Song of Solomon

Chapter 10

When Hansel and Gretel stood in the forest and saw the house in the clearing before them, the little hairs at the nape of their necks must have shivered. Their knees must have felt so weak that blinding hunger alone could have propelled them forward. No one was there to warn or hold them; their parents, chastened and grieving, were far away. So they ran as fast as they could to the house where a woman older than death lived, and they ignored the shivering nape hair and the softness in their knees. A grown man can also be energized by hunger, and any weakness in his knees or irregularity in his heartbeat will disappear if he thinks his hunger is about to be assuaged. Especially if the object of his craving is not gingerbread or chewy gumdrops, but gold.

Milkman ducked under the boughs of black walnut trees and walked straight toward the big crumbling house. He knew that an old woman had lived in it once, but he saw no signs of life there now. He was oblivious to the universe of wood life that did live there in layers of ivy grown so thick he could have sunk his arm in it up to the elbow. Life that crawled, life that slunk and crept and never closed its eyes. Life that burrowed and scurried, and life so still it was indistinguishable from the ivy stems on which it lay. Birth, life, and death—each took place on the hidden side of a leaf. From where he stood, the house looked as if it had been eaten by a galloping disease, the sores of which were dark and fluid.

One mile behind him were macadam and the reassuring sounds of an automobile or two—one of which was Reverend Cooper’s car, driven by his thirteen-year-old nephew.

Noon, Milkman had told him. Come back at noon. He could just as easily have said twenty minutes, and now that he was alone, assaulted by what city people regard as raucous silence, he wished he had said five minutes. But even if the boy hadn’t had chores to do, it would be foolish to be driven fifteen miles outside Danville on “business” and stay a hot minute.

He should never have made up that elaborate story to disguise his search for the cave; somebody might ask him about it. Besides, lies should be very simple, like the truth. Excessive detail was simply excess. But he was so tired after the long bus ride from Pittsburgh, coming right after the luxury of the flight, he was afraid he wouldn’t be convincing.

The airplane ride exhilarated him, encouraged illusion and a feeling of invulnerability. High above the clouds, heavy yet light, caught in the stillness of speed (“Cruise,” the pilot said), sitting in intricate metal become glistening bird, it was not possible to believe he had ever made a mistake, or could. Only one small thought troubled him—that Guitar was not there too. He would have loved it—the view, the food, the stewardesses. But Milkman wanted to do this by himself, with no input from anybody. This one time he wanted to go solo. In the air, away from real life, he felt free, but on the ground, when he talked to Guitar just before he left, the wings of all those other people’s nightmares flapped in his face and constrained him. Lena’s anger, Corinthians’ loose and uncombed hair, matching her slack lips, Ruth’s stepped-up surveillance, his father’s bottomless greed, Hagar’s hollow eyes—he did not know whether he deserved any of that, but he knew he was fed up and he knew he had to leave quickly. He told Guitar of his decision before he told his father.

“Daddy thinks the stuff is still in the cave.”

“Could be.” Guitar sipped his tea.

“Anyway, it’s worth checking out. At least we’ll know once and for all.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

“So I’m going after it.”

“By yourself?”

Milkman sighed. “Yeah. Yeah. By myself. I need to get out of here. I mean I really have to go away somewhere.”

Guitar put his cup down and folded his hands in front of his mouth. “Wouldn’t it be easier with the two of us? Suppose you have trouble?”

“It might be easier, but it might look more suspicious with two men instead of one roaming around the woods. If I find it, I’ll haul it back and we’ll split it up just like we agreed. If I don’t, well, I’ll be back anyway.”

“When you leaving?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“What’s your father say about you going alone?”

“I haven’t told him yet. You’re the only one knows so far.” Milkman stood up and went to the window that looked out on Guitar’s little porch. “Shit.”

Guitar was watching him carefully. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Why you so low? You don’t act like a man on his way to the end of the rainbow.”

Milkman turned around and sat on the sill. “I hope it is a rainbow, and nobody has run off with the pot, cause I need it.”

“Everybody needs it.”

“Not as bad as me.”

Guitar smiled. “Look like you really got the itch now. More than before.”

“Yeah, well, everything’s worse than before, or maybe it’s the same as before. I don’t know. I just know that I want to live my own life. I don’t want to be my old man’s office boy no more. And as long as I’m in this place I will be. Unless I have my own money. I have to get out of that house and I don’t want to owe anybody when I go. My family’s driving me crazy. Daddy wants me to be like him and hate my mother. My mother wants me to think like her and hate my father. Corinthians won’t speak to me; Lena wants me out. And Hagar wants me chained to her bed or dead. Everybody wants something from me, you know what I mean? Something they think they can’t get anywhere else. Something they think I got. I don’t know what it is—I mean what it is they really want.”

Guitar stretched his legs. “They want your life, man.”

“My life?”

“What else?”

“No. Hagar wants my life. My family…they want—”

“I don’t mean that way. I don’t mean they want your dead life; they want your living life.”

