فصل 01

Beloved Sixty million and more

I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.

             ROMANS 9: 25 1

124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old–as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the door sill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once–the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, their mother; and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. It didn’t have a number then, because Cincinnati didn’t stretch that far. In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them.

Baby Suggs didn’t even raise her head. From her sickbed she heard them go but that wasn’t the reason she lay still. It was a wonder to her that her grandsons had taken so long to realize that every house wasn’t like the one on Bluestone Road. Suspended between the nas tiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn’t get interested in leaving life or living it, let alone the fright of two creeping-off boys. Her past had been like her present–intolerable–and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color.

“Bring a little lavender in, if you got any. Pink, if you don’t.”

And Sethe would oblige her with anything from fabric to her own tongue. Winter in Ohio was especially rough if you had an appetite for color. Sky provided the only drama, and counting on a Cincinnati horizon for life’s principal joy was reckless indeed. So Sethe and the girl Denver did what they could, and what the house permitted, for her. Together they waged a perfunctory battle against the outrageous behavior of that place; against turned-over slop jars, smacks on the behind, and gusts of sour air. For they understood the source of the outrage as well as they knew the source of light.

Baby Suggs died shortly after the brothers left, with no interest whatsoever in their leave-taking or hers, and right afterward Sethe and Denver decided to end the persecution by calling forth the ghost that tried them so. Perhaps a conversation, they thought, an exchange of views or something would help. So they held hands and said, “Come on. Come on. You may as well just come on.”

The sideboard took a step forward but nothing else did.

“Grandma Baby must be stopping it,” said Denver. She was ten and still mad at Baby Suggs for dying.

Sethe opened her eyes. “I doubt that,” she said.

“Then why don’t it come?”

“You forgetting how little it is,” said her mother. “She wasn’t even two years old when she died. Too little to understand. Too little to talk much even.”

“Maybe she don’t want to understand,” said Denver.

“Maybe. But if she’d only come, I could make it clear to her.”

Sethe released her daughter’s hand and together they pushed the sideboard back against the wall. Outside a driver whipped his horse into the gallop local people felt necessary when they passed 124.

“For a baby she throws a powerful spell,” said Denver.

“No more powerful than the way I loved her,” Sethe answered and there it was again. The welcoming cool of unchiseled headstones; the one she selected to lean against on tiptoe, her knees wide open as any grave. Pink as a fingernail it was, and sprinkled with glittering chips. Ten minutes, he said. You got ten minutes I’ll do it for free.

Ten minutes for seven letters. With another ten could she have gotten “Dearly” too? She had not thought to ask him and it bothered her still that it might have been possible–that for twenty minutes, a half hour, say, she could have had the whole thing, every word she heard the preacher say at the funeral (and all there was to say, surely) engraved on her baby’s headstone: Dearly Beloved. But what she got, settled for, was the one word that mattered. She thought it would be enough, rutting among the headstones with the engraver, his young son looking on, the anger in his face so old; the appetite in it quite new. That should certainly be enough. Enough to answer one more preacher, one more abolitionist and a town full of disgust.

Counting on the stillness of her own soul, she had forgotten the other one: the soul of her baby girl. Who would have thought that a little old baby could harbor so much rage? Rutting among the stones under the eyes of the engraver’s son was not enough. Not only did she have to live out her years in a house palsied by the baby’s fury at having its throat cut, but those ten minutes she spent pressed up against dawn-colored stone studded with star chips, her knees wide open as the grave, were longer than life, more alive, more pulsating than the baby blood that soaked her fingers like oil.

“We could move,” she suggested once to her mother-in-law.

“What’d be the point?” asked Baby Suggs. “Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby. My husband’s spirit was to come back in here? or yours? Don’t talk to me. You lucky. You got three left.

Three pulling at your skirts and just one raising hell from the other side. Be thankful, why don’t you? I had eight. Every one of them gone away from me. Four taken, four chased, and all, I expect, worrying somebody’s house into evil.” Baby Suggs rubbed her eyebrows.

“My first-born. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that? Eight children and that’s all I remember.”

