All Aunt Hagar's Children

ALL AUNT HAGAR’S CHILDREN

On what was to have been one of my last days in Washington, my mother, my aunt, and murdered Ike’s mother came up to the second-floor office I had been sharing with Samuel Jaffe. This was three weeks after Sam had gone to Israel, and a little more than nine months since I’d left the Korean War. When the big front door downstairs opened and shut, it shook the windows of our building on F Street, and as the three women came in I watched the giant window in our office do a quick, awful shaking, then slowly come to rest. I heard the three coming up the stairs and learned seconds later that it was murdered Ike’s mother who was wearing those heavy black old-lady shoes, which made the loudest sound as the women clumped their way up to me. This was two months since I’d told Sheila Larkin as kindly as I could that she and I were finished. “So, you have your way with this woman and now you tellin her to just disappear?” The three women were all the while talking, talking as easily as if they were sitting around over coffee and sweet rolls in one of their living rooms, the way they had no doubt been doing since before I was even a consideration in my mother’s eye. Then they were standing in my doorway, the three of them. I turned from the giant window showing me a beautiful day on F Street and faced them. I put down the box I was holding and brushed myself off; a man like me does not greet the woman who brought him into the world while holding a box of dusty belongings from an undistinguished life. This was a little more than a month since the white woman had died right in front of my eyes. “No, Sheila baby, that ain’t what I’m sayin at all.”

“Talked to Freddy, and he told me say hi,” my mother said. My older brother was studying to be a lawyer. She offered her cheeks and I kissed them, her face wrinkle-free. “I’m guiltless,” she once said to me. Her dark cheeks were lightly rouged. As a rule, my mother wasn’t demonstrative. She lived in a sphere all her own, where few things could intrude and hurt her anymore. She always let Freddy and me in, but she kept her eye on the door while we visited, lest we say something wrong and she had to show us out. I got a letter from Freddy three weeks after I hit Korea: “You’d best return alive or Mama will never be the same. She can’t stop crying.” I spent many Korean months trying to reconcile the mother to beat all mothers of my childhood with the mother in Freddy’s letters who was mourning me.

I touched my mother’s elbow and stepped around her to Aunt Penny. I kissed her cheek. She and Uncle Al owned a grocery store at 5th and O Streets, N.W. As children, Freddy and I had all the sweets boys could want. “Love ya,” Aunt Penny said. The three women were all wearing gloves on that warm day; theirs may have been the last generation of Negro women to go about the world in such a way. “Here, Aggie,” my aunt said, turning to Miss Agatha. I hugged Miss Agatha. I hadn’t seen her for months, though we had talked soon after I returned from Korea, when I made the obligatory visits in my uniform to family and friends: a Negro had gone off to the man’s war and survived to tell about it to all who had prayed for him. Miss Agatha’s only child had been murdered while I was in Korea, and Freddy had sent me the articles from the Daily News. Ike Appleton had always gone for bad. He beat me bloody when I was in junior high school, and Freddy found him and whipped him just as bad, and after that I never had any trouble from Ike. The articles had a picture of Ike in his high-school-graduation cap.

Miss Agatha’s face had enough lines for all three women—someone had come up behind Ike as he sat over supper and blown his brains out.

“You look well,” Miss Agatha said. “Maybe workin downtown mongst white folks grees with you.” When I was eight, I went to some boy’s birthday party and spent days telling Freddy about the good time I’d had and about all the boss gifts the boy had received. On the third day of all that talking, my mother, unsmiling, said to me, “Remember, every happy birthday boy is headed for his grave.”

I asked Miss Agatha, “How you been?”

“Fine. In my way.”

My mother came around me. I knew she had been behind me, taking the measure of me and the room, finding something she could use against me. She took off her gloves, slowly, one long finger after another. “She’s here to ask for your help,” my mother said. “Aggie thinks you know things. It ain’t for me to tell her different.” I looked at her. “She thinks her way.” Any day now, I was due to go off to Alaska to hunt for gold with a war buddy. (“I didn’t think white people let Negroes into white Alaska,” my mother said when I mentioned my plans.) The “favor” thing sounded like a big obstacle between me and gold and cars and clothes and more women than I could shake a dick at, as my buddy had put it. I was ready for a new place; I was a veteran of Washington, D.C., and there was nothing else for me to discover here. And I wanted to get far away, because I thought it might help me to stop thinking about that dead white woman. “A moll is gav vain ah rav und ah rabbit sin,” the woman had said as she was dying. The night before, I dreamed I had been able to save her. She had gotten up off the streetcar tracks and walked away. “A favor. We don’t ask for much,” my mother was saying.

That could be true about women. Even Sheila Larkin had said it that last time, when I told her we were finished: “God knows I don’t ask for much from you, man.” Maybe in Alaska I could learn something new about women and become a different kind of veteran. My mother opened her pocketbook and dropped her gloves into it and, while looking at me, one of her two living children, snapped it shut. That sound was all the room had.

“They killed my Ike,” Miss Agatha said, as if I needed to be reminded. He was one of only sixty-six people murdered in D.C. that first year I was away. “Near bout two years gone by, and they ain’t done any more than the day it happened.”

“If they are doin somethin, they keepin it secret,” Aunt Penny said. “One more colored boy outa their hair. It’s a shame before God, the way they do all Aunt Hagar’s children.”

“Penny,” my mother said, “don’t get worked up now.” My mother was the youngest of them, Miss Agatha the oldest by at least five years. When the three were girls in Alabama, a white man had set out after Miss Agatha as they walked home from school. The man tried to drag her into the woods and have his way with her. My mother and my aunt picked up rocks and beat the man down to the ground until he was no more than an unconscious lump. In the woods, when it was done, the girls held each other and cried, half out of their minds, afraid of what the world was going to do to them. They were barefoot. The man lay in the woods for three days, covered with tree bark and leaves, half in life, half in death. He was not a rich man, but he was white. So when the law discovered him, dead or alive, it would do everything to find out what had happened to him.

I got a chair for Miss Agatha. Once seated, she pulled out her hatpins and took off her hat, a modest thing with a veil pulled back over it, black like her dress and black like her old-lady shoes with Cuban heels. A woman’s boy child deserved more than one year of mourning.

“I have waited and I done called the police,” Miss Agatha said. “I just wanna know who hurt my boy so I can put my mind to rest. I’ll leave the punishin up to God. But I must know. I even talked to a colored policeman at Number 2. You’d think a colored policeman would help me.”