“You’re losing me,” said Milkman.

“Look. It’s the condition our condition is in. Everybody wants the life of a black man. Everybody. White men want us dead or quiet—which is the same thing as dead. White women, same thing. They want us, you know, ‘universal,’ human, no ‘race consciousness.’ Tame, except in bed. They like a little racial loincloth in the bed. But outside the bed they want us to be individuals. You tell them, ‘But they lynched my papa,’ and they say, ‘Yeah, but you’re better than the lynchers are, so forget it.’ And black women, they want your whole self. Love, they call it, and understanding. ‘Why don’t you understand me?’ What they mean is, Don’t love anything on earth except me. They say, ‘Be responsible,’ but what they mean is, Don’t go anywhere where I ain’t. You try to climb Mount Everest, they’ll tie up your ropes. Tell them you want to go to the bottom of the sea—just for a look—they’ll hide your oxygen tank. Or you don’t even have to go that far. Buy a horn and say you want to play. Oh, they love the music, but only after you pull eight at the post office. Even if you make it, even if you stubborn and mean and you get to the top of Mount Everest, or you do play and you good, real good—that still ain’t enough. You blow your lungs out on the horn and they want what breath you got left to hear about how you love them. They want your full attention. Take a risk and they say you not for real. That you don’t love them. They won’t even let you risk your own life, man, your own life—unless it’s over them. You can’t even die unless it’s about them. What good is a man’s life if he can’t even choose what to die for?”

“Nobody can choose what to die for.”

“Yes you can, and if you can’t, you can damn well try to.”

“You sound bitter. If that’s what you feel, why are you playing your numbers game? Keeping the racial ratio the same and all? Every time I ask you what you doing it for, you talk about love. Loving Negroes. Now you say—”

“It is about love. What else but love? Can’t I love what I criticize?”

“Yeah, but except for skin color, I can’t tell the difference between what the white women want from us and what the colored women want. You say they all want our life, our living life. So if a colored woman is raped and killed, why do the Days rape and kill a white woman? Why worry about the colored woman at all?”

Guitar cocked his head and looked sideways at Milkman. His nostrils flared a little. “Because she’s mine.”

“Yeah. Sure.” Milkman didn’t try to keep disbelief out of his voice. “So everybody wants to kill us, except black men, right?”

“Right.”

“Then why did my father—who is a very black man—try to kill me before I was even born?”

“Maybe he thought you were a little girl; I don’t know. But I don’t have to tell you that your father is a very strange Negro. He’ll reap the benefits of what we sow, and there’s nothing we can do about that. He behaves like a white man, thinks like a white man. As a matter of fact, I’m glad you brought him up. Maybe you can tell me how, after losing everything his own father worked for to some crackers, after seeing his father shot down by them, how can he keep his knees bent? Why does he love them so? And Pilate. She’s worse. She saw it too and, first, goes back to get a cracker’s bones for some kind of crazy self-punishment, and second, leaves the cracker’s gold right where it was! Now, is that voluntary slavery or not? She slipped into those Jemima shoes cause they fit.”

“Look, Guitar. First of all, my father doesn’t care whether a white man lives or swallows lye. He just wants what they have. And Pilate is a little nuts, but she wanted us out of there. If she hadn’t been smart, both our asses would be cooling in the joint right now.”

“My ass. Not yours. She wanted you out, not me.”

“Come on. That ain’t even fair.”

“No. Fair is one more thing I’ve given up.”

“But to Pilate? What for? She knew what we did and still she bailed us out. Went down for us, clowned and crawled for us. You saw her face. You ever see anything like it in your life?”

“Once. Just once,” said Guitar. And he remembered anew how his mother smiled when the white man handed her the four ten-dollar bills. More than gratitude was showing in her eyes. More than that. Not love, but a willingness to love. Her husband was sliced in half and boxed backward. He’d heard the mill men tell how the two halves, not even fitted together, were placed cut side down, skin side up, in the coffin. Facing each other. Each eye looking deep into its mate. Each nostril inhaling the breath the other nostril had expelled. The right cheek facing the left. The right elbow crossed over the left elbow. And he had worried then, as a child, that when his father was wakened on Judgment Day his first sight would not be glory or the magnificent head of God—or even the rainbow. It would be his own other eye.

Even so, his mother had smiled and shown that willingness to love the man who was responsible for dividing his father up throughout eternity. It wasn’t the divinity from the foreman’s wife that made him sick. That came later. It was the fact that instead of life insurance, the sawmill owner gave his mother forty dollars “to tide you and them kids over,” and she took it happily and bought each of them a big peppermint stick on the very day of the funeral. Guitar’s two sisters and baby brother sucked away at the bone-white and blood-red stick, but Guitar couldn’t. He held it in his hand until it stuck there. All day he held it. At the graveside, at the funeral supper, all the sleepless night. The others made fun of what they believed was his miserliness, but he could not eat it or throw it away, until finally, in the outhouse, he let it fall into the earth’s stinking hole.

