Beloved, Page 2

  “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 t
he 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.”