“Trust what they do, Aggie, not the color of their skin, is what I say,” Aunt Penny said. “You put a Negro workin round white folks and he starts forgettin.”

“Miss Agatha, I’m no detective,” I said, looking first at her and then at my mother. I had been in the military police in Korea, doing nothing. Lording it over some Southern cracker for a bit. Helping drunks back to their tents and thinking myself blessed if I didn’t get puked on. But murder was a dance on the more complicated side of life. And I, a veteran hearing Alaska singing, didn’t want to ask any big questions and didn’t want anybody asking me any big questions. I was twenty-four and just starting to dance away on the easy side—a little soft-shoe here, a little soft-shoe there.

“You know a lot more than them fools at Number 2,” Aunt Penny said. Working in Sam Jaffe’s office, I wanted to say, wasn’t the same as finding a killer. Sam, a lawyer, did some private detective work, and I sometimes went along with him when I wasn’t filing. But mostly I just filed. A veteran doing ABCs.

“You the only thing close to the law we got,” my mother said. “Talk to Aggie. Listen to what she got to say. You know her. She was there when I birthed you.”

“Whatever you can do would be good,” Miss Agatha said. “It all just worries the heart so much. It worries the mind. I can’t sleep at night. A few crumbs of why would be better than what I’m gnawin on now.” She took off one glove and put her hand over mine. Flesh must meet flesh, my mother had taught her sons. Never shake hands with your glove on. Miss Agatha’s husband had died of a stroke four years ago. She was wearing her wedding ring, and it was shiny and unmarred.

“He’ll help us, Aggie. Don’t worry bout that,” Aunt Penny said, putting both hands on Miss Agatha’s shoulders. “They gonna pay, whoever did it.” Since Sam had left for Israel on business, I’d been leaning back in my chair facing that giant window onto F Street and imagining returning to Washington with Alaska gold. I saw myself walking down M Street, strutting about New York Avenue, my pockets bulging with nuggets, big pockets, big as some boy’s pockets fat with candy—your Mary Janes, your Squirrel Nuts, your fireballs.

It was my mother who came up with the idea of the three of them leaving Alabama. It was late evening of the day she and my aunt had beaten the white man. He still lay in the woods, alone except for what animals came, sniffed, and walked over him. All the Negroes who had any business knowing knew what had happened, but not a white soul knew. At first, the Negroes understood, the law would be thinking the culprit was a stranger from someplace else; it was a nice world the law and its people thought they had in Choctaw, Alabama, and coloreds in that place didn’t do bad things to white people, whom the law was built to protect.

The families of the three girls were sitting and standing around the parlor in Miss Agatha’s house. She was in her father’s arms on the settee. The youngest children were being fed in the kitchen. My grandfather, arms crossed and leaning in the doorway, said that the men in that room should go out and kill the white man if he wasn’t dead already. “Finish him for good,” he said. “I’ll kill him with my own hands and be done with it.”

No one said anything for some time. One boogeyman erased forever from a child’s life was tempting, and in the quiet their hearts reached for it. But everyone in that room feared God and wanted one day to sit in the aura of his majesty. And they wanted to be able to sit there in the happy company of my grandfather. That could not happen if he came before God with murder on his hands.

“Morris, we won’t have no talk of that,” my grandfather’s mother said eventually. She was sitting at the back of the room in a cane-bottomed chair, leaning over because she breathed best that way. She was not fifty years out of slavery. She was five years from death. She had seen death following her for more than three years. “Do it or leave me be.”

“Then what kinda talk is we gonna have, Mama?”

“Not none of my son goin out and killin somebody in cold blood.” My grandfather’s mother raised her head and looked at her son. Her walking stick, with a series of snakes carved into it, was across her lap. Someone had sent for the preacher, but he hadn’t arrived. He was a drinking man and Sunday was the only day he could be counted on. Miss Agatha had been attacked on a Wednesday.

My grandfather smiled. “In hot blood, then, Mama. I’ll kill him in hot blood.”

“Do nothin, Morris,” my grandfather’s mother said. “You can’t kill in Aggie’s name. What would become of her? Ask yoself that, son. What would become of Aggie? What would become of your own chirren if you had your way with him? What would come of Penny and Bertha if you killed that man?”

A moll is gav vain ah rev und ah rab-bit sin,” I said as I listened to the three women go back down the stairs. I watched them walk the few steps to 8th Street and turn the corner, heading to Kann’s Department Store. It was the Sabbath, so Sam’s wife, Dvera, was not upstairs in the back office. She and I rarely spoke, and I had never been up to the third floor. She made me nervous, moving about in her silence with those fat ankles.

I called my brother, whom Sam had encouraged to become a lawyer. He might know where I should start to look for a murderer. His wife, Joanne, told me he was out. Joanne was pregnant. A root worker had had Joanne throw ten hairpins up in the air and have them fall on one of Joanne’s head scarves. Examining the pattern of the fallen pins, the root worker predicted that Joanne would be having twin girls. The news excited my mother like nothing else I’d seen. I didn’t care. I was not a man to suffer the company of children. Joanne said, “I’ll have Freddy get in touch.” “No,” I said. “I guess it can wait.” Lying naked in her bed beside me, Sheila Larkin had said two months ago, “I’ll wait for you until you return from Alaska, man. I’ll wait.”

At about four, I closed the office and drove to Mojo’s in my Ford, the only meaningful thing I had bought with my army money, taking the route I thought would best help me to avoid Sheila Larkin. I had been very successful in avoiding Sheila since I’d broken up with her. I knew how vicious she could be. I did not want to go to Alaska with a face scarred by lye. At Mojo’s, on North Capitol just up from New York Avenue, Mojo’s wife, Harriet, told me he was away. I had a few sips of beer at the bar, and when Mary Saunders and Blondelle Steadman came in, I followed them to a booth. They had been in my brother’s class at Dunbar High School. I once thought I loved Mary.

“What you out and about for on a nice Saturday, soldier man?” Mary said. She had come from Jamaica when she was about twelve and Jamaica was still there when she talked. “Hear Alaska was calling you. You done had all our women and now you want theirs.” They were sharing a cherry Coke.

“Still going, but I have to do a few things fore I leave. Yall member Ike?” Blondelle nodded, and Mary drank some Coke. “Miss Agatha want me to find out who did it.”