“That’s all you let yourself remember,” Sethe had told her, but she was down to one herself–one alive, that is–the boys chased off by the dead one, and her memory of Buglar was fading fast. Howard at least had a head shape nobody could forget. As for the rest, she worked hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe. Unfortunately her brain was devious. She might be hurrying across a field, running practically, to get to the pump quickly and rinse the chamomile sap from her legs. Nothing else would be in her mind. The picture of the men coming to nurse her was as lifeless as the nerves in her back where the skin buckled like a washboard. Nor was there the faintest scent of ink or the cherry gum and oak bark from which it was made. Nothing. Just the breeze cooling her face as she rushed toward water. And then sopping the chamomile away with pump water and rags, her mind fixed on getting every last bit of sap off–on her carelessness in taking a shortcut across the field just to save a half mile, and not noticing how high the weeds had grown until the itching was all the way to her knees. Then something. The plash of water, the sight of her shoes and stockings awry on the path where she had flung them; or Here Boy lapping in the puddle near her feet, and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her–remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys. Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that.

When the last of the chamomile was gone, she went around to the front of the house, collecting her shoes and stockings on the way.

As if to punish her further for her terrible memory, sitting on the porch not forty feet away was Paul D, the last of the Sweet Home men. And although she she said, “Is that you?”

“What’s left.” He stood up and smiled. “How you been, girl, besides barefoot?”

When she laughed it came out loose and young. “Messed up my legs back yonder. Chamomile.”

He made a face as though tasting a teaspoon of something bitter.

“I don’t want to even hear ‘bout it. Always did hate that stuff.”

Sethe balled up her stockings and jammed them into her pocket.

“Come on in.”

“Porch is fine, Sethe. Cool out here.” He sat back down and looked at the meadow on the other side of the road, knowing the eagerness he felt would be in his eyes.

“Eighteen years,” she said softly.

“Eighteen,” he repeated. “And I swear I been walking every one of em. Mind if I join you?” He nodded toward her feet and began unlacing his shoes.

“You want to soak them? Let me get you a basin of water.” She moved closer to him to enter the house.

“No, uh uh. Can’t baby feet. A whole lot more tramping they got to do yet.”

“You can’t leave right away, Paul D. You got to stay awhile.”

“Well, long enough to see Baby Suggs, anyway. Where is she?”

“Dead.”

“Aw no. When?”

“Eight years now. Almost nine.”

“Was it hard? I hope she didn’t die hard.”

Sethe shook her head. “Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part. Sorry you missed her though. Is that what you came by for?”

“That’s some of what I came for. The rest is you. But if all the truth be known, I go anywhere these days. Anywhere they let me sit down.”

“You looking good.”

“Devil’s confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad.” He looked at her and the word “bad” took on another meaning.

Sethe smiled. This is the way they were–had been. All of the Sweet Home men, before and after Halle, treated her to a mild brotherly flirtation, so subtle you had to scratch for it.

Except for a heap more hair and some waiting in his eyes, he looked the way he had in Kentucky. Peachstone skin; straight-backed.

For a man with an immobile face it was amazing how ready it was to smile, or blaze or be sorry with you. As though all you had to do was get his attention and right away he produced the feeling you were feeling. With less than a blink, his face seemed to change–underneath it lay the activity.

“I wouldn’t have to ask about him, would I? You’d tell me if there was anything to tell, wouldn’t you?” Sethe looked down at her feet and saw again the sycamores.

“I’d tell you. Sure I’d tell you. I don’t know any more now than I did then.” Except for the churn, he thought, and you don’t need to know that. “You must think he’s still alive.”

“No. I think he’s dead. It’s not being sure that keeps him alive.”

“What did Baby Suggs think?”

“Same, but to listen to her, all her children is dead. Claimed she felt each one go the very day and hour.”

“When she say Halle went?”

“Eighteen fifty-five. The day my baby was born.”

“You had that baby, did you? Never thought you’d make it.”

He chuckled. “Running off pregnant.”

“Had to. Couldn’t be no waiting.” She lowered her head and thought, as he did, how unlikely it was that she had made it. And if it hadn’t been for that girl looking for velvet, she never would have.

“All by yourself too.” He was proud of her and annoyed by her.

Proud she had done it; annoyed that she had not needed Halle or him in the doing.

“Almost by myself. Not all by myself. A whitegirl helped me.”

“Then she helped herself too, God bless her.”

“You could stay the night, Paul D.”

“You don’t sound too steady in the offer.”

Sethe glanced beyond his shoulder toward the closed door. “Oh it’s truly meant. I just hope you’ll pardon my house. Come on in.

