1From her place at the window she watched him, hatless, coatless, lead the mule to the wagon beneath an evenly gray sky. An empty pipe clamped between his teeth, he hitched the mule, and after she came out of the house, having kissed the children goodbye, he helped her up onto the wagon. She took the reins from him and settled herself on a seat of rags. He covered her legs with their oldest quilt, tucking it with care, and his hand lingered on the toe of her boot.

2“You think of anything you want?” she asked, looking down at him. Her head was all but concealed in a makeshift woolen scarf, so that only the very tip of her nose could be seen from the side.

3He said, “A bad cold snap’s comin. Tonight, maybe early tomorrow mornin.” He looked east, west, then up at her. He offered a piece of a smile and his eyes squinted and the empty pipe whistled with every breath. “Could be snow.”

4After nearly eleven years with him she had not gotten used to that way he had of saying something out of the blue or of leaping ahead in their conversations, supplying answers to questions she had yet to ask, or did not want the answers to.

5The mule turned his head to stare at them with a look of sad and humble impatience.

6“Maybe tis snow,” she said. But she did not care if he was right or wrong, though about such things he was usually right.

7“Some pipe tobacca . . .,” he said. “And some sweets for them children. You know how they are when they ain’t brought nothin.” He put his hands in his pockets and dug absently in the dirt with his toe.

8“Yes,” she said.

9The mule stamped a hoof.

10In the cold their words were puffs of white mist that floated away a few inches and died; their son, her son, called them cold words. About them, in the final days of November, there was barely a sign of life. Each thing—bush, tree, smokehouse, barn—seemed to have contracted, as if to keep within what warmth there was left. Whenever the wind blew, an occasional wood chip or an ugly ball of dry weeds twigs sailed across the yard, and the peach tree’s swing swung with what she told her children was a ghost child.

11“I betta get on,” she said, leaning down to kiss his mouth so that a part of his face momentarily disappeared inside the scarf. Except when he took his crops to market went to church, he rarely ventured beyond his own land, but traveling, moving, was something she had discovered over the years was in her blood. Absalom held her shoulder for instant, then stepped back, and she called to the mule, “Get up!”

12Breathing heavily, the mule took her out to the path, and in a long moment she passed from his sight. She knew he would stand there until he could no longer hear the heavy rumble of the wagon. (In warmer weather he would follow her out to the road and watch the dust swallow her up.) Years before, she used to wonder when she pulled away whether he thought that she would not come back, that with that old mule and wagon she would take to the roads and try once more to find her way to New York. . . . Now she did not wonder, and if she had been asked, she would have said that that was the furthest thought from his mind. And if it was, she would have said it was partly because she herself did not think of it anymore. Now they had a shared history of eleven years that bound them together, and she felt his eyes follow her around the bend in the path.

13Coming fully into the road, she considered speaking a soothing word or two to the mule, but in his old age he had grown solitary, withdrawn, and she did not think he would hear her or care for words as he once might have. Once upon a time he had been smart and had enough life in him for three mules, Absalom had told her, but now, his eyes dull, lifeless, the mule kept to himself in his corner, his backside turned to the rest of the barn.

14And so she hummed.

15It was a back road, the one she was traveling on. The fields that bordered it were worked by people who lived in cabins that bordered more traveled roads. Here and there was an abandoned shack, mauled by the weather and time, its door open to the winds and homeless dogs. A single bird flew over, too high for her to tell what kind, its wings pumping, pumping with all the life it had. “You late,” she said to it, “and it’ll catch up with you. Tonight or tomorrow, it’ll catch you. You late thing.”

16After a mile or so she crossed the small bridge his father had built. The creek had given up its life and was now still, a mirror reflecting the grayness above. The bridge and the creek gave the area where they lived its name, The Island, though it was far from that. Absalom had lived there alone until the day she came, a day not unlike today. Hungry and cold to the bone, she had pounded at his door until her hand was scratched and bleeding slightly. When he had finally opened the door and she saw him, calm and as expressionless as an egg, she knew he had heard her from the first knock.

