“So George worked awhile and then Joe wanted to go to work too. They worked around at different things, so I could give up cooking and next year put in another crop of tomatoes. That was about all we thought about raising down here then. And that crop was fine. It was a big year and I got George and Joe down here to help me picking and carrying to the packing house, and I paid them the same wages as anybody, and it was real nice. They were big strapping boys then and it seemed like everything was coming all right at last. We’d get home and light the lamp and I’d cook them a good hot supper and see them lean over the table and eat hearty.
“Then McDevitt come back. I can see it just as plain as if it was yesterday. After supper the boys were setting on the porch with their shoes off and smoking and I come to the door after the dishes was done, and just as I stood there McDevitt walked out of the dark into the patch of lamplight by the steps. I knew it was him even before he looked up at me and smiled with his teeth shining under a long red mustache and his eyes gleaming like hot wires. His beard was gone and he had a good suit of clothes on and a white collar. He put a leather bag on the step and stood looking at me, and then the house and at the big boys staring at him, and my knees begun to shake with the cold that come over me.
“‘Well, Sarah McDevitt,’ he said, ‘I see you’ve done pretty well here,’ and he started to come up the steps.
“I couldn’t say anything at all at first, and then all of a sudden I called out to him, ‘Don’t you dare to set foot on this porch, Peter McDevitt, or I’ll shoot off my gun at you. This is my land and my house, and I got made a free dealer right and proper under the Florida law so’s you couldn’t get any of it. You’ve got no more right here than a dog has, and you can just go back the way you came.’
“He stood there and looked at me, with his nose coming down over his mustache and the veins standing out in his forehead where he’d taken his hat off, and I could see he was older than he used to be and not so smooth. Because now he couldn’t cover up how mad he was. But he stood still in his tracks, with his head and shoulder held careful and stiff, the way a tomcat stands that hasn’t made up his mind how to jump, except he’d turn his eyes and look at the boys standing there with their mouths open, and then back at me, a hateful, sliding sort of look. If he’d been a snake I couldn’t have hated him worse.
“‘Well, well, Sarah,’ he says at last, changing his feet easy, ‘I see you know how to take care of yourself all right. But it’s a long ways back to Miami and I haven’t seen my boys since they was little, and any father has a right to talk to his own children. You haven’t got the heart to keep me from doing that just a minute, have you?’
“I had, though, and I would of if I could. But when he smiled at me like that I knew I couldn’t do anything more with him than what I had, so I slammed the door and walked up and down the kitchen, trying not to listen to the sound of their men voices talking easy on the porch, and trying to hear what they said, and trying to make myself think I didn’t care and that it would be all right anyhow as long as he couldn’t get my property away from me. I remember I stood at the sink and kept wiping and wiping the same clean plate over and over again until I couldn’t stand it any longer.
“But when I opened the door again McDevitt and the two boys were standing out in front with just their feet in the patch of light from the door, and he was talking to them and they were laughing. Pretty soon he went away and George carried his bag for him, and they must have stood awhile talking down by the gate, for the boys didn’t come back for a while. It seemed like hours. When they did come they walked and acted real careless, joking and talking loud and cutting up with each other. But when they stood at the foot of the steps and looked up at me, standing stiff in the doorway, their eyes were shining and hard and they wouldn’t quite look at me, the way men act when they think their womenfolks are standing in their way. If I’d been cold before, I went frozen all over then, for I see that McDevitt had turned their minds away from me a little so that there was something hard and cold come between them and me. They didn’t want to talk to me much, and after they went to bed I heard them talking low and laughing to themselves at something.
“The next day they said they wanted to go to Miami, and I gave them some money and let them go. I couldn’t have said anything to them against it, any more than I could have begged McDevitt to come back that time. It felt as if something inside of me was a hard lump that wouldn’t let me feel anything. I wasn’t going to have McDevitt say I’d kept them from seeing him. It was just as it used to be when he’d try to find out if I had a weak place he could get hold of, and I gritted my teeth to keep from showing it to the boys.
“They didn’t come back for two days, and I didn’t expect them to. I had a couple of nigras working for me then and I made them cut down all the orange trees I had and burn them. I couldn’t stand the look of them. I had them drag the trees down to a cleared space at the edge of my land and the fire showed red through the pine trees. That night the boys came back as if nothing had happened, walking up the path, with the glare through the pines showing faint and McDevitt walking between them.
“I wouldn’t let him set foot on the porch. ‘I told you once and I tell you again, Peter McDevitt,’ I says, ‘that I won’t have you on my place. The boys can do what they like. They’re old enough to know better. But you, I don’t have to have, and I won’t have, and you can make up your mind to it.’
“George come up to me and put his arm around me and his black head, like my father’s, was way taller than mine. ‘Aw, Ma,’ he said to me, ‘Grammer McDevitt used to say you were too hard. Dad never done as much harm to you as you thought. Joe and I think you’d ought to let him come and talk things over with you. He’s had a hard time, too, and it would be nice to let bygones be bygones.’
“I didn’t feel his arm around me no more than if it was a piece of iron, and I looked down at Joe standing there beside McDevitt, and he was as tall as McDevitt. For the first time I see that his hair that had been gold color when he was a baby had turned to be copper-colored like his father’s, and his eyes were the same red-brown when he narrowed them. The two of them stood and looked at me, and George dropped his arm and looked at me, and McDevitt’s eyes begun to shine and his nose came down over his mustache and his teeth under it were white and shining like gravestones, and he smiled as if at last he’d found the place where I was weak, and I knew it.
“That was when it seemed as if I didn’t know what I was doing, except that I heard somebody telling them they could all three go away and never let me see them again as long as they’d rather have him than me. Then I saw them walking back down the road, all of them, as if they were hurrying, and I ran in and got my six-shooter and ran down the path after them, and I was shooting over their heads. When I’d shot all six shots I threw my gun away and went on stumbling in the dark after them, down through the pine woods where there was a reddish light from the bonfire still flickering.
“At the gate I saw McDevitt go on down to a car he had there, but Joe turned around and started to come back toward me, and George stopped and watched him, and then he began to walk toward me too. I stopped and watched them come, with their backs to McDevitt, and it seemed as if the hard thing in me was melting and softening and warming me all over. I come to myself all of a sudden and I could see Joe’s face and George’s, just as clear, without any kind of dark mist over them, and it seemed to me that it didn’t really matter how weak anybody thought I was as long as I had my boys. I started to walk to them, too, almost crying, and I was just going to beg them to come back anyway, that I’d do anything they wanted me to. That was when Henry Marsh drove up and turned in my gate, passed the boys and leaned out and shouted at me that the pine woods in back of the place where the orange-tree fire was had caught and it was threatening the rest of my pines and on his side clear up to his grapefruit grove. I didn’t understand him at first, until he kept saying that the fire was creeping toward the pines. And I looked, and sure enough all that light wasn’t just the bonfire but the palmetto flaring up and popping and flying and the flames climbing like ragged ribbons all the way up one dead tree that stood nearest. If I hadn’t been so taken up with McDevitt I would have known the difference long ago.