed before you, to have you know I’d been that way toward her.” He picked up the check with both hands and read his name, pronounced each letter of it in his mind. “And even afta all that she leaves me this.”

32“She left what everybody leaves,” Miriam said. “She loved you, honey, but I don’t guess thas what that check’s about.”

33Hezekiah stood up and went to the back door, opened it. Dew covered the porch, the yard, and he was struck by how beautiful the sun shone upon them, made everything gleam in such a peaceful way and made him think it would be a sin ever to walk upon it. He looked at his fields and the black birds flying over them and away into the sun. And way out there, almost level with his eye, the scarecrow hung alone. Here was the only place where he had felt safely small. There had been nightmares for two nights after his return, dreams about being lost in that city. The third night, under a moon that provided just enough light, he had walked the boundaries of the fields, which had just been planted before he left, and when he was exhausted, he came back and laid down. Then there was a different dream.

34“What should we do?” he asked in the same tone his wife had used moments before. She came to him and put her arms around his great waist. “It won’t be what it should,” he said, pointing with his chin to the fields. “They been worked and worked and worked. They ain’t got no more to give, at least not to me. Don’t tell it to me again. Whateva you say, I’ll do. You neva asked a thing a me, Miriam.” He sighed and wiped his face with his hand. “He was a store owna man in that city, that Simon was. He came down to visit kin folks, plannin’ to stay just a week, and when he saw my aunt in church, he stayed the whole summa, then left and came back a few weeks more. Drove her up and down the roads in a fancy rented buggy, courtin’ her. Me nor my daddy had eva thought of her like that. She was at that age where we thought no man would be interested in her. But he’d take off his hat wheneva he came up to her and he said her name in a way I hadn’t neva heard a man say it. When she left, my fatha said give the Philadelphia whore one or two weeks and all them canned goods would drive her home. And me, I’d listen like a fool and go out to the road and look down to where she’d be comin’ from . . . .”

35She smiled, the side of her face against his back. “You wanna be a store man?”

36“No. That was his way a livin’, and it was good for him. But we can’t stay here. We can move to town, maybe. Find somethin’ there. God knows there’s money anough.”

37“You, Hezekiah Battle, livin’ ‘mongst all them folks?”

38“Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. It’s a small place. We know a lotta people there already. And then there’s the folks here I’ve knowed all my life. And the church is there, too.”

39“Yes,” was all she said.

40After they had moved in, two months or so after the Philadelphia trip, had restored the place that had been vacant for years, and had bought what furnishings they would need, he christened it “The Farmers Palace” and had his friend John Briscoe paint those words across the front window. In the first weeks he served only food, beer, soft drinks, a good business. Later, he added liquor, and he and Miriam kept a nice, orderly place, people said, no foolishness and no riff-raff. Because of their sunup to sundown work it was not often farmers who came in. Saturday was their day. They knew Hezekiah and Miriam and they wanted to patronize them and see how far up in the world they had come. Sipping their beers and soft drinks, they sat quietly near the window. They told him what a fine establishment it was and how proud Alfred, his father, would have been. And before leaving, they told him not to become a stranger, to come out and sit an evening at their tables. There was no charge, they kidded him, they had not yet come up that far.

41Now the screen door shut with a great bang. He looked up from the stool to see Wallace Cleveland lumber in with his cousin Lucas behind him.

42“Hezekiah,” Wallace bellowed, “tell me the good news.”

43Grinning broadly, Hezekiah stood and reached across the bar to shake both men’s hands. “I figured you’d be the first in, Wallace. An old early bird with his pocket fulla money.”

44Pulling out an empty pocket, Wallace shook his head. “That white man’s takin’ it all for hisself fast as I can make it. The gov’ment ‘spose to be helpin’ out, but ‘tween me and that gov’ment man is that white man, smilin’ with them buckteeth a his and puttin’ his hand in my pocket like it’s his home.” He leaned on the bar and Lucas stood just behind him. “I cain’t believe I’m workin’ twice as hard as I did ten, twelve years ago, ‘cause I sure ain’t getting’ the same money for my labors.” They had grown up together, Hezekiah and Wallace.