17“I ain’t a rich man,” he had said later while she sat shivering before the fire, though she had not inquired about his circumstances. She could see he was not much older than she, but he had the bearing of some old men, that haughty look that seemed to say all time was now in his back pocket and there was no need to hurry. He draped a blanket that smelled of pine wood over her shoulders and handed her a cup of bitter tea. As she drank, he brought in a bucket of warm, salted water for her swollen feet. “I’ve neva bothered a soul . . .” As she listened, as feeling painfully returned to feet and legs, she perceived that his was not the sound of complaining about being disturbed, but more a simple stating of what was true and what was not.

18 

19Long before she reached the shack near the fork in the road, she saw the black smoke rising, dissipating. She watched it until she was close to the shack, then she saw a small figure wrapped in a blue cape, standing before her in the road. The person pulled back the cape’s hood and she saw an old woman, gray hair in plaits, smiling with a mouth full of dark yellow teeth. Calling to the mule, the younger woman stopped the wagon.

20“Hi you doin?” the old woman said, hurrying to the side of the wagon. “I was hopin you’d stop. I’m Sally Longwood. Been livin there”—with her chin she pointed to the shack—“for bout a week and you my second company today. The second in all the time I been here.” She spoke in quick, anxious spurts, as if there were some danger of something cutting her off at any moment. “Well, really you my first, cause that otha today wasn’t no company atall.”

21“I’m Hortense Stuart. But I ain’t come to visit. I’m headed to town, to the sto.”

22The old woman glanced down the road as if she could see the store from where she stood. “Oh . . . Oh, I see. I knowed I was out here by my lonesome, but when I heard the wagon, I guess I just thought you was comin to see me.” She pulled the hood back over her head. “But come in and stop a minute anyway. Why don’t you?” She touched Hortense’s knee. “Just for a cup a coffee then. That sto ain’t goin nowhere, hon.”

23Hortense shook her head. “I wish I could, but my son’s taken with a bad cold and I don’t want to leave him for too long. I’m goin in afta some salve and quinine pills.”

24“A cold?” the old woman said. “Oh, shoot! He’ll get ova that with or without you. You know chirren . . . Now come on with yourself.” She took the reins from Hortense and secured them, then stepped back with another yellow smile. “A cup of coffee, a word or two, thas all, then you can be on your way.”

25With a deliberately loud sigh Hortense climbed down. “Just a minute though, then I’ll have to be goin.”

26“A minute’s all thas needed tween friends, child.”

27A thick warmth enveloped her as soon as the old woman pushed open the shack’s door. Inside there seemed no space in which to move, to breathe. Furniture and pasteboard boxes from floor to ceiling hid the walls, the lower boxes crushed in places from the weight of those on top. On the boxes were written in a childlike scrawl “china,” “lenen,” “can goods,” “nic nacs.” Clothes—dresses, skirts, coats—were draped over expensive-looking high-backed chairs and were hanging heavily from rope nailed to the ceiling, and what must have been two dozen pairs of women’s shoes stuffed with rags were lined in neat, shiny rows on boxes and along the floor. Near the center of the room, just to the side of a pallet, a pot-bellied stove showed a small raging orange face.

28“I had to give way some a my stuff before I moved here. My otha place caught fire and so they moved me here. You shoulda seen all that I lost in the fire.” She pulled two cane-bottom chairs up to the stove. “My people moved me to this place, and I guess it’ll do for the time bein.” For a good while the old woman looked solemnly at the great mass, and the younger woman watched her. “You just my second company today and I’m so glad to see you, hon.”

29“Your people?” Hortense said, taking off her coat and sitting down.

30“Yes. That is my white people, the ones I useta work for before I got so I couldn’t. Lord, if it wasn’t for them, I don’t know what I’d do.” She sat down next to Hortense and put a coffee pot on the stove, then she handed Hortense the prettiest china cup and saucer she had ever seen. On the saucer and the cup was the same decorative rose, which seemed as real to Hortense as any she had seen in life. Its petals were breathtaking red, promising to the touch a softness unequalled, and curling out from each rose was the same vibrant green stem. And into each cup Miss Sally put a shining silver spoon.

31“You say you had some company today?”

