When he had delivered all the children to their homes, the bus driver drove back to town and let her off beside the road near the path down into the ravine. She didn’t wave, as she normally did, when the bus drove off. She crossed the street and started down the trail. She hadn’t realized she’d left her house shoes on, with the heels all flattened, until she got on the trail, with its roots and little dips and gopher holes, and so she shuffle-stepped slowly along it. Her feet cold in them now. A rabbit scooted a brown-and-white blur from the trail’s edge across and into the brush on the other side and a gray squirrel barked at her from the low limb of an oak tree. And the winter birds everywhere, hardly singing but fluttering by so close as to breeze her face and sometimes squawking when they made a perch, or dipping away like on a bob string weaving down the trail ahead of her as it narrowed and the light grew gray and solemn blue through the deepening canopy of skeletal and veiny leafless great hardwoods and silent pines.
She went to her own cabin, which she’d painted green because she liked the color and the way it made the house almost invisible in green season when you were a ways off on the trail looking into the clearing at the bottom of the ravine. Inside, she shoved a few sticks from the trail into the stove, sprinkled them with some kerosene-soaked sawdust. When that was crackling she laid in a stick of stove wood and closed the door and sat beside the stove with her hands out, warming.
She got up and looked out her tiny kitchen window and could just see Vish’s cabin in the gathering dusk, come early here in February. Was ending up a dreary afternoon after the sun peeking early on. No drizzle but the air in the woods turning so gray and damp as to almost seem like it. She stood there looking. Couldn’t see anything for a long time and then a little light inside, just a flicker. She went back to the stove. Getting hungry. She got a sack of meal from the cupboard and poured some in a bowl. She got a dab of lard from a little bucket and put it in a skillet and put the skillet on top of the stove to heat. There was some water left in the water jug and she poured a little into the meal and stirred it. She took an egg from where it was wrapped in a soft rag in her handbag, cracked it into the bowl, and stirred that in. Would be better if she had some buttermilk but water would do. Just needed something on her stomach, for nerves as much as hunger.
When the lard in the pan started to smoke she gave the meal another stir and poured it in, hissing in the hot lard, watched it cook. She liked to make bread in the oven but didn’t want to fool with that, and with no milk it’d be better browned on both sides and crispy. She’d made it thin. She watched it thicken and crack on top and then she turned it over with a spatula. The bottom was dark brown. She cooked it another few minutes and took the pan off the stove and set it on the table and cut out a piece to cool on a plate, and she ate it with a cup of water from the jug, chewing and washing down the dry bread with the water, and looking at the little flickering flame in Vish’s cabin down the path. She saw something cross over inside and block out the flame for a second, then the flame again. She wiped her hands on a rag and took another drink of the water, closed the stove vents, and put her coat back on, looked out the window again, and then went out to the porch. It was getting pretty cold. She stepped carefully down the steps and into the path and walked toward Aunt Vish’s cabin.
— Creasie! she’d heard him call, heard a clatter in the sink. He stuck his head into the pantry, mad. -I’ll be back in an hour, so make up a fresh pot of coffee. That’s the worst cup of coffee I ever tasted in my life.
— No, sir, Creasie said to herself now as she stepped up onto Vish’s porch and lifted her knuckles to rap lightly on the old plank door. -I reckon it was worse that that.
AUNT VISH LOOKED made from a tough, blackened root in the flickering faint light from the coal oil lamp on the little shelf behind her. The cabin was hammered together of unplaned planks, burlap tacked to the walls for insulation tattered and torn here and there and stained. She held out a clean mason jar toward Creasie across the table. Her breath like smoke from her mouth when she spoke in the cold air.
— You put it in this. Tell young Mr. Parnell to put it in this.
— Yes’m, Creasie said. -What do I do with it after he give it to me?
Vish’s bloodshot, jaundiced eyes watched her without movement. Outside it was quiet as inside, not a breeze rustling a single dry leaf. Still February winter, maybe a drizzle drifting in, maybe a patter on the dead leaves carpeting the trails. The woods around there black as what you see when life goes out, before whatever light in whatever world comes next shows itself, black nothing, switches of branches and sticky spiderwebs like some gauntlet between here and there.
— You keep it with you.
After a moment, Creasie nodded.
— Yes’m.
The old woman’s hands lay on the table before her, two black crooked claws, long yellow nails resting on the unfinished plank top of the table. She showed what teeth she had then, one long dark horse tooth in front, gaps between what seemed occasional sharpened incisors here and there on back.
— Tell him what I told you to. Don’t tell him who I am. He smart enough, he’ll know.
— Yes’m.
— Say Clint, helped his old papa, done told me about it. He’ll remember Clint, all right, used to help them out down there. Tell him I know about the government, them bodies.
She nodded. She waited a minute, didn’t want to say it. She was afraid.
— Yes’m. What if he calls the police.
— If he smart, if he got any brains at all, child, he ain’t going to call no police. People find out what his daddy was mixed up in, ain’t going to be no more business for Grimes Funeral Home.
She nodded, looking down.
— You go on. You never been here, now. I don’t remember you, I don’t know you. I’m just a crazy old nigger woman, you know what I mean?
She looked up. Old woman grinning at her with those snaggly black teeth. She grinned back, a little.
— Yes’m, she said. Everybody know that.
— That’s right, the old woman said, raising her eyebrows and leaning back in the flickering yellow lamplight. -Everybody. Ha ha ha, she laughed then, her voice deep like a man’s and quiet like she was laughing to herself, but those old bloody eyes never leaving her own.
Black Heart
PARNELL HAD JUST gone downstairs for a glass of milk when he heard a tap-tapping at the front door and when he looked out the side panes he saw a young colored woman standing there holding a jar in her hands. He saw her eyes cut over and see him looking. He sighed, opened the door enough to look out, as he was wearing his house robe and slippers. She stood there looking at him, mute and frightened it seemed.
— Yes? he said. -How may I help you, Miss?
— Yes, sir, Mr. Grimes, she said then. -I need to see you about Mr. Earl.
— Earl Urquhart?
— Yes, sir.
— Did you know Mr. Urquhart?
She stared at him, her eyes pools of something awful, he couldn’t tell.