45“One and all been comin’ in and out here all week with just about the same story,” Hezekiah said quietly. He came around to the two men, Wallace a head shorter than he, Lucas two heads shorter. “Nothin’ ain’t right no more. I keep thinkin’ ‘bout Poppa and me and then me and Miriam out there. I guess we the lucky ones. . . . I hear tell that Boone’s movin’ up to Chicago come next month, him and the whole fam’ly.”

46“We know,” Wallace said. “We went to see him day ‘fore yestiddy to see what we could do. He in a state, Hezekiah, what with this and that to be done. But Marilyn’s holdin’ up, keepin’ them kids in line and lettin’ him know what should be done and all. Hell, escapin’ almost as hard as what you escapin’ from.”

47“We bought things offa him,” Lucas said, his hands in his back pockets. “A churn. Rope. Tools. A harness. Rope. A churn.” He counted them off slowly on his fingers, then he grew quiet and went to stand by the window.

48“Where Miriam?” Wallace asked. “Let me go and toss a hello at her.”

49Hezekiah pointed his thumb over his shoulder. “Back in the back. She been workin’ all mornin’. If it wasn’t for her, me and this place both would go to hell.”

50Wallace went through the hall, his hat in his hand and his handkerchief sticking out of one back pocket and his pipe sticking out of the other. Hezekiah watched Lucas at the window as he moved his head about, up and down, sideways, like a chicken. He talked to himself, but Hezekiah paid him no real mind because people had always said Lucas was not right and so anything was possible with him. He waved to people, everyone, those he knew and those he did not, and his shadow fell across three tables.

51Near about twelve o’clock Calvin Simms and his son-in-law Robert Adams came in. Hezekiah was setting up the liquor and putting the kegs of beer in place. They all said good morning. Robert, a young man, took Hezekiah’s hand. His wife, dead some six months, had been Hezekiah’s godchild. Covering most of the left side of his face was a burn scar, a raw patch of dark brown. He moved slowly, deliberately, as if giving thought to each step. He smiled, a wide and generous smile, but the scar overshadowed the smile so that it seemed somehow false, sinister. His eyes shined and his wife had always said they were the things she liked best about him. But now, when he found people looking too long and too hard into his eyes, he felt they did it to avoid looking at the scar, and sometimes he would slowly turn his head just a bit, as if to provide a better view of the scar.

52“Where Miriam, Hezekiah?” Calvin said. “Let me go in and say hello to her first thing before you get to chewin’ my poor ears off.” The three men laughed.

53“Tell her I’ll be in soon,” Robert said.

54“Everything done and finished for you, too?” Hezekiah asked. From the first day he had met him he had felt a special fondness for Robert, and that feeling had deepened when he married his godchild.

55Robert nodded. “Weren’t the best prices, but I’ve done betta than most. I guess me and Calvin have a bit more luck.” He clasped his hands on the table and the scar shone strangely in the day’s light. Lucas remained at the window, mumbling and moving his head about. “I think I might go back down home for a while. See my people. . . .” Hezekiah nodded.

56Others were now entering and Hezekiah went to greet them. The two women and the men in the kitchen came out. Miriam sat down to talk with Robert. Their heads leaned forward to catch each other’s words because the room was quickly filling up with voices, with dark men of various shapes and sizes, men with big hands and chipped fingernails and hair cut close and imperfectly by wives and daughters in kitchens on Saturday nights.

57Before long Miriam and Priscilla and Bailey returned to the kitchen. The men sat at the tables and on their knees or on the floor they placed their hats, cloth things sweated through and through so that all the original color had long ago been lost and forgotten. Some pulled out paper and tobacco and began rolling cigarettes, and others, unused to having idle hands, put them inside the bibs of their overalls. Robert, Calvin, Wallace and Lucas sat together just in front of the bar.

