Then she heard feet again and her mother came toward the door to the kitchen, crossing and for a moment blotting the orifice. Yet she did not move, not even when her mother entered the kitchen. She stooped to the crack, her breathing regular and placid, hearing her mother clattering the stovelids behind her.
Then she saw the stranger for the first time and then she was holding her breath quietly, not even aware that she had ceased to breathe. She saw him standing beside the table in his shabby cloak, with his hat in his left hand. Vatch did not look up.
“My name is Saucier Weddel,” the stranger said.
“Soshay Weddel,” the girl breathed into the dry chinking, the crumbled and powdery wall. She could see him at full length, in his stained and patched and brushed cloak, with his head lifted a little and his face worn, almost gaunt, stamped with a kind of indomitable weariness and yet arrogant too, like a creature from another world with other air to breathe and another kind of blood to warm the veins. “Soshay Weddel,” she breathed.
“Take some whiskey,” Vatch said without moving.
Then suddenly, as it had been with the suspended breathing, she was not listening to the words at all, as though it were no longer necessary for her to hear, as though curiosity too had no place in the atmosphere in which the stranger dwelled and in which she too dwelled for the moment as she watched the stranger standing beside the table, looking at Vatch, and Vatch now turned in his chair, a cartridge in his hand, looking up at the stranger. She breathed quietly into the crack through which the voices came now without heat or significance out of that dark and smoldering and violent and childlike vanity of men:
“I reckon you know these when you see them, then?”
“Why not? We used them too. We never always had the time nor the powder to stop and make our own. So we had to use yours now and then. Especially during the last.”
“Maybe you would know them better if one exploded in your face.”
“Vatch.” She now looked at her father, because he had spoken. Her younger brother was raised a little in his chair, leaning a little forward, his mouth open a little. He was seventeen. Yet still the stranger stood looking quietly down at Vatch, his hat clutched against his worn cloak, with on his face that expression arrogant and weary and a little quizzical.
“You can show your other hand too,” Vatch said. “Don’t be afraid to leave your pistol go.”
“No,” the stranger said. “I am not afraid to show it.”
“Take some whiskey, then,” Vatch said, pushing the jug forward with a motion slighting and contemptuous.
“I am obliged infinitely,” the stranger said. “It’s my stomach. For three years of war I have had to apologize to my stomach; now, with peace, I must apologize for it. But if I might have a glass for my boy? Even after four years, he cannot stand cold.”
“Soshay Weddel,” the girl breathed into the crumbled dust beyond which the voices came, not yet raised yet forever irreconcilable and already doomed, the one blind victim, the other blind executioner:
“Or maybe behind your back you would know it better.”
“You, Vatch.”
“Stop, sir. If he was in the army for as long as one year, he has run too, once. Perhaps oftener, if he faced the Army of Northern Virginia.”
“Soshay Weddel,” the girl breathed, stooping. Now she saw Weddel, walking apparently straight toward her, a thick tumbler in his left hand and his hat crumpled beneath the same arm.
“Not that way,” Vatch said. The stranger paused and looked back at Vatch. “Where are you aiming to go?”
“To take this out to my boy,” the stranger said. “Out to the stable. I thought perhaps this door—” His face was in profile now, worn, haughty, wasted, the eyebrows lifted with quizzical and arrogant interrogation. Without rising Vatch jerked his head back and aside. “Come away from that door.” But the stranger did not stir. Only his head moved a little, as though he had merely changed the direction of his eyes.
“He’s looking at paw,” the girl breathed. “He’s waiting for paw to tell him. He aint skeered of Vatch. I knowed it.”
“Come away from that door,” Vatch said. “You damn nigra.”
“So it’s my face and not my uniform,” the stranger said. “And you fought four years to free us, I understand.”
Then she heard her father speak again. “Go out the front way and around the house, stranger,” he said.
“Soshay Weddel,” the girl said. Behind her her mother clattered at the stove. “Soshay Weddel,” she said. She did not say it aloud. She breathed again, deep and quiet and without haste. “It’s like a music. It’s like a singing.”