They laughed. It went on for a good minute. They had been together for many years, so that now one woman sounded like the other. Blondelle called to Harriet behind the bar. “Heard the latest? Soldier man’s now a detective man. Like in the picture show.” Harriet held a glass up to the light to see how clean she had gotten it. “Next he’ll be a rocket-ship man, heh?” There were four women drinking milk shakes at the bar.

“The problem you have is everybody in the world hated Ike,” Mary said. “Except his mother and his wife. They had to like him, had to love him.” When I was a sophomore at Dunbar, and Mary was a senior, my brother told me I had nothing to lose by asking her out. “But after them two,” she said, “what you should do is close your eyes and put your finger on a list of names. Whichever one you pick, thas who did it.” I followed Mary from school one day in April. She was walking with Blondelle, who wouldn’t peel off so I could be alone with Mary and ask her out. In the end, I just went up to Mary and asked to speak to her private-like. When I was done, she went over to Blondelle and said, “Would you mind if he and I went out?” “I would indeed,” said Blondelle, who didn’t seem mad, didn’t sound upset. My brother kept a lot about the world from me. “If I had told you,” he said to me later, “it wouldn’t be the same as finding out yourself.”

“Miss Agatha’s in pain,” I said.

“We love Miss Aggie,” Blondelle said. “So we wish we could help, but we have nothin.” She wore glasses, and it struck me for the first time ever that she was pretty. How had I missed that? The April day that Mary told me no, she took my hand and held it long enough for me to know that there should be no hard feelings. Blondelle walked away. Mary kissed my mouth. There was a pleasant smell I came to associate with all colored women. If a man is to be rejected by a woman, he should be rejected by a woman like Mary, for then he might not be bitter about women. Blondelle was saying, “You know what a devil Ike could be. You could accuse anybody in Washington.” She sighed. “You have a high mountain to climb. And even if you do find the person, you gotta go back down that mountain and tell it to Miss Aggie.” She drank. “You been to where they killed him?”

“What?”

“Where he was killed? He lived downstairs from Miss Aggie. The second-floor place.”

“I ain’t been there.”

“They didn’t teach you that in detective school?” Mary said. Blondelle killed the Coke. “They never taught you to visit the scene of the crime? You should use some a that mother wit you was born with.”

Blondelle said to Mary, “Oh, you know the private-dick people don’t like using mother wit. That would be too much like right.”

I blinked and then blinked again. The white woman, lying across the streetcar tracks in the middle of New Jersey Avenue, was the first woman I had ever seen die. I never saw one woman die in Korea. Not one. Zetcha kender lock gadank za tira vos ear lair rent doe.

It was near on seven o’clock when I got to Mr. and Mrs. Fleming’s house on 6th Street, where I was renting a room. It was late September, and though there was some sun left, I didn’t want to visit a dead man’s place with night coming on. In Korea I had got used to dead men everywhere, but that was different from one dead man on a street where I had grown up. I had played with that dead man when he wasn’t either of those things. I had been a happy boy on M Street.

I took a nap, and as soon as I stepped through the dream door the dead white woman was waiting for me. She was alive again. She had a child on either side of her, and I kept thinking that those children would help me to save her, help me to keep her always alive.

I called Freddy on the Flemings’ telephone when I woke, but he hadn’t returned.

On Sunday, I cleaned my room and went to Ike’s apartment, at 423 M Street. First I visited Miss Agatha on the third floor. She was glad to see me and I was glad for that. When I told her what I wanted to do, she gave me the key to her son’s place below her. She herself hadn’t seen the apartment since the night she and Alona, his wife, five months pregnant then, had found Ike. The landlord had had trouble renting the place even after it was cleaned up, Miss Agatha said, and no one had lived there since; colored people believed dead people should stay dead, but they also knew that dead people tended to follow their own minds. Clinging to Miss Agatha’s dress was her granddaughter, not quite two years old. “Hi,” the kid kept saying to me. “Hi hi.” I nodded to her and went downstairs.

I turned the key every which way, but the door refused to give, and I finally had to push my way in with such force that the place shook. I flicked on the light, though the sun coming through the bare windows should have been all a man needed. I looked at my watch and sighed. There was furniture, but I figured it was show furniture the landlord had put there to entice a possible tenant.

A cheap snapshot of Ike and Alona was taped to the icebox. In the picture, sepia, torn at one corner, Alona was smiling, but Ike, wherever they were, looked somber. Alona had a determined look. Perhaps she had been trying to get Ike to smile.

For some reason, there was only one chair at the table. At first, I thought this chair facing the window was the one Ike had been sitting in when the guy shot him in the back of the head. But with all the blood and stuff there must have been, this couldn’t be the death chair.

In the bedroom there was a stripped-down double bed. At the head of the bed, on the left side, where a pillow would have been, I saw the faint brown ghost of blood. I knew that Ike wouldn’t have moved from that kitchen table once he was hit, so it was blood from another event. In the bathroom there was a rather large bottle of Mercurochrome and three bottles of iodine in the medicine cabinet and, under the sink, a pasteboard box with bandages. There was also half a box of Kotex. I sighed again. I shook the pasteboard box and clumps of hair appeared from under the bandages. What could the landlord have been thinking, leaving all that shit there?

I returned to the kitchen. Whoever had cleaned it had done a good job. The apartment could have been rented if someone saw that room and didn’t know its history. I stood in the middle of the kitchen and turned around and around, looking at everything as critically as I could for long seconds. I had no goddam idea what the hell I was doing.

Miss Agatha gave me sweet potato pie when I went back up. Alona was also at the table, holding the child. “Hi hi,” the kid kept saying to me. The pie was good, but it wasn’t reward enough for having to put up with that child.

“They say you’re going to Alaska,” Alona said once I was midway through the pie. I nodded. She had been one of the smartest students Dunbar had ever known, destined for things that I, with my average brain, could never imagine. “Hi hi,” the child said. In her junior year Alona had fallen in, as my mother would have said, with Ike, and after that she was walking around on the plain old earth just like me and everybody else the Dunbar teachers never cooed over. Alona said, “I once read a Life magazine article about a man in Alaska who was seeking solitude. He made a place for himself that was eighty miles in any direction from other people. He lived there for twenty years.”

“That ain’t for me,” I said. “I need bodies around.” “Hi hi,” the girl said. I waved to her. I was nearing the end of the pie. I wanted another piece and wondered if it would be worth it to put up with her.