32“Oh, he wasn’t no real company like you, hon,” the old woman said. “Just some colored fella in a big blue automobile. He was lost and he wanted darections from me. From me, and I as lost in this here place as he is. Said his home was right near here; called the name a the place, but I done forgot. When he found out I couldn’t help him he went away. Offered him some coffee, the fire, but he wouldn’t stop. Didn’t even get out that thing. Said he was in a hurry, so what could I do? Lord, but that automobile was big! Bigga than some parlors I done seen.”

33Where space allowed along some boxes, ancient photographs were displayed. A host of white people stared blankly out at Hortense: the women with mourning eyes and severe, ax-sharp parts in the middle of their heads, aged-looking children standing stiffly to either side of their elders, and gaunt men in Confederate army uniforms with thick moustaches and heavy beards. There was a more recent photograph propped against a jewelry box at the head of the pallet. Hortense leaned down to the side to see a woman—obviously a younger Miss Sally—in the middle of a group of white children. At her side, his hand in hers, was a small black boy, smiling.

34“Thas my oldest. I had five,” the old woman said, holding her open hand before her face, “but they all turned on me. Chirren will do that. They forget what you did for em and they turn on you.” She poured coffee into their cups. “I have sugar round here somewhere, if you want.” Hortense shook her head.

35Then they were quiet, sipping and watching the fire. It cracked, spit. The wind rattled the roof and for a second or two the women look up at the stovepipe, then shyly at each other.

36“Where they at now, your children?” Hortense asked.

37“Here and there, this place, that place.” She pointed to the picture on the floor. “He in Philadelphia. Been there now goin on fifteen years. You know that place, Philadelphia?”

38“No, ma’am, I don’t.”

39Miss Sally sighed and set her cup on the floor. “I got anotha boy in Washington, D.C., where the president lives, and my girls they in Detroit. My youngest son’s in Boston, or California, I cain’t memba which. The last time I heard, I think it was California.” She was a small light-brown skinned woman. Her hair was tied with long, exquisite green ribbons and the skin on her jaws hung down and moved sluggishly whenever she turned her head. She stared into the fire, one hand cupped in the other, her slippered feet tucked demurely under the chair. About her there was an aura of gardenia.

40As she drank her coffee, Hortense looked about the room. The more she looked the less impressive everything seemed. Some of the clothes had an ugly dinginess about them, others had colors fading or completely lost. And many of the shoes were badly scuffed with peeling leather and only their shine to recommend them. Even the cup she held had two cracks thinner than hair. She sensed that there was not one person in all the old pictures who was alive, or as alive as she and Miss Sally were now. And somehow that made the pictures—despite the fine wooden frames and the quaint majesty of some of the faces—as unimpressive as the dingy clothes and the cracked cups.

41“They thought I treated them betta, but that ain’t true. As God is my witness, that ain’t true,” Miss Sally was saying in a voice plaintive and low.

42“Ma’am?”

43The old woman said nothing. She looked at Hortense for a long time and touched her hand. “My chirren. They cused me a that, but it ain’t true. . . . I been here a week and you my first company. Listen: I neva did what they said. Sometimes I wish God had neva give em to me. Thas bad to say, I know, but thas what it all done come down to: questionin His work.”

44“You say they accused you?”

45“Yes. Yes,” she said. She looked into the face of the fire and it was as if she were speaking to it, as if that was the only way she could speak to Hortense. “Yes, they did. They said I treated the white chirren betta that I brought up, that I gave the white where I wouldn’t give them. Gave myself, my time, you see.” She folded her arms. “Maybe I did once or twice, but no more than that. No more. A body is human. It happens. Maybe I did.” Then, with her eyes intense and one string of a vein prominent in her neck, she seemed to gain strength and become more confident of what she was saying, and she turned to face Hortense. “But it wasn’t like they said. I loved my own above all. I know and God knows.” She began rubbing her eyes with the palms of her hands. “Maybe you know what I mean. I put my chirren first, first as I could, and I’ll say so come Judgement.”

46“I don’t think you should worry, Miss Sally, if you did the best you could.”

47“I know I did,” she said in a whisper, turning back to the fire.

48Hortense searched herself for words to give her, but everything seemed small and inadequate when she considered the old woman’s loss. Like faces, the boxes and clothes and shoes stared at her. She closed her eyes and wiped the sweat from her brow, from her eyelids.