Talk to Denver while I cook you something.”

Paul D tied his shoes together, hung them over his shoulder and followed her through the door straight into a pool of red and undulating light that locked him where he stood.

“You got company?” he whispered, frowning.

“Off and on,” said Sethe.

“Good God.” He backed out the door onto the porch. “What kind of evil you got in here?”

“It’s not evil, just sad. Come on. Just step through.”

He looked at her then, closely. Closer than he had when she first rounded the house on wet and shining legs, holding her shoes and stockings up in one hand, her skirts in the other. Halle’s girl–the one with iron eyes and backbone to match. He had never seen her hair in Kentucky. And though her face was eighteen years older than when last he saw her, it was softer now. Because of the hair. A face too still for comfort; irises the same color as her skin, which, in that still face, used to make him think of a mask with mercifully punched out eyes. Halle’s woman. Pregnant every year including the year she sat by the fire telling him she was going to run. Her three children she had already packed into a wagonload of others in a caravan of Negroes crossing the river. They were to be left with Halle’s mother near Cincinnati. Even in that tiny shack, leaning so close to the fire you could smell the heat in her dress, her eyes did not pick up a flicker of light. They were like two wells into which he had trouble gazing. Even punched out they needed to be covered, lidded, marked with some sign to warn folks of what that emptiness held. So he looked instead at the fire while she told him, because her husband was not there for the telling. Mr. Garner was dead and his wife had a lump in her neck the size of a sweet potato and unable to speak to anyone. She leaned as close to the fire as her pregnant belly allowed and told him, Paul D, the last of the Sweet Home men.

There had been six of them who belonged to the farm, Sethe the only female. Mrs. Garner, crying like a baby, had sold his brother to pay off the debts that surfaced the minute she was widowed. Then schoolteacher arrived to put things in order. But what he did broke three more Sweet Home men and punched the glittering iron out of Sethe’s eyes, leaving two open wells that did not reflect firelight.

Now the iron was back but the face, softened by hair, made him trust her enough to step inside her door smack into a pool of pulsing red light.

She was right. It was sad. Walking through it, a wave of grief soaked him so thoroughly he wanted to cry. It seemed a long way to the normal light surrounding the table, but he made it–dry-eyed and lucky.

“You said she died soft. Soft as cream,” he reminded her.

“That’s not Baby Suggs,” she said.

“Who then?”

“My daughter. The one I sent ahead with the boys.”

“She didn’t live?”

“No. The one I was carrying when I run away is all I got left.

Boys gone too. Both of em walked off just before Baby Suggs died.”

Paul D looked at the spot where the grief had soaked him. The red was gone but a kind of weeping clung to the air where it had been.

Probably best, he thought. If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up. Still… if her boys were gone…

“No man? You here by yourself?”

“Me and Denver,” she said.

“That all right by you?”

“That’s all right by me.”

She saw his skepticism and went on. “I cook at a restaurant in town. And I sew a little on the sly.”

Paul D smiled then, remembering the bedding dress. Sethe was thirteen when she came to Sweet Home and already iron-eyed. She was a timely present for Mrs. Garner who had lost Baby Suggs to her husband’s high principles. The five Sweet Home men looked at the new girl and decided to let her be. They were young and so sick with the absence of women they had taken to calves. Yet they let the iron-eyed girl be, so she could choose in spite of the fact that each one would have beaten the others to mush to have her. It took her a year to choose–a long, tough year of thrashing on pallets eaten up with dreams of her. A year of yearning, when rape seemed the solitary gift of life. The restraint they had exercised possible only because they were Sweet Home men–the ones Mr. Garner bragged about while other farmers shook their heads in warning at the phrase.

“Y’all got boys,” he told them. “Young boys, old boys, picky boys, stroppin boys. Now at Sweet Home, my niggers is men every one of em. Bought em thataway, raised em thataway. Men every one.”

“Beg to differ, Garner. Ain’t no nigger men.”

“Not if you scared, they ain’t.” Garner’s smile was wide. “But if you a man yourself, you’ll want your niggers to be men too.”

“I wouldn’t have no nigger men round my wife.”

It was the reaction Garner loved and waited for. “Neither would I,” he said. “Neither would I,” and there was always a pause before the neighbor, or stranger, or peddler, or brother-in-law or whoever it was got the meaning. Then a fierce argument, sometimes a fight, and Garner came home bruised and pleased, having demonstrated one more time what a real Kentuckian was: one tough enough and smart enough to make and call his own niggers men.