Alona grinned. “You might try something like that when you get there. If the gold doesn’t pan out, try it and write to me.” There was something positive in the way she was talking, as if she had been to Alaska, looked around, and knew things would go good for me there.

“Alona’s decided to go on to Howard, go to college,” Miss Agatha said.

“Mama’s always bragging on whatever I do.”

“You deserve braggin on, child,” Miss Agatha said. “You know how much I believe in you, honey.” She said to me, “Alona’s my future.”

“Whatcha gonna be takin up?” I said, the way my mother would.

“I haven’t decided,” she said, and she looked a bit dreamy-like, like a man thinking about all the gold in his pockets. “I’ll decide down the road. Won’t I, sweetums? Won’t I, sweetums?” She stood the child up on her lap and kissed her face until she collapsed in laughter. After a bit, the child got down from Alona’s lap and scurried off to the living room. Alona stood up. “Have some more pie,” she said. “It was as good as usual, Mama,” and she put her arms around Miss Agatha and kissed her cheek and left.

“I don’t know what I would do without her,” Miss Agatha said. “Son, you find somethin down there?” She pointed her index finger down.

“I can’t say, ma’am, cause I’m just startin out. But I plan to keep on it. Don’t worry bout that.”

“He was into some things I would never appreciate, I have to tell you.” I nodded. “But towards the end I think he was tryin to get hisself together. Tryin to make things right with Alona, with the baby comin and all, you know. I’m sure it woulda been a new day for him.” She swept a few crumbs from the table into her hand and then brushed them with the other hand into her empty coffee cup. Watching the crumbs fall, I wanted to do the very best I could for her. “You might hear some bad things bout Ike. I can’t testify to that. People tend not to lie bout a dead man, so I can’t testify to anything they say. All I can say is that even if he was the Devil hisself, he was still mine. I gave him life.”

“Yes, ma’am.” I got up and took my plate and fork to the sink, the way I had been taught. I ran hot water onto the plate. “I’d best get on, Miss Agatha, but I’ll be back workin on things tomorrow.”

“Maybe you shouldna been workin today, on the Lord’s day. God might not appreciate it.”

I went home to clean up before going to my mother’s for Sunday supper. Every Sunday since I had finished high school and gone out on my own, my mother had made a big fried-chicken supper for herself, my brother, and me, usually with string beans, potatoes boiled with a bit of fatback, and corn bread with crackling. An apple or peach cobbler. Every other Sunday I got to choose the Kool-Aid, and I almost always picked grape. Freddy was a lime man. After Freddy married, his wife came, too, of course, so I got to enjoy my grape Kool-Aid only every third week. Joanne was into orange Kool-Aid, which I hated. A punk flavor. God only knew what shit their twin girls would choose, but I had no plans to be around when those two started showing up and spoiling everything and putting my choice of Kool-Aid off to the fifth or sixth week. Gold could buy grape Kool-Aid every day of a man’s life. My mother had never commanded that we be there each Sunday at six. It was simply in her sons’ blood to know to show up. I suspect that if the Korean War had been fought as close as Maryland or Pennsylvania, my blood would have sent me to her every Sunday.

Afraid I would see Sheila Larkin, I took the long way—down 4th Street, then along New York Avenue to 6th Street. Afraid of lye in my face. I felt bad about her, but she wasn’t in my future.

I sat on my bed in the upstairs back room and drank the last of some whiskey a friend had given me, listening to WOOK all the while. On Sundays WOOK was full of religious shit, and it always depressed the hell out of me. But I didn’t change the station. A moll is gav vain ah rav und ah rabbit sin. I put some water in the empty bottle to get the last of the juice out of it. Then I took out the booklet on Alaska and turned to page six, the one with “little known facts about our northern neighbor.” Alaska was not even a state. Zetcha kender lock, gadank za tira vos ear lair rent doe.

About a week before Sam Jaffe went to Israel, I was on the streetcar headed down New Jersey Avenue to see a friend in Northeast when I decided to get off and visit Aunt Penny and her husband, on 3rd Street. My car was acting hincty, so I had put it in the Ridge Street garage. Three women preceded me off the streetcar at L Street. One of them was a white woman. The first two women went on across the street to the sidewalk, but just as I was about to step down from the streetcar the white woman turned and held her arm out to me. I thought she wanted to get back on the car. I stepped down and to the side to make way. She was less than three feet from me. She took two steps toward me and began to collapse, her arm still out to me.

I heard her say, “A moll is gav vain ah rev und ah rabbit sin.”

I got to her before her head hit the ground.

She said, “Zetcha kender lock, gadank za tira vos ear lair rent doe.”

Her head was covered with a gray woollen scarf, which was much too heavy for a warm day. I could see that beneath the scarf there was a wig. I thought, If we can keep her wig in place, just the way it was when she walked out her front door, everything will be fine. Her dark blue dress came down to her ankles. She was far too young for the old-lady black shoes she had on. I lowered her head to the ground, and just as I did, she closed her eyes. I looked around for someone to help, but no one came. I kept thinking, Where in the world is that streetcar conductor? Where the hell is that man? Isn’t this his job? And then, seeing the stopped streetcar gleaming in the sun, I thought, Green and off-white are perfect colors for a streetcar. The woman struggled with each breath. I could see several colored women looking out the streetcar windows at me and the white woman.

I tilted her head back and tried to give her breath, the way the army had taught me. My mother had always told my brother and me that if she ever caught us kissing a white woman she would cut off our lips. “You ever try coolin soup with no lips? Try it and see. It won’t work. That soup will never cool and you’ll starve to death.”

For a long time, I tried to help the woman, but I began to see that only the breath of God could help her. Would that white streetcar conductor show up and think that I was trying something untoward? Would he try to kill me for doing the right thing? Try coolin that tomato soup yall love with no lips. Try it and see what it gets you boys. Three of the colored women on the streetcar came to us and knelt down. One caressed the white woman’s cheek. “It’s all right, son,” the colored woman said. I saw then that the white woman was dead. “You done your best. At least you walked with her all the rest a the way.” In the end, I laid the white woman’s head down on the ground, but a human head on metal tracks and concrete in the middle of a city street seemed so out of place that I put my hand under her head again. By and by, the dead woman let go of my other hand and one of the colored women soon put her own hand under her head where mine had been.