49After several minutes Miss Sally said, “Here, let me show you somethin, hon. I don’t show it to just anybody, cause not everybody can preciate it.” From a box near the back of the room she brought a stereoscope and several 3-D pictures.

50“My white lady gave this to me,” she said, handling the objects with the greatest care. “It was her daddy’s and she give it to me. Everything in this room just about she gave me. Her son moved me here, the same one I took care of all his life. He nice, but he ain’t like her. The livin neva come close to what the dead was, but we learn to make do.” She slid one of the double pictures into the stereoscope and handed it to Hortense, who peered into it to see people at a World’s Fair. Miss Sally changed the picture and there was a tower-like building with hundreds of windows. She changed it again and a busy city street appeared, then a half- naked dancing woman, then a man in a cowboy suit with guns strapped to his side, sitting on a white horse; all of it—except for the lack of color—as life-like to Hortense as the woman next to her.

51“Ain’t that nice?” Miss Sally said. “I treasure that. It’s like bein right there, don’t you think? All them places up close like that. It belonged to her fatha. He was a judge and seen all that, and more besides.”

52“It’s right nice.”

53Miss Sally placed the stereoscope and pictures back in the box. “I got more pictures, more than you can shake a stick at. You come by some time and see em. We could make a day of it, you and me. A whole day, lookin at pictures and what not.”

54“Yes, ma’am, maybe I will.” Hortense stood up, giving the old woman the cup and saucer.

55“Yes, child, do come by.” She stood and her hand, far more bone than flesh, held Hortense’s, patted it. “But why would God let my chirren leave me floatin out here like this? Why would somebody do that to somebody?”

56“Oh, Miss Sally, you shouldn’t worry. He always makes a way for us.” Hortense opened the door.

57“I know I shouldn’t worry, but I do. I have to.”

58Pulling the hood of the cape over her head and putting her hands in her pockets, she walked Hortense to the wagon. The mule bucked when she got up on the wagon and his ears perked up.

59“You’ll come back soon, won’t you?” Miss Sally asked. “We have a lot to talk about.” Hortense nodded. “But now if my people come for me, I won’t be here.”

60“That’d be good,” and she wanted to ask why she wasn’t with them now, but the old woman turned and went back in the shack. Hortense said good-by and the door shut and the mule pulled her away.

61 

62The gray land moved past her and she moved deeper into it. She did not want to think about the old woman, surrounded in that shack by her precious things. She wanted to hum, but her mind would form no tune. She thought of her own children and a sadness took hold of her. If Absalom did not watch them, the boy would be out in the day’s cold, dragging along his sister. Hortense saw them vividly in her mind at that moment, standing before the cabin, hand-in-hand as if posing for a picture, their faces and clothes dirtied. The boy had none of Absalom’s blood, and the girl, being female, surely had more of her being than his. Yet sometimes—like now, on that cold road—she felt as if they were not hers at all, but belonged completely to him, had been formed from their first second of life in his image, with his ways and nature, so that now as she imagined them standing before the cabin, she felt lost from them. She remembered what a fat revival preacher had said about Mary some long ago summer evening in her childhood: That Mary was only the instrument, the tool, it was Jesus and God that really mattered in the end, “cold and cruel as that might sound to y’all.” It could have been any woman, the man had thundered, but there was only one God and could have been but that one Jesus.

63There was nothing moving in the town except a stray dog. He looked up at her with drooping eyes, sniffed the air a moment or two, and hurried away, one hind leg held up from the ground. Even before she reached the store, she could see the blue automobile, bold and shining and alone on the street, parked in front of the store. And standing on the store’s porch was a dark-skinned man watching her. She sensed immediately that the car belonged to him, and she remembered the man Miss Sally had said had not stopped. He wore a brown dress hat and a brown overcoat, the expensive kind she saw in South Boston’s store windows on white mannequins, and as the mule took her closer she could see that his shoes were as shiny as any of Miss Sally’s. He wore a tie which she rarely saw on a colored man in mid-week.

64She secured the reins and got down from the wagon. He caught her eye as she walked up the steps, and in that moment she knew that she knew him. She slowed without realizing it, and when she was just past him, the smell of his cologne in her nose, her lips began to quiver until she pressed them tightly together. She reached for the door knob once, twice, missing it each time because it was not where she thought it was. Say my name. Say my name.