And so they were: Paul D Garner, Paul F Garner, Paul A Garner, Halle Suggs and Sixo, the wild man. All in their twenties, minus women, fucking cows, dreaming of rape, thrashing on pallets, rubbing their thighs and waiting for the new girl–the one who took Baby Suggs’ place after Halle bought her with five years of Sundays.

Maybe that was why she chose him. A twenty-year-old man so in love with his mother he gave up five years of Sabbaths just to see her sit down for a change was a serious recommendation.

She waited a year. And the Sweet Home men abused cows while they waited with her. She chose Halle and for their first bedding she sewed herself a dress on the sly.

“Won’t you stay on awhile? Can’t nobody catch up on eighteen years in a day.”

Out of the dimness of the room in which they sat, a white staircase climbed toward the blue-and-white wallpaper of the second floor.

Paul D could see just the beginning of the paper; discreet flecks of yellow sprinkled among a blizzard of snowdrops all backed by blue.

The luminous white of the railing and steps kept him glancing toward it. Every sense he had told him the air above the stairwell was charmed and very thin. But the girl who walked down out of that air was round and brown with the face of an alert doll.

Paul D looked at the girl and then at Sethe who smiled saying, “Here she is my Denver. This is Paul D, honey, from Sweet Home.”

“Good morning, Mr. D.”

“Garner, baby. Paul D Garner.”

“Yes sir.”

“Glad to get a look at you. Last time I saw your mama, you were pushing out the front of her dress.”

“Still is,” Sethe smiled, “provided she can get in it.”

Denver stood on the bottom step and was suddenly hot and shy.

It had been a long time since anybody (good-willed whitewoman, preacher, speaker or newspaperman) sat at their table, their sympathetic voices called liar by the revulsion in their eyes. For twelve years, long before Grandma Baby died, there had been no visitors of any sort and certainly no friends. No coloredpeople. Certainly no hazelnut man with too long hair and no notebook, no charcoal, no oranges, no questions. Someone her mother wanted to talk to and would even consider talking to while barefoot. Looking, in fact acting, like a girl instead of the quiet, queenly woman Denver had known all her life. The one who never looked away, who when a man got stomped to death by a mare right in front of Sawyer’s restaurant did not look away; and when a sow began eating her own litter did not look away then either. And when the baby’s spirit picked up Here Boy and slammed him into the wall hard enough to break two of his legs and dislocate his eye, so hard he went into convulsions and chewed up his tongue, still her mother had not looked away. She had taken a hammer, knocked the dog unconscious, wiped away the blood and saliva, pushed his eye back in his head and set his leg bones. He recovered, mute and off-balance, more because of his untrustworthy eye than his bent legs, and winter, summer, drizzle or dry, nothing could persuade him to enter the house again.

Now here was this woman with the presence of mind to repair a dog gone savage with pain rocking her crossed ankles and looking away from her own daughter’s body. As though the size of it was more than vision could bear. And neither she nor he had on shoes.

Hot, shy, now Denver was lonely. All that leaving: first her brothers, then her grandmother–serious losses since there were no children willing to circle her in a game or hang by their knees from her porch railing. None of that had mattered as long as her mother did not look away as she was doing now, making Denver long, downright long, for a sign of spite from the baby ghost.

“She’s a fine-looking young lady,” said Paul D. “Fine-looking.

Got her daddy’s sweet face.”

“You know my father?”

“Knew him. Knew him well.”

“Did he, Ma’am?” Denver fought an urge to realign her affection.

“Of course he knew your daddy. I told you, he’s from Sweet Home.”

Denver sat down on the bottom step. There was nowhere else gracefully to go. They were a twosome, saying “Your daddy” and “Sweet Home” in a way that made it clear both belonged to them and not to her. That her own father’s absence was not hers. Once the absence had belonged to Grandma Baby–a son, deeply mourned because he was the one who had bought her out of there. Then it was her mother’s absent husband. Now it was this hazelnut stranger’s absent friend. Only those who knew him (“knew him well”) could claim his absence for themselves. Just as only those who lived in Sweet Home could remember it, whisper it and glance sideways at one another while they did. Again she wished for the baby ghost–its anger thrilling her now where it used to wear her out. Wear her out.