“Once,” he said. “Just once.” And felt the nausea all over again. “The crunch is here,” he said. “The big crunch. Don’t let them Kennedys fool you. And I’ll tell you the truth: I hope your daddy’s right about what’s in that cave. And I sure hope you don’t have no second thoughts about getting it back here.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I’m nervous. Real nervous. I need the bread.”

“If you’re in a hurt, I can let you have—”

“Not me. Us. We have work to do, man. And just recently”—Guitar squinted his eyes at Milkman—“just recently one of us was put out in the streets, by somebody I don’t have to name. And his wages were garnisheed cause this somebody said two months rent owing. This somebody needs two months rent on a twelve-by-twelve hole in the wall like a fish needs side pockets. Now we have to take care of this man, get him a place to stay, pay the so-called back rent, and—”

“That was my fault. Let me tell you what happened….”

“No. Don’t tell me nothing. You ain’t the landlord and you didn’t put him out. You may have handed him the gun, but you didn’t pull the trigger. I’m not blaming you.”

“Why not? You talk about my father, my father’s sister, and you’ll talk about my sister too if I let you. Why you trust me?”

“Baby, I hope I never have to ask myself that question.”

It ended all right, that gloomy conversation. There was no real anger and nothing irrevocable was said. When Milkman left, Guitar opened his palm as usual and Milkman slapped it. Maybe it was fatigue, but the touching of palms seemed a little weak.

At the Pittsburgh airport he discovered that Danville was 240 miles northeast, and not accessible by any public transportation other than a Greyhound bus. Reluctantly, unwilling to give up the elegance he had felt on the flight, he taxied from the airport to the bus station and settled himself for two idle hours before the Greyhound left. By the time he boarded, the inactivity, the picture magazines he’d read, the strolls in the streets near the station, had exhausted him. He fell asleep fifteen minutes outside Pittsburgh. When he woke it was late in the afternoon, with an hour more to go before he reached Danville. His father had raved about the beauty of this part of the country, but Milkman saw it as merely green, deep into its Indian summer but cooler than his own city, although it was farther south. The mountains, he thought, must make for the difference in temperature. For a few minutes he tried to enjoy the scenery running past his window, then the city man’s boredom with nature’s repetition overtook him. Some places had lots of trees, some did not; some fields were green, some were not, and the hills in the distance were like the hills in every distance. Then he watched signs—the names of towns that lay twenty-two miles ahead, seventeen miles to the east, five miles to the northeast. And the names of junctions, counties, crossings, bridges, stations, tunnels, mountains, rivers, creeks, landings, parks, and lookout points. Everybody had to do his act, he thought, for surely anybody who was interested in Dudberry Point already knew where it was.

He had two bottles of Cutty Sark in his suitcase, along with two shirts and some underwear. The large suitcase, he thought, would have its real load on the return trip. Now he wished he had not checked it under the bus, for he wanted a drink right then. According to his watch, the gold Longines his mother had given him, it would be another twenty minutes before a stop. He lay back on the headrest and tried to fall asleep. His eyes were creasing from the sustained viewing of uneventful countryside.

In Danville he was astonished to learn that the bus depot was a diner on route 11 where the counterman sold bus tickets, hamburgers, coffee, cheese and peanut butter crackers, cigarettes, candy and a cold-cut plate. No lockers, no baggage room, no taxi, and now he realized no men’s room either.

Suddenly he felt ridiculous. What was he supposed to do? Put his suitcase down and ask the man: Where is the cave near the farm where my father lived fifty-eight years ago? He knew nobody, had no names except the first name of an old lady who was now dead. And rather than call any more attention to himself in this tiny farming town than his beige three-piece suit, his button-down light-blue shirt and black string tie, and his beautiful Florsheim shoes had already brought, he asked the counterman if he could check his bag there. The man gazed at the suitcase and seemed to be turning the request over in his mind.

“I’ll pay,” said Milkman.

“Leave ’er here. Back a the pop crates,” the man said. “When you wanna pick ’er up?”

“This evening,” he said.

“Fine. She’ll be right here.”

Milkman left the diner/bus station with a small satchel of shaving things and walked out into the streets of Danville, Pennsylvania. He’d seen places like this in Michigan, of course, but he never had to do anything in them other than buy gas. The three stores on the street were closing up for the night. It was five-fifteen and about a dozen people, all told, were walking on the sidewalks. One of them was a Negro. A tall man, elderly, with a brown peaked cap and an old-fashioned collar. Milkman followed him for a while, then caught up to him and said, “Say, I wonder if you could help me.” He smiled as he spoke.

The man turned around but did not answer. Milkman wondered if he had offended him in some way. Finally the man nodded and said, “Do what I can.” He had a slight country lilt, like that of the white man at the counter.