58Throughout the afternoon Miriam, Priscilla and Bailey went in and out the kitchen, bringing food and tea and coffee and taking back dirty dishes. Occasionally, one of them would sit at a table and ask a man about his family, or about so-and-so who had died or about so-and-so who had had a baby. A tray in his hands, Hezekiah brought beer and, less frequently, liquor, weaving and passing between tables. He, too, would sit, reminisce, inquire. Sometimes he laughed at the least funniest jokes and slapped his thigh loudly, or he would feign anger and argue with someone about how incompetent the Dodgers or Roosevelt were. Then, at other times, something would come over him and he felt a sudden, painful distance, as if he were looking in the window at the men and the tables and the food. He would grow quiet, and for a moment or two he would feel almost as if he were still on that train, alone and moving through Virginia and Maryland, heading for that afternoon of noise in Philadelphia. “Poppa’s luck just turned bad on him, thas why this land neva did right for him,” he told his aunt that last time. “But that was him. That was his luck.” At first she only nodded.

59About half past two the men at one table, at which Hezekiah happened to be sitting, began talking about a man, a farmer, who had been seen going in and out a house just beyond Hezekiah’s where a certain woman lived. Miriam stood near, behind Hezekiah. The man’s youngest daughter, about twelve, had been seen several times walking up and down the streets asking people if they had seen her father, telling them that her mother wanted him to come home.

60“Well,” one of the men said, leaning back on two legs of the chair, “I woulda figured that a Ben. Him and Clara ain’t been real man and wife in so long most anything could happen.”

61“But that ain’t no reason to let your fam’ly go to pieces,” Miriam said, “to have that child lookin’ all ova creation for him.”

62“Anybody know where this here woman came from anyhow?” a second man asked. “I’d like to get a look at her so I can know what one a them looks like.”

63“I don’t think she look no different from any otha woman,” the first man said. “But I’m sure she got a way a lettin’ you know she different. Like a bell or somethin’.” Raising his hands, the man shook an imaginary bell and they all laughed, a heavy, peasant laughter. Hezekiah said, “I seen her, or what I guess was the one Ben’s seein’, and this otha woman, sittin’ out there one mornin’ a few days ago. One was pluckin’ a chicken and the otha was shellin’ peas. And a child was standin’ sida one woman, while anotha child, no more than a baby, was playin’ sida this otha woman. Look to be sistas, so I think both a them is sportin’ women.”

64“Now that ain’t so, Hezekiah,” Miriam said. “That ain’t true atall. I didn’t know ‘em, hadn’t had time to say but a few words to eitha one of ‘em, but I know wasn’t but one that typa a woman. One lived upstairs, that loose one did, and the one whose children you saw lived downstairs.”

65“Oh, but, honey,” Hezekiah said, turning to face her, “that day I saw ‘em out there they was so buddy-buddy, thick as fleas. And it was plain that whateva business they in, they in it togetha.”

66“Not so,” Miriam said. “That just ain’t so. I heard the two out there arguin’ the otha mornin’. That motha didn’t know a thing about it. I heard ‘em and got up and stood by the window. You was sleepin’ and I thought sure they’s wake you. It was anough to wake the dead.”

67“Why didn’t you tell me all this?” Hezekiah asked.

68“Oh, now you don’t want me to go worryin’ you every time folks get to arguin’ round here, do you?”

69“No. But this was different.”

70“I don’t see how, honey. I don’t see how. . . . Anyway, the motha was mad as all get out. “If I’da knowed you was that,’ she kept sayin’ to the otha one, ‘I wouldna moved here!’ I think she’d been livin’ there a little less than a week by then. ‘It ain’t what you think.’ that otha said. ‘Damn you, it is! You know it is!’ The motha started screamin’ and her fists went up in the air—like this—and she and them fists was just a shakin’. ‘And my children ‘mongst all that trashy goin’ on. My own babies. Well, I won’t have ‘em here, not with you, not if I have to live in the streets with ‘em.’ She commenced to cryin’ and that otha went to her, to comfort her, I suppose. But the motha pulled away like it was the devil hisself come for her. ‘Don’t’ she said. ‘Just you don’t!’ And she ran into her place, and I guess she and them younguns must a moved that same day, ‘cause I think the place been empty now for a day or so. . . . And thas,” she said to Hezekiah, “how I know one was sportin’ and the otha wasn’t.”