65“You the best lookin thing to walk by me yet,” he said and took off his hat. “The only think cept that fool dog. Don’t hurry in, stay a while.”

66She studied the face and slowly took it back through the years until it was not as mature, had no moustache, no glistening, thumb-sized scar on the left cheek. Say my name. He came toward her and tilted his head. Then, before long, his mouth opened wide enough for a June bug to fly in. He squinted with a look of gradual recognition, and in his eyes she thought she could see words of familiarity, of remembrance, forming in his mind, preparing to march their way down to his mouth.

67He turned his eyes away from her. “It’s cold,” he said, as if that were the news of the day. “I always been kinda fraid of the cold.” He still did not look at her and he began to mumble.

68“What you want with me?” She could see herself walking on that road that day, walking away home, from father and brother, walking all those miles whenever she couldn’t get a ride in a buggy or on a wagon, seeing more of the world than she had in all her days. Walking until the fruit and ash cakes she had eaten along the way began to turn her stomach, walking until she found herself standing in Absalom Stuart’s yard and looking at his door like it was salvation itself.

69“I don’t mean you no harm.” He spoke softly, smiled nervously, a familiar smile that had not changed as much the face had. Say it. Say my name. “We learned in school—at least I did in my school—bout that ice age, and teacher said how it was gonna come again. Maybe soon. And every winter since she said that I keep thinkin this gonna it, that the cold’s gonna come and never go away, and I’ll be caught somewhere and get turned to a block a ice. Know what I mean? I dream about it sometimes. Nightmares.” He gave a small laugh. She remembered the teacher, the lesson, the two of them in that schoolroom with the stove that never worked properly. “I guess if it did happen to me, I’d be good for nothin but bein chopped up and dropped into somebody’s glass a lemonade.” He seemed to huddle in his coat. Just say it, thas all.

70When she saw that there were more of the same words about to come from him, she glared at him until a pained look came over his face. Blinking, he merely looked at her and after a bit he lowered his eyes, closing them off to her. Then slowly he seemed to compose himself, his face losing all expression. He straightened his tie, looking into her scarf-shadowed face as if it were a mirror. And when that was done, he smiled boldly, and that smile was not at all familiar. It shook her, and though she knew he recognized her, she knew that he would not say her name, even if he remembered it. She felt the need to sit down, but she steeled herself, commanded her feet to anchor themselves to the porch. She reached for the knob again, and again she missed it.

71“What you want with me, I said?” Yes, walked and walked till my feet swolled and I got dog-tired and almost forgot my own name, trying to get to you in that New York place. And then knockin and knockin till my hand bled.

72“Some friendly talk, is all,” he said. “I bought stuff in his store, but he won’t let me stand in there out the cold. I shoulda knowed it would be that way when I left home, but bein away from all this you forget. I got tired a bein in that car, nice as it is. So I just stood up here.”

73“There ain’t nothin I can do for you,” Hortense said and stepped away from him. She thought of calling him by name to let him know she knew who he was, but when he smiled again, a gold tooth caught her eye and would not allow her to speak.

74“But hey now . . .” He came toward her, tall, imposing, blocking out what daylight there was. She opened the door and a little bell tinkled and she stepped into a room that smelled of molasses and pickles.

75“Some Vicks salve and quinine pills, please,” she said to the old white man half-asleep behind the counter. They were alone in the store. Behind him on the wall was tacked a Coca- Cola calendar with a Santa Claus smiling beneficently at her, a glass of the dark brown liquid in his hand. The year on the calendar was different from the one it was presently.

76In her head there were falling leaves, each one so separate from the others that she could count them, each one floating down within its own space of color.

77Lucas, I’ll be patient.

78“Some peppamints, too, please. And pipe tobacca, that kind there in the red can.”

79Don’t count the days, baby, cause there ain’t gonna be no need for that. Before you can turn around good the ticket’ll be here and you’ll be there. Snap! Quick as that.

80“Sixty-two cents,” the man said. “And there’s two extra pieces for the children.”

81Hortense nodded, unfolding a handkerchief and giving him one of two crumpled dollar bills.