“I’m looking for…Circe, a lady named Circe. Well, not her, but her house. Do you know where she used to live? I’m from out of town. I just got off the bus. I have some business to take care of here, an insurance policy, and I need to check on some property out there.”

The man was listening and apparently not going to interrupt him, so Milkman ended his sentence lamely with: “Can you help me?”

“Reverend Cooper would know,” said the man.

“Where can I find him?” Milkman felt something missing from the conversation.

“Stone Lane. Follow this here street till you come to the post office. Go on around the post office and that’ll be Windsor. The next street is Stone Lane. He lives in there.”

“Will there be a church there?” Milkman assumed a preacher lived next door to his church.

“No. No. Church ain’t got no parsonage. Reverend Cooper lives in Stone Lane. Yella house, I believe.”

“Thanks,” said Milkman. “Thanks a lot.”

“Mighty welcome,” said the man. “Good evenin’.” And he walked away.

Milkman considered whether to go back for his suitcase, abandoned the idea, and followed the directions given him. An American flag identified the post office, a frame structure next to a drugstore that served also as the Western Union office. He turned left at the corner, but noticed there were no street signs anywhere. How could he find Windsor or Stone Lane if there were no signs? He walked through a residential street, another and another, and he was just about to go back to the drugstore and look under “A.M.E.” or “A.M.E. Zion” in the telephone directory when he saw a yellow-and-white house. Maybe this is it, he thought. He climbed the steps, determined to mind his manners. A thief should be polite and win goodwill.

“Good evening. Is Reverend Cooper here?”

A woman was standing in the doorway. “Yes, he’s here. Would you like to come in? I’ll call him.”

“Thank you.” Milkman entered a tiny hall and waited.

A short chubby man appeared, fingering his glasses. “Yes, sir? You wanted to see me?” His eyes ran rapidly over Milkman’s clothes, but his voice betrayed no excessive curiosity.

“Yes. Uh … how are you?”

“Fine. Fine. And you?”

“Pretty good.” Milkman felt as awkward as he sounded. He had never had to try to make a pleasant impression on a stranger before, never needed anything from a stranger before, and did not remember ever asking anybody in the world how they were. I might as well say it all, he thought. “I could use your help, sir. My name is Macon Dead. My father is from around—”

“Dead? Macon Dead, you say?”

“Yes.” Milkman smiled apologetically for the name. “My father—”

“Well, I’ll be.” Reverend Cooper took off his glasses. “Well, I’ll be! Esther!” He threw his voice over his shoulder without taking his eyes off his guest. “Esther, come here!” Then to Milkman: “I know your people!”

Milkman smiled and let his shoulders slump a little. It was a good feeling to come into a strange town and find a stranger who knew your people. All his life he’d heard the tremor in the word: “I live here, but my people…” or: “She acts like she ain’t got no people,” or: “Do any of your people live there?” But he hadn’t known what it meant: links. He remembered Freddie sitting in Sonny’s Shop just before Christmas, saying, “None of my people would take me in.” Milkman beamed at Reverend Cooper and his wife. “You do?”

“Sit on down here, boy. You the son of the Macon Dead I knew. Oh, well, now, I don’t mean to say I knew him all that well. Your daddy was four or five years older than me, and they didn’t get to town much, but everybody round here remembers the old man. Old Macon Dead, your granddad. My daddy and him was good friends. A blacksmith, my daddy was. I’m the only one got the call. Well well well.” Reverend Cooper grinned and massaged his knees. “Oh, Lord, I’m forgetting myself. You must be hungry. Esther, get him something to fill himself up on.”

“Oh, no. No, thank you, sir. Maybe a little something to drink. I mean if you do drink, that is.”

“Sure. Sure. Nothing citified, I’m sorry to say, but—Esther!” She was on her way to the kitchen. “Bring some glasses and get that whiskey out the cupboard. This here’s Macon Dead’s boy and he’s tired and needs a drink. Tell me, how’d you find me? Don’t tell me your daddy remembered me?”

“He probably does, but I met a man in the street and he told me how to find you.”

“You asked him for me?” Reverend Cooper wanted to get all the facts straight. Already he was framing the story for his friends: how the man came to his house first, how he asked for him….

Esther returned with a Coca-Cola tray, two glasses, and a large mayonnaise jar of what looked like water. Reverend Cooper poured it warm and neat into the two glasses. No ice, no water—just pure rye whiskey that almost tore Milkman’s throat when he swallowed it.

“No. I didn’t ask for you by name. I asked him if he knew where a woman named Circe used to live.”

“Circe? Yes. Lord, old Circe!”

“He told me to talk to you.”

Reverend Cooper smiled and poured more whiskey. “Everybody round here knows me and I know everybody.”

“Well, I know my father stayed with her awhile, after they…when they…after his father died.”

“They had a fine place. Mighty fine. Some white folks own it now. Course that’s what they wanted. That’s why they shot him. Upset a lot of people here, a whole lot of people. Scared ’em too. But didn’t your daddy have a sister name of Pilate?”