71Hezekiah sat silent, his face expressionless. “Well, I had ‘em both in my mind as the same,” he said after a while. “How’s a body to know? Now that one’s gone and I still don’t know one face from the otha.” His hands were open on the table, palms up.

72“You will now,” the first man said, laughing, “‘cause ain’t but one left, and she the one with the bell.”

73“Y’all have some more to eat,” Miriam said.

74“Y’all have some more to eat,” Hezekiah repeated.

75The men shook their heads. Miriam returned to the kitchen and the conversation at that table wound its way to other things.

76 

77From the right the evening sun came in the window, red-yellow in the men’s faces and on the backs of their necks. Behind the bar Hezekiah and Bailey were putting away glasses, while Priscilla took dirty dishes out to the kitchen. When Robert suddenly began to shout, Miriam, in the kitchen, hushed her song and the men stopped their talk. For a while, as if fearful of what they might see, the men with their backs to Robert would not turn to him, and those who were facing him found other things to rest their eyes upon.

78For the most part he was incoherent, but when he did speak so that they could understand, his eyes would narrow and the scar seemed to become lighter than the rest of his face. “For long as whateva life I’ve had,” he said at one point, “I’ve held God in my heart. I have, I have. Don’t say I haven’t ‘cause I have. Every everybody knows me. And now look, just look at this: wife, children, home even. All pffff. Just like that. Pffff. . . .” He leaned forward and enclosed his glass within his hands. “Papa,” he said to Calvin, “I came all the way up from Georgia to this place and married your only child. You know that. You knew me. You said to me, you said, ‘Bob, I know you.’ And then you let us get married. I ‘member those words, I ‘member that day, Papa . . . I never harmed a soul in my life, never took from—” he broke off and began to cry.

79“Bob,” his father-in-law said. “We’d best be getting’ back.”

80Robert shook his head. He stood up and stumbled to the bar, looking from Hezekiah to Bailey. No one said anything. Robert stretched out his hand across the bar, then let it fall with a thump. “Now, Bob,” Hezekiah said. “Now, Bob.” Robert shook his head again, and when he attempted to speak, he made only guttural sounds. He turned to go back to the table and fell. The men nearest rushed to him, around him. Lucas reached him first.

81“Bob,” Miriam said, entering the room. “Is he all right, Lucas?”

82“He just piss-ass drunk!” Calvin said, still in his seat. “Dead drunk, thas all. He gets worse and worse every damn day. Now just look at him. Look at him, the mess he’s makin’ of hisself.”

83Lucas cradled Robert’s head with one hand and rubbed his forehead with the other. He spoke to him. Robert’s eyes were closed. His apron in his hand, Hezekiah knelt down to them, looking helplessly at Lucas’ hand moving about Robert’s forehead.

84“Just drunk, is all,” Calvin said. “She was my daughta, damnit! They was my grand babies. Hell, he’s alive. All he got was some burns. But they dead and gone. I’ve grieved, sure, night and day, but not this. Not come out here and make a fool a yourself.”

85“He’s just wore out, Calvin,” Miriam said. “It was the worse that could happen. You know how it was. He feel he didn’t do anough to get ‘em out. . . . Lucas, maybe we’d best lay him down somewhere. Calvin, he can stay here tonight, and you can come pick him up tomorrow. That might be best for both y’all.”

86“Bob,” Hezekiah said, “it’s okay. It’s all right, Bob.”

87In his sleep Robert began to whimper. He was far smaller than Robert, but Lucas picked him up and carried him to the back room just off from the kitchen. Miriam followed.

88The men went back to their tables, but none sat. For several moments they stood awkwardly about, absently tracing patterns over the tablecloths or looking solemnly at each other or taking out their silver dollar-sized pocket watches and needlessly checking them with the clock on the wall. Then they quietly collected their hats and whatever else they came in with. Robert was the youngest of them. They took from their pockets and change purses what they owed Hezekiah, who was at the bar with a cigar box, into which he unthinkingly dropped the money they gave him. There were murmurs in the place and the sound of brogans moving over the wooden floor. They told Hezekiah they would be seeing him, then they went out into the twilight and got on the wagons and buckboards that would take them back to women and children waiting on porches and in front rooms.