82“I always give extra to children. It makes for business in years to come.” She knew this, had heard it dozens of times. But if he had offered, she would have sat down on the flour barrel and listened to it for the rest of her life.

83She saw herself sewing in her father’s house, saw herself watching the falling leaves.

84She thanked the man, walked to the door. The bell tinkled and she breathed odorless air heavy with the threat of snow.

85“I’m down to see my mother,” the man she knew as Lucas said. He stood partly in front of her and partly to the side, so that if she had wanted she could have walked past him. “I started out way long before sunup. And somethin kept tellin me all the way that I was too late, but the more it said that, the faster I drove.” He spoke slowly, almost sadly, and she was reminded of Absalom, giving answers to unasked questions. “I thought I was bein good to her, y’know? I had her up to visit me. I sent down what money and things she needed. But now my aunt that live with her sent me this telegram”—he patted his breast pocket—“sayin she took bad. Dyin. I always sent her money, but I guess money don’t buy medicine enough. She deserved a better son, I guess. She deserved that at least.” He looked fully at her, taking her whole face in, and came one step closer. Hortense could see his mother, sweating, standing alone in a wide field of tobacco and waving to her, her arm high above her head, her hand open.

86“This the only real town around,” he said, “the only place where I could get gasoline. I know I can’t be no more than fifteen miles or so from where my home is.” Rubbing the scar, he paused. “But I ain’t been in this part a the world in a lotta years and I guess I got myself lost.” She sensed an attempt at something beyond the words and found herself listening and waiting, but then she heard a leaf hitting the ground and the sound was like a scream. “But say now, you live round here?” he said finally, his eyes taking all of her in, his voice reverting to that tone in which he had first addressed her.

87“No. And I gotta be goin.”

88The wagon creaked as she got up. He came down to her, and putting on his hat, he pointed with a gloved hand to the car.

89“If you wanna change your mind, honey, that belongs to me. Free and clear. It rides like your own bed: you hardly know you movin. The Packard people guarantee every one a they cars, and I extra-guarantee this one.” She stared briefly at him, and it came to her—painfully obvious, like something she had fought a long long time to reject—that she could stand before him forever and he would spend that eternity denying her.

90She picked up the reins. The mule took his time, but she managed to turn him around. Then there were no more falling leaves, only a skeleton tree that looked relieved to be free of a burden. The leaves swirled up as if to return, but the limbs shook them away and the wind stopped.

91Behind her he was saying something she could not hear.

92When she was almost to the edge of the town, out of his sight, she stopped the wagon, got out and looked around the side of a building at him. A white man came up the street and spoke to him. Lucas leaned against the porch post, saying nothing. For a good while the man looked into each window of the car, and after saying something more to Lucas, he walked away. Soon afterwards Lucas took off his hat and coat and got into the car. In a minute or so he was gone.

93Say my name. The motor kept saying it until the name was just a vague mechanical sound in the distance that could have been any name.

94My pretty gal, thas what I’m gonna call you. My pretty gal. The prettiest gal in all Virginia, in the whole damn south for that matta.

95When she got back on the wagon, the mule, sensing home at last, picked up his pace. She began to cry and could not see the road, but the mule knew the way.

96She thought of what lay before her—Absalom, the children, home. And once or twice she looked back down the way she had come. Absalom. Whom she had stumbled upon and who had let her stay out of a kindness she had never known before, a kindness she found sharp-edged one moment and bountifully reassuring the next. In those first days he never once asked who she was or where she had come from. When she was going. He seemed to disappear and reappear in the room at will; she would be sitting before the fire trying to tell him how she came to be there, only to look up and find him gone. Gradually, over the weeks and months, most of her adapted. He delivered the child, the boy, because the midwife could not find her way in the snow to The Island. When the child is strong, she kept telling him, I will be gone.

97She continued to cry. The reins became slack, and fearful of losing them, she wrapped them tightly around her hands. She watched the mule make his half-blind way over the road and something in her envied him. In the beginning, in that cabin of what was then one room and a kitchen, she and Absalom staked out a separate space for themselves, while the boy was free to crawl wherever he wished. In time, with the sharing of responsibility for the child, the cabin became whole again. Three years after the birth of the boy Absalom delivered his daughter.