Another of the women took a new sweater with the tag still on it out of a Hecht’s bag and put it under the white woman’s head. I stood up. Traffic up and down New Jersey Avenue had stopped, and on any other day that would have been something to see. I went to the sidewalk and then I turned and went down L Street toward Northeast, which wasn’t the way to my aunt’s. Eventually, after a long time, I found my way to my mother’s house. She fixed me something to eat, and though I didn’t tell her about the white woman she saw how the hot food just went cold lying on the plate and said I should sleep at her place that night. I said I would go on home, but my mother said I would do no such thing.

I woke up Monday morning with the dead white woman speaking in my head. A moll and a rabbit…As I looked at my face in the mirror while I shaved, it came to me that I might not ever be able to get the voice out of my head. When my great-grandfather was a slave, a patroller who owned no slaves and little more than what he was wearing killed a slave who was coming back from seeing his wife on another plantation. The dead man had been my ancestor’s best friend. My great-grandfather called himself by the dead man’s name forever after that, and no one, not even his wife and seven children, could move him from it. I have that dead man’s name. Way down in Choctaw, Alabama, there are two names on my great-grandfather’s tombstone. Two dates of birth and two dates of death.

I didn’t do much about finding Ike’s murderer until the next Sunday. I spent some of that week getting stuff together at Sam’s office. The rest of the time I just hung out at Mojo’s. I didn’t take Miss Agatha’s advice about resting on the Lord’s day and went out that Sunday morning after breakfast to do what I could. My Ford was acting up again, so I left it in front of the house. I went up 6th Street. There was a big crowd around Daddy Grace’s church, but I didn’t see anyone I knew. I turned onto M. Sheila Larkin slept very late on Sunday, so I wasn’t afraid of meeting her.

I knocked at the front first-floor apartment in Miss Agatha’s building. A woman opened the door, and as soon as she did a mynah bird in a giant cage behind her gave a wolf whistle, quite distinct and quite loud. It was about twelve o’clock; Sheila was stretching in her bed, wondering if today was the day she would get me. After I told the woman who I was and what I wanted, she opened the door wider to let me in. She was wearing a housecoat. She could have been thirty or forty. I was getting better at determining a woman’s age, but I wasn’t yet good enough to tell about her. She was good-looking, and she would be that way for a long while.

“Oh, yes! Oh, yes! Just like that!” the bird said.

The woman pointed to an easy chair for me to sit in, and sat across from me on a couch with cushions that had deep impressions. Somebody had sat on those things and the cushions had never got over it. She said her name was Minnie Parsons.

“I ain’t sure what I can tell you,” Miss Minnie said, crossing her legs. “I talked to some colored cop a day or so after it happened. He asked me questions, but he seemed more interested in Billie, there. ‘How you make it talk?’ he kept sayin. ‘How you get him to say all that?’ He didn’t seem to care much about poor Ike.”

“I’m only flesh and blood!” Billie said.

She said she knew Ike “only in passin,” and as she crossed and recrossed her legs, something told me that it wasn’t true. “I knew Alona better. And Miss Agatha’s like my own mother.” Her apartment was well kept, pictures of children on the walls, pictures of adults in Sunday clothes on the mantelpiece. On the wall behind the couch there was just a cross, with Jesus’ head hanging down, because he had given up the ghost. The obligatory cloth covered his privates. The nails through his hands and feet were painted red. No blood. “You at Number 2?” Miss Minnie said.

“No, ma’am.” I told her I wasn’t a detective and had just been in the military police in Korea.

“Don’t treat me like I’m that old,” she said. “Don’t go yes-ma’aming me. I ain’t old. You want somethin to drink?” I said no. “My husband was in the army,” she said after a bit. “He was a cook. Still a good cook. Can’t you tell?” She leaned to the side and slapped her thigh.

“Like that?” the bird asked.

I asked her if she had been home the night Ike was killed. She said that she had but that she heard nothing. She knew Miss Agatha had been out, maybe at church. She didn’t know where Alona was. “Ain’t no book that girl ain’t read…. I heard Miss Agatha come in and go upstairs. It wasn’t long before I heard both of them screamin. The whole buildin shook with them screamin.”

“That a girl bird or a boy bird?” I asked.

She considered Billie for a while as it hopped down to the floor of the cage, stuck its head through the bars of the cage door, and looked to the left. “I ’m only flesh and blood! I’m only flesh and blood!”

“I don’t really know,” Miss Minnie said. “Could be either. A woman once told me she could come and turn Billie upside down and inspect Billie’s natural parts and then say one way or another, but I never sent for her. I suspect Billie’s a girl.”

“Oh.”

“A woman knows when another woman’s in her nest.”

“There’s more to come, somebitch!” Billie said.

Miss Minnie didn’t react at all to the bad word, and I remembered my mother once saying that a woman comfortable around curse words would be comfortable around the Devil. I was ready to go. Miss Minnie said, as I stood up, “I will say that in my dealins with Ike he treated me with the utmost respect. Now, my husband…Hal didn’t care for Ike too much. Billie liked him, though, cause she doesn’t discriminate.” She crossed her legs the other way again. “Would you like somethin to eat? Wouldn’t be no trouble to heat up a little somethin.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Oh, yes! Oh, yes! Just like that!”

“What I done told you bout that ma’am stuff?”

“Your husband comin back soon?”

“Oh?” she said. “Whatcha mean by ‘soon’?” She laughed. “He just went to the store for somethin for breakfast. But he always stays long enough to be out to butcher the pig and collect the eggs. He’ll be gone a long time. He slow that way.”

I left, went down to the corner of M and 4th, and stood there so I could see into Leon’s store. The only man in it came out with a mediumsized paper bag and was walking on crutches. One of his legs had been cut off below the knee, while the other had been cut off above the knee. I watched him cross the street to my side and move past me so silently that if I hadn’t seen him with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have known he was there. No huffing and puffing, no rattling from the paper bag, no sound from the crutches hitting the sidewalk. Just a nothing spiriting on down the street. He looked mean and tough, but maybe that was just me trying to compensate for a fellow veteran who had lost so much. He said something to a little girl coming the other way and went into Miss Minnie’s building. I got to the building and asked the little girl, who was holding an even smaller girl by the hand, if she knew the man.

“Everybody know Mr. Hal,” the girl said.

I went through the files in my memory trying to recall if that was what Miss Minnie had called her husband. I couldn’t remember at all. Billie, I knew, was the bird’s name, because she had mentioned the thing many times. “Mr. Hal married to Miss Minnie, right?” I said to the girl.