“We have a ghost in here,” she said, and it worked. They were not a twosome anymore. Her mother left off swinging her feet and being girlish. Memory of Sweet Home dropped away from the eyes of the man she was being girlish for. He looked quickly up the lightning-white stairs behind her.

“So I hear,” he said. “But sad, your mama said. Not evil.”

“No sir,” said Denver, “not evil. But not sad either.”

“What then?”

“Rebuked. Lonely and rebuked.”

“Is that right?” Paul D turned to Sethe.

“I don’t know about lonely,” said Denver’s mother. “Mad, maybe, but I don’t see how it could be lonely spending every minute with us like it does.”

“Must be something you got it wants.”

Sethe shrugged. “It’s just a baby.”

“My sister,” said Denver. “She died in this house.”

Paul D scratched the hair under his jaw. “Reminds me of that headless bride back behind Sweet Home. Remember that, Sethe? Used to roam them woods regular.”

“How could I forget? Worrisome…”

“How come everybody run off from Sweet Home can’t stop talking about it? Look like if it was so sweet you would have stayed.”

“Girl, who you talking to?”

Paul D laughed. “True, true. She’s right, Sethe. It wasn’t sweet and it sure wasn’t home.” He shook his head.

“But it’s where we were,” said Sethe. “All together. Comes back whether we want it to or not.” She shivered a little. A light ripple of skin on her arm, which she caressed back into sleep. “Denver,” she said, “start up that stove. Can’t have a friend stop by and don’t feed him.”

“Don’t go to any trouble on my account,” Paul D said.

“Bread ain’t trouble. The rest I brought back from where I work.

Least I can do, cooking from dawn to noon, is bring dinner home.

You got any objections to pike?”

“If he don’t object to me I don’t object to him.”

At it again, thought Denver. Her back to them, she jostled the kindlin and almost lost the fire. “Why don’t you spend the night, Mr. Garner? You and Ma’am can talk about Sweet Home all night long.”

Sethe took two swift steps to the stove, but before she could yank Denver’s collar, the girl leaned forward and began to cry.

“What is the matter with you? I never knew you to behave this way.”

“Leave her be,” said Paul D. “I’m a stranger to her.”

“That’s just it. She got no cause to act up with a stranger. Oh baby, what is it? Did something happen?”

But Denver was shaking now and sobbing so she could not speak.

The tears she had not shed for nine years wetting her far too womanly breasts.

“I can’t no more. I can’t no more.”

“Can’t what? What can’t you?”

“I can’t live here. I don’t know where to go or what to do, but I can’t live here. Nobody speaks to us. Nobody comes by. Boys don’t like me. Girls don’t either.”

“Honey, honey.”

“What’s she talking ‘bout nobody speaks to you?” asked Paul D.

“It’s the house. People don’t–”

“It’s not! It’s not the house. It’s us! And it’s you!”

“Denver!”

“Leave off, Sethe. It’s hard for a young girl living in a haunted house. That can’t be easy.”

“It’s easier than some other things.”

“Think, Sethe. I’m a grown man with nothing new left to see or do and I’m telling you it ain’t easy. Maybe you all ought to move.

Who owns this house?”

Over Denver’s shoulder Sethe shot Paul D a look of snow. “What you care?”

“They won’t let you leave?”

“No.”

“Sethe.”

“No moving. No leaving. It’s all right the way it is.”

“You going to tell me it’s all right with this child half out of her mind?”

Something in the house braced, and in the listening quiet that followed Sethe spoke.

“I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running–from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D Garner: it cost too much! Do you hear me?

It cost too much. Now sit down and eat with us or leave us be.”

Paul D fished in his vest for a little pouch of tobacco–concentrating on its contents and the knot of its string while Sethe led Denver into the keeping room that opened off the large room he was sitting in. He had no smoking papers, so he fiddled with the pouch and listened through the open door to Sethe quieting her daughter. When she came back she avoided his look and went straight to a small table next to the stove. Her back was to him and he could see all the hair he wanted without the distraction of her face.

“What tree on your back?”

“Huh.” Sethe put a bowl on the table and reached under it for flour.

“What tree on your back? Is something growing on your back?

I don’t see nothing growing on your back.”

“It’s there all the same.”

“Who told you that?”

“Whitegirl. That’s what she called it. I’ve never seen it and never will. But that’s what she said it looked like. A chokecherry tree.