“Yes, sir. Pilate.”

“Still living, is she?”

“Oh, yes. Very much living.”

“Issat so? Pretty girl, real pretty. My daddy was the one made the earring for her. That’s how we knew they was alive. After Old Macon Dead was killed, nobody knew whether the children was dead too or what. Then a few weeks passed and Circe came to my daddy’s shop. Right across from where the post office is now—that’s where my daddy’s blacksmith shop was. She came in there with this little metal box with a piece of paper bag folded up in it. Pilate’s name was written on it. Circe didn’t tell Daddy anything, but that he was to make a earring out of it. She stole a brooch from the folks she worked for. My daddy took the gold pin off it and soldered it to the box. So we knew they was alive and Circe was taking care of ’em. They’d be all right with Circe. She worked for the Butlers—rich white folks, you know—but she was a good midwife in those days. Delivered everybody. Me included.”

Maybe it was the whiskey, which always made other people gracious when he drank it, but Milkman felt a glow listening to a story come from this man that he’d heard many times before but only half listened to. Or maybe it was being there in the place where it happened that made it seem so real. Hearing Pilate talk about caves and woods and earrings on Darling Street, or his father talk about cooking wild turkey over the automobile noise of Not Doctor Street, seemed exotic, something from another world and age, and maybe not even true. Here in the parsonage, sitting in a cane-bottomed chair near an upright piano and drinking homemade whiskey poured from a mayonnaise jar, it was real. Without knowing it, he had walked right by the place where Pilate’s earring had been fashioned, the earring that had fascinated him when he was little, the fixing of which informed the colored people here that the children of the murdered man were alive. And this was the living room of the son of the man who made the earring.

“Did anybody ever catch the men who did it—who killed him?”

Reverend Cooper raised his eyebrows. “Catch?” he asked, his face full of wonder. Then he smiled again. “Didn’t have to catch ’em. They never went nowhere.”

“I mean did they have a trial; were they arrested?”

“Arrested for what? Killing a nigger? Where did you say you was from?”

“You mean nobody did anything? Didn’t even try to find out who did it?”

“Everybody knew who did it. Same people Circe worked for—the Butlers.”

“And nobody did anything?” Milkman wondered at his own anger. He hadn’t felt angry when he first heard about it. Why now?

“Wasn’t nothing to do. White folks didn’t care, colored folks didn’t dare. Wasn’t no police like now. Now we got a county sheriff handles things. Not then. Then the circuit judge came through just once or twice a year. Besides, the people what did it owned half the county. Macon’s land was in their way. Folks just was thankful the children escaped.”

“You said Circe worked for the people who killed him. Did she know that?”

“Course she did.”

“And she let them stay there?”

“Not out in the open. She hid them.”

“Still, they were in the same house, right?”

“Yep. Best place, I’d say. If they came to town somebody’d see’em. Nobody would think of looking there.”

“Did Daddy—did my father know that?”

“I don’t know what he knew, if Circe ever told him. I never saw him after the murder. None of us did.”

“Where are they? The Butlers. They still live here?”

“Dead now. Every one of ’em. The last one, the girl Elizabeth, died a couple years back. Barren as a rock and just as old. Things work out, son. The ways of God are mysterious, but if you live it out, just live it out, you see that it always works out. Nothing they stole or killed for did ’em a bit a good. Not one bit.”

“I don’t care whether it did them good. The fact is they did somebody else harm.”

Reverend Cooper shrugged. “White folks different up your way?”

“No, I guess not…. Sometimes, though, you can do something.”

“What?” The preacher looked genuinely interested.

Milkman couldn’t answer except in Guitar’s words, so he said nothing.

“See this here?” The reverend turned around and showed Milkman a knot the size of a walnut that grew behind his ear. “Some of us went to Philly to try and march in an Armistice Day parade. This was after the First World War. We were invited and had a permit, but the people, the white people, didn’t like us being there. They started a fracas. You know, throwing rocks and calling us names. They didn’t care nothing ‘bout the uniform. Anyway, some police on horseback came—to quiet them down, we thought. They ran us down. Right under their horses. This here’s what a hoof can do. Ain’t that something?”

“Jesus God.”

“You wouldn’t be here to even things up, would you?” The preacher leaned over his stomach.

“No. I’m passing through, that’s all. Just thought I’d look around. I wanted to see the farm….”

“Cause any evening up left to do, Circe took care of.”

“What’d she do?”

“Hah! What didn’t she do?”

“Sorry I didn’t come out here long time ago. I would have liked to meet her. She must have been a hundred years old when she died.”

“Older. Was a hundred when I was a boy.”

“Is the farm nearby?” Milkman appeared mildly interested.

“Not too far.”

“I sort of wanted to see where it was since I’m out this way. Daddy talked so much about it.”

“It’s right back of the Butler place, about fifteen miles out. I can take you there. My old piece of car’s in the shop, but it was supposed to be ready yesterday. I’ll check on it.”