The girls looked at each other and laughed. “Evbody know that,” the smaller girl said. “How come you don’t know that?”

“Forget him,” the older girl said, and before the girls went off she twirled her index finger around and around an inch from her ear. “Yeah,” she said. “Just forget him if he don’t know that. I bet he don’t even know Mr. Hal ain’t got no legs.” “Forget him anyway,” the smaller girl said.

I stood outside the building, trying to decide if I should give Hal a pass on murdering Ike based on the crutches. I didn’t have anybody else to suspect right then, so I kept him in my mental suspect files. Miss Agatha had let me keep the key to her son’s place, but I decided against going back up there, lest she hear me and I have to tell her I’d found out nothing yet.

I felt as helpless as the day I first inspected Ike’s apartment. Sheila Larkin had her cup of coffee in her hand by now, was probably looking out her N Street window, thinking about me. I left off detective work and took the long way home.

Mojo’s was closed on Sunday. It was just as well. My mother always knew if I’d had even a drop of something before showing at her place for supper. Sometimes I gave a shit and sometimes I didn’t and would drink before going to her. “You been drinkin,” she had stated that last Sunday even before opening the door. That was all she talked about the rest of the evening. Then she dredged up ancient history: A month after I came back from Korea, I was still celebrating. One Tuesday I drank heavily at a friend’s place, in the Augusta apartments at New York and New Jersey Avenues, only two blocks up from where the white woman would die. I made a mistake and told my buddy I could walk home all right. I got out to the corner at about three in the morning and dropped down on the sidewalk. Actually, I dropped more in the street than on the sidewalk. In those days, most of D.C. was asleep at that time of the night, so there wasn’t any traffic to run over me. The street was warm, and all that warmth told me to take a nap. Man, just nap.

Where the old lady came from at that time of the morning I’ll never know. But after she roused me I could see through all the alcohol that she was dressed like she was going to church. At three in the morning on a weekday.

“Ain’t you Bertha’s baby boy? Ain’t you Penny’s nephew?” she asked after I managed to raise my head. Nap on, boy, just nap on. “You Bertha’s boy?” Even in the feeble streetlights, I could see, up and through that glorious haze, that I had never seen that woman before in my life. “Ain’t you Bertha’s boy? Got a brother name Freddy that married Dolley and Pritchard’s girl? You Bertha’s boy what went to Korea? Ain’t yall’s pastor Reverend Dr. Miller over at Shiloh Baptist?”

Hearing the lady talking, my buddy came down and they got me back up to his place. The old lady disappeared, and I never saw her again. My mother bided her time. One Sunday, three months later, after I said something “mannish” at supper, she brought up the drunk scene for the first time, told me what I was wearing down to the color of my socks, told me about the “ratty furniture” in every room of my friend’s apartment, told me how many empty bottles were on the kitchen table, about the half-naked woman on the couch. The drunken dog staggering from room to room. “Your life won’t be nothin but a long Tuesday night of devilment—Tuesday night and all day Wednesday…Kissin Miss Hattie’s hand with them drunken lips.” She went on for some thirty minutes, her voice never rising above a conversational tone. When she was finished, she pointed at my brother and then at the potatoes, which meant he was to pass them over to me. It was an orange-Kool-Aid Sunday. Joanne never said a mumbling word.

When I showed at my mother’s place on L Street at about four, Joanne and her big belly full of twins were there, my brother having dropped her off and gone to pick up something at the law library. We sat in the living room. I must say this: my mother never treated her living rooms like she was saving them for Jesus Christ to visit. No plastic slipcoverings and shit. “The key word in livin room is livin,” she used to say, so wherever we were the living room was as comfortable for Freddy and me as our own room.

“Mama, is there anything you can tell me bout this Ike thing? Somethin Miss Agatha didn’t tell me?” We were drinking grape Kool-Aid.

“I don’t think I can, son. He was troubled. I was there when he was born, and Ike came into the world full of trouble, God rest his soul.” Joanne was beside her on the couch, looking real satisfied with herself. “Son, you know all I know. You know he was into that…that mess.” She pointed at the crook in her arm and made a needle with her finger. “I lived fifty years before I knew a colored person doin that. And it was somebody like a son to me.” I perked up. My mother said, “What is the world coming to, Joanne? But he always yes-ma’amed and no-ma’amed me, I will give him that. And he wasn’t no parrot, either, so he meant it when he said it. He was brought up right. His mama and daddy saw to that. But boys have a way of turnin into men, and then they sell their mother wit for thirty pieces of silver.”

“Mama, you never told me Ike was doin that. Miss Agatha never told me, either.”

“Son, how easy you think it is to tell anybody that your child has fallen far from the height you worked to put him on? How many people would I want to blab to bout your drinkin and foolishness? Not that people don’t know already.”

“But I’m tryin to find out who did that to her son and she didn’t give me all the facts.”

“Well, you got all the facts.”

I went for more Kool-Aid and drank it at the kitchen window. She had raised my brother and me in Northwest, mainly around M Street, where Miss Agatha lived. Her new apartment was half a block past North Capitol Street, her first venture into Northeast. Slowly, place by place, my mother was trying to put herself midway between where I lived, on 6th Street, and where my brother and Joanne lived, in Anacostia. My brother saw Anacostia one day when he was nine—the hills, the Anacostia River, the indescribable pleasantness, the way the wind came up over the river as if straight from the cooling mouth of God—and he vowed then that he would live there when he became a man. I, too, saw the place that day, but all I remembered was the chickens running around. And the little white pig lounging under the shade tree.

I filled my glass again. Women. The evening of the day the white man attacked Miss Agatha, it was my mother who suggested that she, nearing eight, and my aunt, well past nine, and Miss Agatha, fourteen, go far away before the law came to get them. My grandfather and my grandmother, still in the doorway, thought it was the worst thing they had ever heard. But as the evening darkness came in and they lit the lamps and the candles and as the white man lay in the woods, they all knew the law would descend upon them. The law might even raise their dead and make them pay as well.