Trunk, branches, and even leaves. Tiny little chokecherry leaves. But that was eighteen years ago. Could have cherries too now for all I know.”

Sethe took a little spit from the tip of her tongue with her forefinger.

Quickly, lightly she touched the stove. Then she trailed her fingers through the flour, parting, separating small hills and ridges of it, looking for mites. Finding none, she poured soda and salt into the crease of her folded hand and tossed both into the flour. Then she reached into a can and scooped half a handful of lard. Deftly she squeezed the flour through it, then with her left hand sprinkling water, she formed the dough.

“I had milk,” she said. “I was pregnant with Denver but I had milk for my baby girl. I hadn’t stopped nursing her when I sent her on ahead with Howard and Buglar.”

Now she rolled the dough out with a wooden pin. “Anybody could smell me long before he saw me. And when he saw me he’d see the drops of it on the front of my dress. Nothing I could do about that. All I knew was I had to get my milk to my baby girl. Nobody was going to nurse her like me. Nobody was going to get it to her fast enough, or take it away when she had enough and didn’t know it. Nobody knew that she couldn’t pass her air if you held her up on your shoulder, only if she was lying on my knees. Nobody knew that but me and nobody had her milk but me. I told that to the women in the wagon. Told them to put sugar water in cloth to suck from so when I got there in a few days she wouldn’t have forgot me. The milk would be there and I would be there with it.”

“Men don’t know nothing much,” said Paul D, tucking his pouch back into his vest pocket, “but they do know a suckling can’t be away from its mother for long.”

“Then they know what it’s like to send your children off when your breasts are full.”

“We was talking ‘bout a tree, Sethe.”

“After I left you, those boys came in there and took my milk.

That’s what they came in there for. Held me down and took it. I told Mrs. Garner on em. She had that lump and couldn’t speak but her eyes rolled out tears. Them boys found out I told on em. Schoolteacher made one open up my back, and when it closed it made a tree. It grows there still.”

“They used cowhide on you?”

“And they took my milk.”

“They beat you and you was pregnant?”

“And they took my milk!”

The fat white circles of dough lined the pan in rows. Once more Sethe touched a wet forefinger to the stove. She opened the oven door and slid the pan of biscuits in. As she raised up from the heat she felt Paul D behind her and his hands under her breasts. She straightened up and knew, but could not feel, that his cheek was pressing into the branches of her chokecherry tree.

Not even trying, he had become the kind of man who could walk into a house and make the women cry. Because with him, in his presence, they could. There was something blessed in his manner.

Women saw him and wanted to weep–to tell him that their chest hurt and their knees did too. Strong women and wise saw him and told him things they only told each other: that way past the Change of Life, desire in them had suddenly become enormous, greedy, more savage than when they were fifteen, and that it embarrassed them and made them sad; that secretly they longed to die–to be quit of it–that sleep was more precious to them than any waking day. Young girls sidled up to him to confess or describe how well-dressed the visitations were that had followed them straight from their dreams.

Therefore, although he did not understand why this was so, he was not surprised when Denver dripped tears into the stovefire. Nor, fifteen minutes later, after telling him about her stolen milk, her mother wept as well. Behind her, bending down, his body an arc of kindness, he held her breasts in the palms of his hands. He rubbed his cheek on her back and learned that way her sorrow, the roots of it; its wide trunk and intricate branches. Raising his fingers to the hooks of her dress, he knew without seeing them or hearing any sigh that the tears were coming fast. And when the top of her dress was around her hips and he saw the sculpture her back had become, like the decorative work of an ironsmith too passionate for display, he could think but not say, “Aw, Lord, girl.” And he would tolerate no peace until he had touched every ridge and leaf of it with his mouth, none of which Sethe could feel because her back skin had been dead for years. What she knew was that the responsibility for her breasts, at last, was in somebody else’s hands.

Would there be a little space, she wondered, a little time, some way to hold off eventfulness, to push busyness into the corners of the room and just stand there a minute or two, naked from shoulder blade to waist, relieved of the weight of her breasts, smelling the stolen milk again and the pleasure of baking bread? Maybe this one time she could stop dead still in the middle of a cooking meal–not even leave the stove–and feel the hurt her back ought to. Trust things and remember things because the last of the Sweet Home men was there to catch her if she sank?