She’s doin it, a man said suddenly. That whiteheaded gal’s makin it talk somehow.
Sewell Beale was watching with indolent, sleepy eyes. He was sitting backward in a canebottom chair, his arms laced across the top slat, his bootheels hooked in the rounds. He was a young man with long dirtyblond hair. His eyes were hooded and chill. His upper lip was covered by a soft blond mustache. You’re talking about my sister, sir, he said coldly, and you are doing it in her house. Say one more word and you will answer to me outside, and you be required to furnish more than your mouth to do it with.
The man arose awkwardly. I forgit where I am, he said. I apologize.
Beale nodded coldly in dismissal.
The black woman had laid aside her fan. Every eye in the room watched alike. Her movements had something of ceremony, intuition, a ritual performed many times before. She clasped the girl’s mouth, the fingers of each hand overlapping over her lips. The girl didn’t stir. The silence stretched, elongated. The audience sat hypnotically rapt.
It would serve the little bitch right if I kept my peace, the voice mused, altering, taking on a selfsatisfied tone. The old black woman sat still as ebony statuary. Then what you do? the voice asked. Band together, tar and feather her, I suppose, and it would be no more that she deserves, the little spreadlegged beast.but do you actually think I’m something she dreamed up to pass the time? I’m more than that.
Then just what sort of monster are you? Primm asked it.
I’m no kind of monster. I am greater than the God you pray to, less than the spittle of a dog’s tongue. I have been here forever, and I will be here when the worms have long finished with you. Now, what kind of monster are you?
That’s no kind of answer at all.
Do you want me to lie to you? I remember what I told old Jake one time…Old Jake was whiteeyeing on me, laying down, he finally knew I was going to stay till I killed him.he kept asking what I was (here the voice changed, coarsened, took on the unmistakable timbre of Jacob Beale’s voice)…Why are you so set on torturing me? What have I ever done to deserve such treatment?
The voice shifted eerily, became curiously neutral, a voice without sex or accent. I said, well, Old Jake, I was one of the first settlers in these parts and I was attacked and killed by Indians here sixty years ago, and I was buried right where your front porch is. When they were building this house, they dug up my grave and reburied the bones down below your spring. They left one of my fingerbones there where the graves was and my soul won’t ever rest in peace till I get a decent burial. Well, Old Jake got them boys humpin. They tore up the floorboards and they was digging up dirt and siftin it lookin right and left for that lost fingerbone. It was in July, and Lord it was hot. After about half a day, I got to feelin sorry for them boys and I broke down and told em I was just sportin with em.
Old Jake still didn’t believe me. He took a grubbin hoe and shovel and dug up that whole bottom there lookin for a grave. Of course he never found one, but anyway that old reprobate did the only full day’s work he ever did.
The voice went on and on without ceasing or even an intimation of ceasing, abusive, obscene, vituperate, until Jacob Beale bolted into the front yard, the door slamming to behind him, opening and closing with the passage of no visible person and the voice commencing again immediately. Beale halfrunning blindly across the frozen yard into the silver moonlight past the dark bulk of the trees.
Run, goddamn you, the voice shrieked. Anywhere you go I’ll be there and waiting for you.
Sewell Beale came onto the porch. Father, he called.
He crossed the yard and took the old man’s arm. Come in by the fire, he said.
Come in by the fire, the voice mimicked. Don’t you worry about Old Jake. He’ll be in the fire soon enough.
There was the flat sound of a slap and Beale’s head lurched sidewise, the long silver hair fanning out, his eyes wide and horrified. More blows, methodical, first on one cheek and then the other, his head jerking crazily from side to side. He tried to run, turning, his left foot dragging on the frozen ground, and then fell as if from a blow across the back of the head. Sewell Beale was flailing at the air, cursing, trying at once to grasp whatever it was and to shield his father. He could feel the blows falling across his own shoulders, sharp measured blows from a stick or walking cane, making a twack, twack on the heavy wool overcoat.
My shoes, boy, the old man said, and Sewell looked, still feeling the stinging blows across his shoulders. He watched his father’s boots unlacing themselves, the rawhide thongs writhing out of the eyelets as if magically invested with life, crawling out.
He could hear maniacal laughter above him. He grasped the boots, one on his father’s foot. No sooner was he at the other than the other was jerked off. He lashed the lacing round the cuff of the boot and felt the boot slide from beneath it. The heel of the boot caught him hard on the temple and he lay for a moment dazed, his cheek pillowed against the cold ground. His father’s feet had begun to jerk eerily as if performing some demented buck-and-wing, kicking madly at the air until Sewell stopped them with his weight, felt them still moving spasmodically against his belly, the flesh of his father’s face contorted, dancing as if every nerve had been divested of coherent purpose, left with only uncontrolled twitching.
The laughter died away. The old man grew still. Sewell saw his eyes were wide with fear and incomprehension, tears forming there and welling over the sockets. Son, the old man awkwardly began, his voice breaking off. Son, she. There seemed to be little of his father left in this pathetic old man.
There were tears in his own eyes now, and Sewell wiped them away with the rough sleeve of the coat. He didn’t say anything. It was far too quiet. There was only the cold wind in the distance, the frozen trees keening over the bare winter fields. He helped Beale up, put his shoes on and tied them. This time they stayed tied. Come on, he said. The old man stood stubborn and disoriented, looking toward the single light flaring in the house, looking out across the fogbound fields as if all places were the same to him.
Come on, Sewell said again, tugging at his arm. The old man came reluctantly, his left foot dragging audibly over the whorled earth.
Where?
The barn. We’re hitching up a team and leaving. I’m taking you and Mama over to Jacob Junior’s.
It won’t do any good.
How do you know what’ll do good?
I just know
Sudden anger flared in Sewell, fierce and violent. Anger at the old man for his stoic acceptance, anger at the horror that had consumed his father and sister, that might in his turn consume him until he lay in his grave. All right, by God, he said. Then we won’t go to Jacob’s. We’ll go to Virginia, or Carolina, or Kentucky. Sell the hellhole or give it away, if you could find a taker like you could have done four years ago, if you hadn’t been too damn stingy to take a penny’s loss.
Halfway to the barn he turned at a sound. A figure had stepped from the darkness pooled in the orchard and strolled silently along, pacing them through the stalks of winter weeds on the other side of the fencerow, gliding toward convergence at the end of the pasture. He hurried the old man, not even hearing the mumbling complaint, his stomach icy with dread. He’d thought his belief was suspended, that he could accept anything without fear, but each manifestation had the quality of being marvelously new yet the same at the core, old wine in new bottles he thought, so that each time his reason was assaulted anew.
He looked back. The figure was climbing the wooden stockgate, a figure in a long gray or black dress. The woman was in motion, climbing down then jumping the last two or three feet to land soundlessly in the roadbed, silhouetted for a moment, inkblack against the paler heavens: its face was long and cowshaped, he could see the hooked horns curving out from the sides of the head.