Milkman waited four days for the car to be ready. Four days at Reverend Cooper’s house as his guest, and the purpose of long visits from every old man in the town who remembered his father or his grandfather, and some who’d only heard. They all repeated various aspects of the story, all talked about how beautiful Lincoln’s Heaven was. Sitting in the kitchen, they looked at Milkman with such rheumy eyes, and spoke about his grandfather with such awe and affection, Milkman began to miss him too. His own father’s words came back to him: “I worked right alongside my father. Right alongside him.” Milkman thought then that his father was boasting of his manliness as a child. Now he knew he had been saying something else. That he loved his father; had an intimate relationship with him; that his father loved him, trusted him, and found him worthy of working “right alongside” him. “Something went wild in me,” he’d said, “when I saw him on the ground.”

His was the genuine feeling that Milkman had faked when Reverend Cooper described the hopelessness of “doing anything.” These men remembered both Macon Deads as extraordinary men. Pilate they remembered as a pretty woods-wild girl “that couldn’t nobody put shoes on.” Only one of them remembered his grandmother. “Good-lookin, but looked like a white woman. Indian, maybe. Black hair and slanted-up eyes. Died in childbirth, you know.” The more the old men talked—the more he heard about the only farm in the county that grew peaches, real peaches like they had in Georgia, the feasts they had when hunting was over, the pork kills in the winter and the work, the backbreaking work of a going farm—the more he missed something in his life. They talked about digging a well, fashioning traps, felling trees, warming orchards with fire when spring weather was bad, breaking young horses, training dogs. And in it all was his own father, the second Macon Dead, their contemporary, who was strong as an ox, could ride bareback and barefoot, who, they agreed, outran, outplowed, outshot, outpicked, outrode them all. He could not recognize that stern, greedy, unloving man in the boy they talked about, but he loved the boy they described and loved that boy’s father, with his hip-roofed barn, his peach trees, and Sunday break-of-dawn fishing parties in a fish pond that was two acres wide.

They talked on and on, using Milkman as the ignition that gunned their memories. The good times, the hard times, things that changed, things that stayed the same—and head and shoulders above all of it was the tall, magnificent Macon Dead, whose death, it seemed to him, was the beginning of their own dying even though they were young boys at the time. Macon Dead was the farmer they wanted to be, the clever irrigator, the peachtree grower, the hog slaughterer, the wild-turkey roaster, the man who could plow forty in no time flat and sang like an angel while he did it. He had come out of nowhere, as ignorant as a hammer and broke as a convict, with nothing but free papers, a Bible, and a pretty black-haired wife, and in one year he’d leased ten acres, the next ten more. Sixteen years later he had one of the best farms in Montour County. A farm that colored their lives like a paintbrush and spoke to them like a sermon. “You see?” the farm said to them. “See? See what you can do? Never mind you can’t tell one letter from another, never mind you born a slave, never mind you lose your name, never mind your daddy dead, never mind nothing. Here, this here, is what a man can do if he puts his mind to it and his back in it. Stop sniveling,” it said. “Stop picking around the edges of the world. Take advantage, and if you can’t take advantage, take disadvantage. We live here. On this planet, in this nation, in this county right here. Nowhere else! We got a home in this rock, don’t you see! Nobody starving in my home; nobody crying in my home, and if I got a home you got one too! Grab it. Grab this land! Take it, hold it, my brothers, make it, my brothers, shake it, squeeze it, turn it, twist it, beat it, kick it, kiss it, whip it, stomp it, dig it, plow it, seed it, reap it, rent it, buy it, sell it, own it, build it, multiply it, and pass it on—can you hear me? Pass it on!”

But they shot the top of his head off and ate his fine Georgia peaches. And even as boys these men began to die and were dying still. Looking at Milkman in those nighttime talks, they yearned for something. Some word from him that would rekindle the dream and stop the death they were dying. That’s why Milkman began to talk about his father, the boy they knew, the son of the fabulous Macon Dead. He bragged a little and they came alive. How many houses his father owned (they grinned); the new car every two years (they laughed); and when he told them how his father tried to buy the Erie Lackawanna (it sounded better that way), they hooted with joy. That’s him! That’s Old Macon Dead’s boy, all right! They wanted to know everything and Milkman found himself rattling off assets like an accountant, describing deals, total rents income, bank loans, and this new thing his father was looking into—the stock market.

Suddenly, in the midst of his telling, Milkman wanted the gold. He wanted to get up right then and there and go get it. Run to where it was and snatch every grain of it from under the noses of the Butlers, who were dumb enough to believe that if they killed one man his whole line died. He glittered in the light of their adoration and grew fierce with pride.

“Who’d your daddy marry?”

“The daughter of the richest Negro doctor in town.”

“That’s him! That’s Macon Dead!”

“Send you all to college?”

“Sent my sisters. I work right alongside him in our office.”

“Hah! Keep you home to get that money! Macon Dead gonna always make him some money!”

“What kinda car he drive?”

