It was as though on that louring and driving day he had crossed and then recrossed a kind of Lethe, emerging, being permitted to escape, buying as the price of life a world outwardly the same yet subtly and irrevocably altered.
It was as though the white woman had not only never quitted the house, she had never existed — the object which they buried in the orchard two days later (they still could not cross the valley to reach the churchyard) a thing of no moment, unsanctified, nothing; his own wife, the black woman, now living alone in the house which old Cass had built for them when they married, keeping alive on the hearth the fire he had lit there on their wedding day and which had burned ever since though there was little enough cooking done on it now; — thus, until almost half a year had passed and one day he went to Zack Edmonds and said, “I wants my wife.
I needs her at home.” Then — and he hadn’t intended to say this. But there had been that half-year almost and himself alone keeping alive the fire which was to burn on the hearth until neither he nor Molly were left to feed it, himself sitting before it night after night through that spring and summer until one night he caught himself standing over it, furious, bursting, blind, the cedar water bucket already poised until he caught himself and set the bucket back on the shelf, still shaking, unable to remember taking the bucket up even — then he said: “I reckon you thought I wouldn’t take her back, didn’t you?”
The white man was sitting down. In age he and Lucas could have been brothers, almost twins too. He leaned slowly back in the chair, looking at Lucas. “Well, by God,” he said quietly. “So that’s what you think. What kind of a man do you think I am? What kind of a man do you call yourself?”
“I’m a nigger,” Lucas said. “But I’m a man too. I’m more than just a man. The same thing made my pappy that made your grandmaw. I’m going to take her back.”
“By God,” Edmonds said, “I never thought to ever pass my oath to a nigger. But I will swear — —” Lucas had turned, already walking away. He whirled. The other was standing now. They faced one another, though for the instant Lucas couldn’t even see him.
“Not to me!” Lucas said. “I wants her in my house to-night. You understand?” He went back to the field, to the plough standing in midfurrow where he had left it when he discovered suddenly that he was going now, this moment, to the commissary or the house or wherever the white man would be, into his bedroom if necessary, and confront him. He had tied the mule under a tree, the gear still on it.
He put the mule back to the plough and ploughed again. When he turned at the end of each furrow he could have seen his house. But he never looked toward it, not even when he knew that she was in it again, home again, not even when fresh woodsmoke began to rise from the chimney as it had not risen in the middle of the morning in almost half a year; not even when at noon she came along the fence, carrying a pail and a covered pan and stood looking at him for a moment before she set the pail and pan down and went back.
Then the plantation bell rang for noon, the flat, musical, deliberate clangs. He took the mule out and watered and fed it and only then went to the fence-corner and there it was — the pan of still-warm biscuit, the lard pail half full of milk, the tin worn and polished with scouring and long use until it had a patina like old silver — just as it had used to be.
Then the afternoon was done too. He stabled and fed Edmonds’s mule and hung the gear on its appointed peg against tomorrow. Then in the lane, in the green middle-dusk of summer while the fireflies winked and drifted and the whippoorwills choired back and forth and the frogs thumped and grunted along the creek, he looked at his house for the first time, at the thin plume of supper smoke windless above the chimney, his breathing harder and harder and deeper and deeper until his faded shirt strained at the buttons on his chest.
Maybe when he got old he would become resigned to it. But he knew he would never, not even if he got to be a hundred and forgot her face and name and the white man’s and his too. I will have to kill him, he thought, or I will have to take her and go away. For an instant he thought of going to the white man and telling him they were leaving, now, tonight, at once.
Only if I were to see him again right now, I might kill him, he thought. I think I have decided which I am going to do, but if I was to see him, meet him now, my mind might change. — And that’s a man! he thought. He keeps her in the house with him six months and I dont do nothing: he sends her back to me and I kills him.
It would be like I had done said aloud to the whole world that he never sent her back because I told him to but he give her back to me because he was tired of her.
He entered the gate in the paling fence which he had built himself when old Cass gave them the house, as he had hauled and laid the field stone path across the grassless yard which his wife used to sweep every morning with a broom of bound willow twigs, sweeping the clean dust into curving intricate patterns among the flower-beds outlined with broken brick and bottles and shards of china and coloured glass.
She had returned from time to time during the spring to work the flower-beds so that they bloomed as usual — the hardy, blatant blooms loved of her and his race: prince’s feather and sunflower, canna and hollyhock — but until today the paths among them had not been swept since last year. Yes, he thought. I got to kill him or I got to leave here.
He entered the hall, then the room where he had lit the fire two years ago which was to have outlasted both of them. He could not always remember afterward what he had said but he never forgot the amazed and incredulous rage with which he thought, Why she aint even knowed unto right now that I ever even suspected.
She was sitting before the hearth where the supper was cooking, holding the child, shielding its face from the light and heat with her hand — a small woman even then, years before her flesh, her very bones apparently, had begun to wither and shrink inward upon themselves, and he standing over her, looking down not at his own child but at the face of the white one nuzzling into the dark swell of her breast — not Edmonds’s wife but his own who had been lost; not his son but the white man’s who had been restored to him, his voice loud, his clawed hand darting toward the child as her hand sprang and caught his wrist.
“Whar’s ourn?” he cried. “Whar’s mine?”
“Right yonder on the bed, sleeping!” she said. “Go and look at him!” He didn’t move, standing over her, locked hand and wrist with her. “I couldn’t leave him! You know I couldn’t! I had to bring him!”
“Dont lie to me!” he said. “Dont tell me Zack Edmonds know where he is.”
“He does know! I told him!” He broke his wrist free, flinging her hand and arm back; he heard the faint click of her teeth when the back of her hand struck her chin and he watched her start to raise her hand to her mouth, then let it fall again.
“That’s right,” he said. “It aint none of your blood that’s trying to break out and run!”
“You fool!” she cried. “Oh God,” she said. “Oh God. All right. I’ll take him back. I aimed to anyway. Aunt Thisbe can fix him a sugar-tit — —”
“Not you,” he said. “And not me even. Do you think Zack Edmonds is going to stay in that house yonder when he gets back and finds out he is gone? No!” he said. “I went to Zack Edmonds’s house and asked him for my wife. Let him come to my house and ask me for his son!”
He waited on the gallery. He could see, across the valley, the gleam of light in the other house. He just aint got home yet, he thought. He breathed slow and steady. It aint no hurry. He will do something and then I will do something and it will be all over. It will be all right. Then the light disappeared. He began to say quietly, aloud: “Now. Now. He will have to have time