III
The Negro was squatting in the hallway of the barn, the sagging and broken stalls of which were empty save for the two horses. Beside him was a worn rucksack, open. He was engaged in polishing a pair of thin dancing slippers with a cloth and a tin of paste, empty save for a thin rim of polish about the circumference of the tin.
Beside him on a piece of plank sat one finished shoe. The upper was cracked; it had a crude sole nailed recently and crudely on by a clumsy hand.
“Thank de Lawd folks cant see de bottoms of yo feets,” the Negro said. “Thank de Lawd it’s just dese hyer mountain trash. I’d even hate fo Yankees to see yo feets in dese things.” He rubbed the shoe, squinted at it, breathed upon it, rubbed it again upon his squatting flank.
“Here,” Weddel said, extending the tumbler. It contained a liquid as colorless as water.
The Negro stopped, the shoe and the cloth suspended. “Which?” he said. He looked at the glass. “Whut’s dat?”
“Drink it,” Weddel said.
“Dat’s water. Whut you bringing me water fer?”
“Take it,” Weddel said. “It’s not water.”
The Negro took the glass gingerly. He held it as if it contained nitroglycerin. He looked at it, blinking, bringing the glass slowly under his nose. He blinked. “Where’d you git dis hyer?” Weddel didn’t answer. He had taken up the finished slipper, looking at it. The Negro held the glass under his nose. “It smell kind of like it ought to,” he said. “But I be dawg ef it look like anything. Dese folks fixing to pizen you.” He tipped the glass and sipped gingerly, and lowered the glass, blinking.
“I didn’t drink any of it,” Weddel said. He set the slipper down.
“You better hadn’t,” the Negro said. “When here I done been fo years trying to take care of you en git you back home like whut Mistis tole me to do, and here you sleeping in folks’ barns at night like a tramp, like a pater-roller nigger—” He put the glass to his lips, tilting it and his head in a single jerk.
He lowered the glass, empty; his eyes were closed; he said, “Whuf!” shaking his head with a violent, shuddering motion. “It smells right, and it act right. But I be dawg ef it look right. I reckon you better let it alone, like you started out. When dey try to make you drink it you send um to me. I done already stood so much I reckon I can stand a little mo fer Mistis’ sake.”
He took up the shoe and the cloth again. Weddel stooped above the rucksack. “I want my pistol,” he said.
Again the Negro ceased, the shoe and the cloth poised. “Whut fer?” He leaned and looked up the muddy slope toward the cabin. “Is dese folks Yankees?” he said in a whisper.
“No,” Weddel said, digging in the rucksack with his left hand. The Negro did not seem to hear him.
“In Tennessee? You tole me we was in Tennessee, where Memphis is, even if you never tole me it was all disyer up-and-down land in de Memphis country. I know I never seed none of um when I went to Memphis wid yo paw dat time. But you says so. And now you telling me dem Memphis folks is Yankees?”
“Where is the pistol?” Weddel said.
“I done tole you,” the Negro said. “Acting like you does. Letting dese folks see you come walking up de road, leading Caesar caze you think he tired; making me ride whilst you walks when I can outwalk you any day you ever lived and you knows it, even if I is fawty en you twenty-eight. I ghy tell yo maw. I ghy tell um.”
Weddel rose, in his hand a heavy cap-and-ball revolver. He chuckled it in his single hand, drawing the hammer back, letting it down again. The Negro watched him, crouched like an ape in the blue Union army overcoat. “You put dat thing back,” he said. “De war done wid now. Dey tole us back dar at Ferginny it was done wid. You dont need no pistol now. You put it back, you hear me?”
“I’m going to bathe,” Weddel said. “Is my shirt—”
“Bathe where? In whut? Dese folks aint never seed a bathtub.”
“Bathe at the well. Is my shirt ready?”
“Whut dey is of it. . . . You put dat pistol back, Marse Soshay. I ghy tell yo maw on you. I ghy tell um. I just wish Marster was here.”
“Go to the kitchen,” Weddel said. “Tell them