Along about midnight, after everyone had embraced them, the girls set out in two wagons, with my grandfather and his brother and Miss Agatha’s father and his brothers. The men were armed. By late morning, the girls were near the Georgia border. By the morning of the next day, driven by other male relatives and friends, they were well through Georgia. It took a week for them to get into North Carolina, carried by new wagons and horses driven by other relatives and friends. The girls’ belongings, what few there were, were always in the first wagon, and the girls, huddled together, were always in the second. All along the way, Miss Agatha cried to her companions that she was sorry for doing this to them. “Forgive me,” she said. “It ain’t nothin but a little bitty old thing,” my mother kept saying. Within two weeks, after wearing out four pairs of wagons and three teams of horses, they were in Washington, at the home of my grandfather’s cousin. He and his family were waiting. A week before, he had received a telegram: “Package arriving.”

When I returned to the living room, my mother was saying, “Now, he”—and she pointed at me—“wasn’t too much trouble comin out, but, oh, your husband was too much, Joanne. Two days. Two long days. I’m bound for Heaven cause I’ve had my hell right here in Washington, D.C. But I will say”—and she pointed to me again—“that he made up for that easy birth by havin his share a colic. And, when he slept, he slept kinda like this,” and my mother leaned her head to the side with one eye open and one eye shut.

“I had to keep one eye on you,” I said.

She didn’t miss a beat: “I hope you still sleep that way, cause I ain’t finished with you yet, boy. Just wait. Just you wait.” Then to Joanne: “You see what war does? It makes a man lose all natural fear of his mother. Be thankful you havin girls.”

I sat back in the chair with my Kool-Aid. They went on talking like that, my mother and my sister-in-law and her twin girls just dying to come out. There is a moment that a man hungers for when he’s boozing—the conductor has already escorted him to the best seat on the train. This happens somewhere, depending on the alcohol, along about the fifth sip. The view from that window is extraordinary; God knew his business that day. A woman sits across from him and only when he looks out the window does she look away. Otherwise, her eyes are always on him. Her blouse is tight, and she shows just enough cleavage not to make herself out to be a tramp. He takes another sip, and emphatic waves of warmth come over him. The woman crosses her legs. She is not wearing old-lady stockings. Hers are sheer nylon, so the man can bear witness to the miracle of her legs. He raises his glass and tries to decide whether to look again at her legs or out the window at what God made just for him.

I went in to the office on Monday morning to continue clearing up. I was missing Sam, who had soothing words for every bad occasion. I worked away and all the while recited aloud the dead white woman’s words.

A moll is gav vain ah rav und ah rab-bit sin.

Zetcha kender lock gadank za tire vos ear lair rent doe.

I was nearing completion of the “S” files when I felt someone watching me. I turned around. Sam’s wife, Dvera, was standing in the doorway. She was crying. I stood and asked if it was bad news about Sam. She took a while, but she eventually shook her head and covered her mouth with both hands. She continued to cry. I stayed near the window. This was all I needed before Alaska: a white woman crying and no witnesses to my innocence.

After several minutes, she pulled out a handkerchief that was tucked into her sleeve, and she stopped crying. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s been a long time since I heard those words.” I didn’t understand. I looked at the floor, but felt safe enough to put down the papers I was holding. “They were my father’s words, his way of beginning stories to me. All his stories started that way. He used to tell me stories when the world got too much. Comforting, you know. Keeping the world away.”

I nodded. This was more than she had ever said to me in all the time I had been working there. Sometimes one moment sweeps aside everything you ever thought about a person.

“Where did you hear those words?” she asked. I told her about the white woman. “I remember hearing about her, but I didn’t know you were there.” She looked long at me and said, “Let me see something.” She turned with her fat ankles and went upstairs.

I wanted to leave now. Files or no files. The dead woman’s words were loud in my head. Dvera Jaffe came back after about an hour. “Miriam Sobel,” she said. “She was in my brother’s congregation. For a week they didn’t know what had happened to her. Young as she was, her mind had been going for a long time. She would disappear at times, trying to get back to Russia, back home.”

Now that I had a name to go with my memory, her dying words were louder than ever. In my head, the woman Miriam Sobel rose up and stood in the streetcar tracks, just as she had before she began to fall, and set her wig in place.

The end of it all came rather quickly after that.

On Thursday, I went to Mojo’s. I asked Mojo’s wife who might have supplied Ike’s stuff. Harriet had a quick answer—a man named Fish Eyes. “But he died two months ago. If you thinkin what I think you’re thinkin, you could be right,” she said. “Fish Eyes would kill God if He owed him money. He went back to Georgia, where he had people. God’s cancer took a long time killin him.”

By then I had talked to about fifteen people and I was tired of Ike and his murder. I wanted Alaska. I took a beer and sat in a booth and mumbled Miriam Sobel’s last words. Not the mixed-up English ones I thought she had said but the Yiddish. “Amohl iz gevayn a rov und a rebbetzin.” The English had died the moment Dvera told me the Yiddish. “Zet zhe, kinderlach, gedenk-zhe, teireh, vos ir lert’ doh.” After a second beer, I began fashioning a story that would let me go off to Alaska with as clear a conscience as a man like me could expect. I figured it wouldn’t hurt anyone if I told Miss Agatha that it had probably been Fish Eyes who killed Ike. One bad man had killed another. That sounded good, and the first sip of the third beer confirmed it.

After four beers, I left Mojo’s happy and headed down New York Avenue. I crossed 1st Street, passing Dunbar’s field. I was nearing Kirby Street when Sheila Larkin and one of her many sisters came out of Kirby, heading toward me. They were only yards away. There was too much daylight for me to turn around and dash across New York Avenue. Damn! Damn! I kept thinking. The women walked on toward me, their arms linked, talking to each other as if their conversation were all that mattered. Well, I thought, we might as well get this shit over with right here and now. I hurried to compose what I would say: “I just felt like gettin on with somethin else in my life, Sheila. It ain’t really about you. I just gotta disentangle before Alaska.” If she tried to hit me, I decided, I would let her get in one lick, but no more than that. My time with her was worth one lick, I figured. Any more than one and it was going to be war. They were about five feet away, and Sheila still hadn’t noticed me. We all kept on. Then, in a moment, she and her sister were past me. And it wasn’t as if they had unlocked arms and walked around me, or stayed arm in arm and walked together around me to the left or the right. It was simply as if they had walked through me, still talking, still arm in arm. It was like a blow to the chest. It took my breath away, and I leaned over to pull myself together. That didn’t help, and I stood up straight and found myself stumbling, struggling. I kept thinking it might help to know what their conversation was about.