89 

90Again he was alone in the room. He had already cleared all the tables, putting the dirty tablecloths in a pile in a corner. As he swept the floor, he listened to Miriam and Bailey and Priscilla in the kitchen. He thought of the mother and that woman in the yard that day. The sun was gone. The lamps flickered.

91“You lonely, that it! Don’t you have whateva you need right here!” It was his father’s voice and he was talking to Hezekiah’s aunt. Hezekiah was then seventeen. He had heard them from outside the house.

92She sent them money regularly from Philadelphia, but his father called it sin money and always returned it with a big NO THANK YOU written across the money order. She was gone six years and his father always referred to her as the Philadelphia whore. And then his father died and she came home to stand over the hole. When it was her turn to drop the handful of dirt into it, she couldn’t release it. Hezekiah held her wrist, shook it gently, and after a while the dirt trickled out.

93Priscilla and Bailey came out from the kitchen. Hezekiah paid them, stood closer to them than he had on previous Saturday nights and told them how much he appreciated how hard they worked. They left, not knowing what to say because he had never spoken such words. He had wanted them to stay, to sit down and talk with him over coffee and soft drinks.

94Yawning, Miriam stood in the entrance to the hall. “I’m goin’ up,” she said. “You come up, too. I looked in on Bob and he’ll be fine till mornin’. You come up. Don’t be long down here.”

95“Soon,” he said. “Soon.”

96“Don’t be long down here,” his aunt had said to him, sitting by the window in her old chair, wearing her Philadelphia-bought dress. “Come up there and live with us. This land been dyin’ for the longest. . . .” Then he asked her. “I cain’t stay here, Hezekiah. I couldn’t even if this was Eden.”

97He had said nothing, but not until he learned she was dead did he realize how much of his father was in him. She and Simon would visit from time to time, but there was nothing to say. Silently, the three would sit in the front room, staring at points in the middle of the floor. Gradually, all Simon’s people died out and they did not come anymore.

98Hezekiah put out the lights in The Farmers Palace and stepped outside into a cool evening. He stood there, listening to nothing. There was no moon, and the stars, twinkling, millions of miles away, made him feel as if he were the last person on earth. After a while he heard voices and walked to the edge of the porch. He could hear what must have been the woman, laughing with abandon, and a man was whispering huskily to her. He could make out the two vague figures standing almost as one in the dark on the stairs leading up to her place. He wondered if the mother was indeed living in the street. The woman’s laughter bounced harshly about in his head, and it occurred to him that he might spend a restless night. Only once, just after he and Miriam had moved in, had he walked about the town at night, hoping to tire himself enough to sleep. But there was no night earth smell strong enough to lull his brain, no feeling that sleep was getting nearer with each step. And, too, dogs came out from dark places and barked at him.

99He went back inside, back through the hall to the stairs. He listened to the sound of Robert sleeping, and he remembered that people used to say that Robert and his wife were like two people out of a fairy tale. All of that, all of that time, was only months ago, but he felt that it was much, much longer. Strangely, he found that he wanted to say something to the sleeping man, perhaps the same words he wanted someone now to say to him. But he turned and made his way up the stairs.

100Once in the room, he was suddenly aware of an emotional exhaustion, like that of someone who had been crying all day. It seemed to him that he had never left the room that morning. After he had undressed, he blew out the lamp and sat down on the side of the bed. He began to say his prayers in his head.

101“Hmmm?” Miriam said sleepily, raising up. “I didn’t say nothin’.” The prayers were lost with the interruption and he did not go back to them.

102“Oh.” She lay back down.

103“I don’t think I’ll be goin’ to church in the mornin,” he said, lying down.

104“Oh?”

105“I just wanted you to know case you woke and wondered. If I wake and get up, then you’ll know I’m goin’. But if I just lay here and say nothin’, then you’ll know to go on without me.”

106For a few moments she was silent, then she said, “I see. I see.”