“Buick. Two-twenty-five.”

“Great God, a deuce and a quarter! What year?”

“This year!”

“That’s him! That’s Macon Dead! He gonna buy the Erie Lackawanna’ If he want it, he’ll get it! Bless my soul. Bet he worry them white folks to death. Can’t nobody keep him down! Not no Macon Dead! Not in this world! And not in the next! Haw! Goddam! The Erie Lackawanna!”

After all the waiting, Reverend Cooper couldn’t go. His preaching income was supplemented by freightyard work and he was called for an early shift. His nephew, called Nephew since he was their only one, was assigned to drive Milkman out to the farm—as close as they could get. Nephew was thirteen and barely able to see over the steering wheel.

“Does he have a license?” Milkman asked Mrs. Cooper.

“Not yet,” she said, and when she saw his consternation she explained that farm kids drove early—they had to.

Milkman and Nephew started out right after breakfast. It took them the better part of an hour because the roads were curving two-lanes and they spent twenty minutes behind a light truck they couldn’t pull around. Nephew spoke very little. He seemed interested only in Milkman’s clothes, which he took every opportunity to examine. Milkman decided to give him one of his shirts, and asked him to stop by the bus station to pick up the suitcase he’d left there.

Finally Nephew slowed down on a stretch of road that showed no houses at all. He stopped.

“What’s the matter? You want me to drive?”

“No, sir. This is it.”

“What’s it? Where?”

“Back in there.” He pointed to some bushes. “The road to the Butler place is in there and the farm’s back behind it. You got to walk it. Car won’t make it.”

Nothing was truer; as it turned out, Milkman’s feet could hardly make it over the stony road covered with second growth. He had asked Nephew to wait, thinking he would survey the area quickly and come back later on his own. But the boy had chores, he said, and would be back whenever Milkman wanted him to be there.

“An hour,” said Milkman.

“Take me an hour just to get back to town,” said Nephew.

“Reverend Cooper said you were to take me. Not leave me stranded.”

“My mama whip me, I don’t do my chores.”

Milkman was annoyed, but because he didn’t want the boy to think he was nervous about being left out there alone, he agreed to having him come back at—he glanced at his heavy, overdesigned watch—at noon. It was nine o’clock then.

His hat had been knocked off by the first branches of the old walnut trees, so he held it in his hand. His cuffless pants were darkened by the mile-long walk over moist leaves. The quiet fairly roared in his ears. He was uncomfortable and a little anxious, but the gold loomed large in his mind, as did the faces of the men he’d drunk with last night, and he stepped firmly onto the gravel and leaves of the driveway which circled the biggest house he’d ever seen.

This is where they stayed, he thought, where Pilate cried when given cherry jam. He stood still a moment. It must have been beautiful, must have seemed like a palace to them, but neither had ever spoken of it in any terms but how imprisoned they felt, how difficult it was to see the sky from their room, how repelled they were by the carpets, the draperies. Without knowing who killed their father, they instinctively hated the murderers’ house. And it did look like a murderer’s house. Dark, ruined, evil. Never, not since he knelt by his window sill wishing he could fly, had he felt so lonely. He saw the eyes of a child peer at him over the sill of the one second-story window the ivy had not covered. He smiled. Must be myself I’m seeing—thinking about how I used to watch the sky out the window. Or maybe it’s the light trying to get through the trees. Four graceful columns supported the portico, and the huge double door featured a heavy, brass knocker. He lifted it and let it fall; the sound was soaked up like a single raindrop in cotton. Nothing stirred. He looked back down the path and saw the green maw out of which he had come, a greenish-black tunnel, the end of which was nowhere in sight.

The farm, they said, was right in back of the Butler place, but knowing how different their concept of distance was, he thought he’d better get moving. If he found what he was looking for he would have to come back at night—with equipment, of course, but also with some familiarity with the area. On impulse he reached out his hand and tried to turn the doorknob. It didn’t budge. Half turning to leave—literally as an afterthought—he pushed the door and it swung open with a sigh. He leaned in. The smell prevented him from seeing anything more than the absence of light did. A hairy animal smell, ripe, rife, suffocating. He coughed and looked for somewhere to spit, for the odor was in his mouth, coating his teeth and tongue. He pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket, held it over his nose, backed away from the open door, and had just begun to spill the little breakfast he’d eaten when the odor disappeared and, quite suddenly, in its place was a sweet spicy perfume. Like ginger root—pleasant, clean, seductive. Surprised and charmed by it, he retraced his steps and went inside. After a second or two he was able to see the hand-laid and hand-finished wooden floor in a huge hall, and at its farther end a wide staircase spiraling up into the dark. His eyes traveled up the stairs.

