“That where Miz Burden stay at.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Burden?”
“No, sir. Ain’t no Mr. Burden. Ain’t nobody live there but her.”
“Oh. An old woman, I guess.”
“No, sir. Miz Burden ain’t old. Ain’t young neither.”
“And she lives there by herself. Don’t she get scared?”
“Who going to harm her, right here at town? Colored folks around here looks after her.”
“Colored folks look after her?”
At once it was as if the boy had closed a door between himself and the man who questioned him. “I reckon ain’t nobody round here going to do her no harm. She ain’t harmed nobody.”
“I guess not,” Christmas said. “How far is it to the next town over this way?”
“ ’Bout thirty miles, they say. You ain’t fixing to walk it, is you?”
“No,” Christmas said. He turned then, going on. The boy looked after him. Then he too turned, walking again, the tin bucket swinging against his faded flank. A few steps later he looked back. The man who had questioned him was walking on, steadily though not fast. The boy went on again, in his faded, patched, scant overalls. He was barefoot. Presently he began to shuffle, still moving forward, the red dust rising about his lean, chocolatecolored shanks and the frayed legs of the too short overalls; he began to chant, tuneless, rhythmic, musical, though on a single note:
Say don’t didn’t.
Didn’t don’t who.
Want dat yaller gal’s
Pudden don’t hide.
Lying in a tangle of shrubbery a hundred yards from the house, Christmas heard a far clock strike nine and then ten. Before him the house bulked square and huge from its mass of trees. There was a light in one window upstairs. The shades were not drawn and he could see that the light was a kerosene lamp, and now and then he saw through the window the shadow of a moving person cross the further wall. But he never saw the person at all. After a while the light went out.
The house was now dark; he quit watching it then. He lay in the copse, on his belly on the dark earth. In the copse the darkness was impenetrable; through his shirt and trousers it felt a little chill, close, faintly dank, as if the sun never reached the atmosphere which the copse held. He could feel the neversunned earth strike, slow and receptive, against him through his clothes: groin, hip, belly, breast, forearms. His arms were crossed, his forehead rested upon them, in his nostrils the damp rich odor of the dark and fecund earth.
He did not look once again toward the dark house. He lay perfectly still in the copse for more than an hour before he rose up and emerged. He did not creep. There was nothing skulking nor even especially careful about his approach to the house. He simply went quietly as if that were his natural manner of moving and passed around the now dimensionless bulk of the house, toward the rear, where the kitchen would be. He made no more noise than a cat as he paused and stood for a while beneath the window where the light had shown. In the grass about his feet the crickets, which had ceased as he moved, keeping a little island of silence about him like thin yellow shadow of their small voices, began again, ceasing again when he moved with that tiny and alert suddenness. From the rear of the house a single storey wing projected. ‘That will be the kitchen,’ he thought. ‘Yes. That will be it.’ He walked without sound, moving in his tiny island of abruptly ceased insects. He could discern a door in the kitchen wall. He would have found it unlocked if he had tried it. But he did not. He passed it and paused beneath a window. Before he tried it he remembered that he had seen no screen in the lighted window upstairs.
The window was even open, propped open with a stick. ‘What do you think about that,’ he thought. He stood beside the window, his hands on the sill, breathing quietly, not listening, not hurrying, as if there were no need for haste anywhere under the sun. ‘Well. Well. Well. What do you know about that. Well. Well. Well.’ Then he climbed into the window; he seemed to flow into the dark kitchen: a shadow returning without a sound and without locomotion to the allmother of obscurity and darkness. Perhaps he thought of that other window which he had used to use and of the rope upon which he had had to rely; perhaps not.
Very likely not, no more than a cat would recall another window; like the cat, he also seemed to see in the darkness as he moved as unerringly toward the food which he wanted as if he knew where it would be; that, or were being manipulated by an agent which did know. He ate something from an invisible dish, with invisible fingers: invisible food. He did not care what it would be. He did not know that he had even wondered or tasted until his jaw stopped suddenly in midchewing and thinking fled for twenty-five years back down the street, past all the imperceptible corners of bitter defeats and more bitter victories, and five miles even beyond a corner where he used to wait in the terrible early time of love, for someone whose name he had forgot; five miles even beyond that it went, I’ll know it in a minute. I have eaten it before, somewhere. In a minute I will memory clicking knowing I see I see I more than see hear I hear I see my head bent I hear the monotonous dogmatic voice which I believe will never cease going on and on forever and peeping I see the indomitable bullet head the clean blunt beard they too bent and I thinking. How can he be so nothungry and I smelling my mouth and tongue weeping the hot salt of waiting my eyes tasting the hot steam from the dish. “It’s peas,” he said, aloud. “For sweet Jesus. Field peas cooked with molasses.”
More of him than thinking may have been absent; he should have heard the sound before he did, since whoever was creating it was trying no more for silence and caution than he had. Perhaps he did hear it. But he did not move at all as the soft sound of slippered feet approached the kitchen from the house side of it, and when he did at last turn suddenly, his eyes glowing suddenly, he saw already beneath the door which entered the house itself, the faint approaching light. The open window was at his hand: he could have been through it in a single step almost. But he did not move. He didn’t even set down the dish. He did not even cease to chew. Thus he was standing in the center of the room, holding the dish and chewing, when the door opened and the woman entered. She wore a faded dressing gown and she carried a candle, holding it high, so that its light fell upon her face: a face quiet, grave, utterly unalarmed. In the soft light of the candle she looked to be not much past thirty. She stood in the door. They looked at one another for more than a minute, almost in the same attitude: he with the dish, she with the candle. He had stopped chewing now.
“If it is just food you want, you will find that,” she said in a voice calm, a little deep, quite cold.
Chapter 11
BY the light of the candle she did not look much more than thirty, in the soft light downfalling upon the softungirdled presence of a woman prepared for sleep. When he saw her by daylight he knew that she was better than thirty-five. Later she told him that she was forty. ‘Which means either forty-one or forty-nine, from the way she said it,’ he thought. But it was not that first night, nor for many succeeding ones, that she told him that much even.
She told him very little, anyway. They talked very little, and that casually, even after he was the lover of her spinster’s bed. Sometimes he could almost believe that they did not talk at all, that he didn’t know her at all. It was as though there were two people: the one whom he saw now and then by day and looked at while they spoke to one another with speech that told nothing at all since it didn’t try to and didn’t intend to; the other with whom he lay at night and didn’t even see, speak to, at all.