98Until two years or so after the girl was born, she could not have said she loved Absalom Stuart. She had had his child, but that had nothing to do with loving him. And though she did not think very much about Lucas after the first five or so years with Absalom, a word or something seen would set free a memory and tell her she did not love Lucas any less. But one day in the sixth year, as she stood alone in the kitchen, something touched her mind as lightly as her hand would touch one of the sleeping children, and she stood quiet, first tensing, then relaxing, her mind swimming, and when she had calmed herself, reached the shore, she went without thinking into where he was playing with the children. She touched his shoulder, his neck, and pulled at a twist of his hair, though he did not acknowledge her presence. From that day on she believed she loved Absalom and gave next to no thought at all to Lucas and none to leaving, until that moment she saw him on the store’s porch, his blue car parked in front of him, a diamond stick pin in his tie.

***

99By and by the tears stopped and she hoped Miss Sally would be standing in the road again. She wanted to sit with her before the stove and look into that thing and see the World’s Fair and the dancing woman and the cowboy with the shining guns. She wanted to be told again about the old woman’s life and how her children had turned on her and how she had come to be in that place surrounded by things and by the memory of the living who might as well be dead.

100It pained her deeply to think that she may not have ever loved Absalom.

101She looked down the road, hoping for Miss Sally, but it was clear and nothing stood in her path. She was frightened, and knew that if Lucas had only called her name and bowed his head in repentence, she might well have taken his hand and pressed it to herself.

102She passed the old woman’s shack. The door was shut. The smoke rose in the same black line to the sky where it disappeared. She did not have in her what it took to stop and knock at the door.

103Even though she knew she would never see Lucas again, she felt somehow suspended between the two men, suspended without life or will, like a dress hanging alone in the middle of a clothesline. If eleven years was not long enough, she thought, then how long? In her mind she saw Absalom standing before the cabin. Perhaps he had known all along, and that was what was on his mind each time he watched her ride away. Perhaps he cared if she came back and at the same time perhaps he did not, as she herself loved and yet did not love. Who would know or care, except the old woman dying for company, if she spent the rest of her life going up and down the road?

104Maybe he would after so long a time.

105Reaching home, she drove the wagon into the barn and unharnessed the mule. He went directly to his corner without a sound or a look back.

106She found the three of them in the room Absalom had built for the children.

107“Mama,” the boy said from the bed, sitting up, “I feel all betta. Daddy said he’d see and maybe I can go outside tomorra if the snow ain’t deep.”

108Absalom sat in a large cushioned chair beside the bed and the little girl was nestled in his lap. Reaching up to be kissed by Hortense, she giggled and drew back slightly when she encountered her mother’s cold lips and cheek.

109“Make it all right?” Absalom said.

110“Yes.” She gave him the bag and touched his shoulder momentarily.

111“See anybody?” he asked.

112“No,” she said, taking the jar of salve from him. “Oh, wait—there’s a old lady down the road a piece. Moved there two weeks ago, I think she said. All by her lonesome in that shack, poor thing. I feel for her.”

113“She all right?”

114“Seem to be. She asked me to come back to see her, and I think I will. But maybe you’d betta see how she doin tomorrow. Bout food and wood and such.”

115He nodded and handed a peppermint stick to each child. “Now no more before y’all get your suppa, y’hear me?”

116The girl smiled and shook her head. The boy bit down loudly.

117Hortense rubbed the salve over the boy’s chest, then she covered it with a patch of wool and pulled the blanket up to his neck. She stepped back, watching them, as if through a window. Don’t think past what’s at hand right now, she told herself. If you do, you’ll go all to pieces like some dry leaf. If not eleven years, then . . .? They shouldna left me floatin out here, hon.

118From a trunk at the foot of the bed Absalom took a Bible as large as the girl’s chest and began reading to the children about the baby Jesus, the only story in the Bible, except the creation one, that they would sit quiet for. The girl looked up into his face, following intently the movement of his lips. The boy closed his eyes and rested his hands behind his head.

119From a shelf Hortense took down a pair of the boy’s pants that needed mending. Quietly, she carried a chair and the pants and her sewing box and sat down against the wall where not much of the lamp light fell. It was a comfortable corner farthest from the hearth.