I went on a few feet more, and at last I sat on the curb at Kirby. The world took its sweet time righting itself, and I began to wish that I was on my train and the conductor was asking me, “Sir, may I fill your glass again?” Forget all of them, I thought, forget Miss Agatha and Sheila and her billions of sisters and forget my mother and Joanne with her belly full of girls. Forget every bitch that ever lived. Forget em! Just go to Alaska, where a man could be a real man without any bullshit. I looked at my watch, at the second hand going round and round. I pulled out the crown a tad and the second hand stopped, just waited for me to start things up again. I told the conductor, “No.” I saw Miss Agatha at her kitchen table brushing crumbs into her hand, and she said she was sorry. I told her it ain’t nothin but a little bitty old thing.

I stood outside Miss Agatha’s apartment door, resolved to tell her that it had been Fish Eyes. He was in Hell, anyway, so he wouldn’t care—what’s another twenty years in an eternity of fire? My mother would have had something to say about that, about lying on someone sitting in Hell on a two-legged stool with his ankles crossed, but I didn’t care. I was about to knock when I decided to go back down to Ike’s place. I planned to tell Miss Agatha that I had gone over the place four times, and two real visits would make it easier to lie.

This time the door opened without any trouble. I gave a perfunctory look to every room, then went to the kitchen. How far, I wondered with a little curiosity, had Ike’s brain matter traveled after he was shot? I took a good look at the room’s new paint and realized now what a shoddy job it was. I pulled out my pocketknife and scraped off paint around the kitchen window and began to see that someone had merely painted over the blood and everything else that had come out of Ike’s head. I stepped back and then back some more. Fuck! Who would do such a shitty job of making over the place? No wonder Miss Agatha couldn’t sleep at night—her son was still up and about just below her head. I opened the window and saw browned blood out on the edge of the sill. Why here, when the window should have been closed on the January night he was killed? And what power was in that blood for it to hang on for nearly two years?

I went out onto the fire escape and climbed up to Miss Agatha’s place. Even after all the snow and sun and rain and time, there were faint bits of brown midway up the window frame, as if someone with bloody hands, just last night, had held on to it to steady himself before entering the apartment. Blood spilled with violence never goes away, I remembered my mother teaching Freddy and me, and you can see it if you have a mind to. I raised the window. Immediately, Alona’s kid came up to the window. “Hi hi,” she said, raising her hand to me. I looked at the other side of the frame and saw more bits of brown, and there, at the frame, it all stopped. “Hi hi.” I adjusted my eyes and looked into the kitchen and saw Alona watching me. Her arms were folded across her breasts, her legs slightly apart. I looked at both sides of the frame again. Seeing Alona standing there, impervious for all eternity, I was suddenly chilled in every part of my body. “Hi hi,” the kid said. “Hi hi.” Mountains did not stand the way Alona stood. Dear God, I thought, dear God. Of all Ike’s crimes against her, what had been the final one? I became aware that in only a few steps Alona could be at the window and one powerful push could send me toppling over the fire escape. I became afraid. “Hi hi.” The kid kept holding her hand up to me, so I took her hand and I let her help me into the room. The child was named for Miss Agatha. “Hi hi,” she said. “Hi,” I said.

The white man who tried to drag Miss Agatha off into the woods when she was a child was never the same again, not in mind, not in body. He awoke in the woods three days later, caked with blood from head to toe, and picked himself up from what all the Negroes had believed was his deathbed. He spent his life saying he had been attacked by “somethin from God, somethin big, big like this.” God called him into preaching, but each sentence he spoke for the rest of his life had no relation to the one before it or to the one after it. He found a home at a very tiny church with a blue door, with people who believed his speech made no sense because that was how God wanted it. Never to be translated into understandable human talk. The law stayed satisfied that it was a drifter from beyond Choctaw who had attacked him. A stranger from faraway over yonder. The law let it be, and the world the white people had made for themselves was set right again.

It came to me over the next few days that I would never find gold in Alaska, not even if my life depended on it. My mother was at first silent when I told her about the blood I’d found, when I told her who had killed Ike. She set a Tuesday-night plate of food before me as I sat at her kitchen table and bade me eat. Then she sat across from me with her cup, two-thirds milk and one-third coffee. She held the cup with both hands and sipped and fought back the tears. I rose to go to her, but she held me back. “You decide what you must tell Aggie and then leave her in peace after that,” my mother commanded. “She knows what she knows. Maybe she needed someone like you in the world to know it, too. Tell her you know, if you got a mind to, and then leave us be. The only harm we ever done you was for your own good, and you must not forget that.”

I found a note on my desk from Dvera, Sam’s wife, when I returned two days later to the office I shared with him. The note, written in beautiful script, had a translation of Miriam Sobel’s last words: Once upon a time there was a rabbi and his wife…. Listen, children, remember, precious ones, what you’re learning here…. Funny, I said to myself. I would never have thought the words meant that just from what I heard. A moll, a rabbit, and his sin…

I went upstairs, where I had never been, to Dvera’s back office. The door was open. From the hallway, it seemed a very small room. But, once I was inside, it felt very large indeed, with everything a woman might need to be comfortable when she’s by herself. The doilies on the couch reminded me of my mother’s living room. Just inside the door was a samovar with a brilliant shine. Dvera was on the telephone, and, as it happened, it was Sam, still in Israel. I stepped all the way into the room. Above the light switch was a calendar with the time of the sunset noted at every Friday. She waved me over and handed me the telephone. Sam said he would be sad to see me go. I did not tell him that I would see Alaska only in some third life. After I’d said a few words to him, the line began to crackle and I felt it best to tell him good-bye. I gave the telephone back to Dvera. She began closing the conversation and pointed at a photograph sticking out of a large brown envelope on her desk. Then she giggled at something Sam said and blushed. “Don’t say that over the telephone,” she said.

The photograph was of Miriam Sobel, younger than the dead woman by nine and two-thirds years, give or take a day or two. Two identical boys with forelocks had hold of her hands. I took the picture to the window, where the light was better. What part would the rabbi’s wife play in the story? And, in the end, was the story really about her and not at all about the rabbi? I raised my eyes from the photograph of Miriam and saw a group of six little colored girls going down 8th Street toward E, all of them in bright colors. My eyes settled on a girl in a yellow dress. She was in the middle of the group and she alone twirled as they walked, her arms out, her head held back, so that the sun was full upon her face. Her long plaits swung with her in an almost miraculous way. It was good to watch her, because I had never seen anything like that in Washington in my whole life. I followed her until she disappeared. It would have been nice to know what was on her mind.