He had had dreams as a child, dreams every child had, of the witch who chased him down dark alleys, between lawn trees, and finally into rooms from which he could not escape. Witches in black dresses and red underskirts; witches with pink eyes and green lips, tiny witches, long rangy witches, frowning witches, smiling witches, screaming witches and laughing witches, witches that flew, witches that ran, and some that merely glided on the ground. So when he saw the woman at the top of the stairs there was no way for him to resist climbing up toward her outstretched hands, her fingers spread wide for him, her mouth gaping open for him, her eyes devouring him. In a dream you climb the stairs. She grabbed him, grabbed his shoulders and pulled him right up against her and tightened her arms around him. Her head came to his chest and the feel of that hair under his chin, the dry bony hands like steel springs rubbing his back, her floppy mouth babbling into his vest, made him dizzy, but he knew that always, always at the very instant of the pounce or the gummy embrace he would wake with a scream and an erection. Now he had only the erection.

Milkman closed his eyes, helpless to pull away before the completion of the dream. What made him surface from it was a humming sound around his knees. He looked down and there, surrounding him, was a pack of golden-eyed dogs, each of which had the intelligent child’s eyes he had seen from the window. Abruptly the woman let him go and he looked down at her too. Beside the calm, sane, appraising eyes of the dogs, her eyes looked crazy. Beside their combed, brushed gun-metal hair, hers was wild and filthy.

She spoke to the dogs. “Go on away. Helmut, go on. Horst, move.” She waved her hands and the dogs obeyed.

“Come, come,” she said to Milkman. “In here.” She took his hand in both of hers, and he followed her—his arm outstretched, his hand in hers—like a small boy being dragged reluctantly to bed. Together they weaved among the bodies of the dogs that floated around his legs. She led him into a room, made him sit on a gray velvet sofa, and dismissed all the dogs but two that lay at her feet.

“Remember the Weimaraners?” she asked, settling herself, pulling her chair close to him.

She was old. So old she was colorless. So old only her mouth and eyes were distinguishable features in her face. Nose, chin, cheekbones, forehead, neck all had surrendered their identity to the pleats and crochetwork of skin committed to constant change.

Milkman struggled for a clear thought, so hard to come by in a dream: Perhaps this woman is Circe. But Circe is dead. This woman is alive. That was as far as he got, because although the woman was talking to him, she might in any case still be dead—as a matter of fact, she had to be dead. Not because of the wrinkles, and the face so old it could not be alive, but because out of the toothless mouth came the strong, mellifluent voice of a twenty-year-old girl.

“I knew one day you would come back. Well, that’s not entirely true. Some days I doubted it and some days I didn’t think about it at all. But you see, I was right. You did come.”

It was awful listening to that voice come from that face. Maybe something was happening to his ears. He wanted to hear the sound of his own voice, so he decided to take a chance on logic.

“Excuse me. I’m his son. I’m Macon Dead’s son. Not the one you knew.”

She stopped smiling.

“My name is Macon Dead too, but I’m thirty-two years old. You knew my father and his father too.” So far, so good. His voice was the same. Now he needed only to know if he had assessed the situation correctly. She did not answer him. “You’re Circe, aren’t you?”

“Yes; Circe,” she said, but she seemed to have lost all interest in him. “My name is Circe.”

“I’m just visiting,” he said. “I spent a couple of days with Reverend Cooper and his wife. They’re the ones brought me out here.”

“I thought you were him. I thought you came back to see me. Where is he? My Macon?”

“Back home. He’s alive. He told me about you….”

“And Pilate. Where is she?”

“There too. She’s fine.”

“Well, you look like him. You really do.” But she didn’t sound convinced.

“He’s seventy-two years old now,” said Milkman. He thought that would clear things up, make her know he couldn’t be the Macon she knew, who was sixteen when she last saw him. But all she said was “Uhn,” as though seventy-two, thirty-two, any age at all, meant nothing whatsoever to her. Milkman wondered how old she really was.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

“No. Thank you. I ate breakfast.”

“So you’ve been staying with that little Cooper boy?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“A runt. I told him not to smoke, but children don’t listen.”

“Do you mind if I do?” Milkman was relaxing a little and he hoped the cigarette would relax him more.

She shrugged. “Do what you like. Everybody does what he likes nowadays anyway.”

Milkman lit the cigarette and the dogs hummed at the sound of the match, their eyes glittering toward the flame.

“Ssh!” whispered Circe.

“Beautiful,” said Milkman.

“What’s beautiful?”

“The dogs.”

“They’re not beautiful, they’re strange, but they keep things away. I’m completely worn out taking care of ’em. They belonged to Miss Butler. She bred them, crossbred them. Tried for years to get them in the AKC. They wouldn’t permit it.”

“What did you call them?”

“Weimaraners. German.”

“What do you do with them?”

“Oh, I keep some. Sell some. Till we all die in here together.” She smiled.

She had dainty habits which matched her torn and filthy clothes in precisely the way her strong young cultivated voice matched her wizened face. Her white hair—braided, perhaps; perhaps not—she touched as though replacing a wayward strand from an elegant coiffure. And her smile—an opening of flesh like celluloid dissolving under a drop of acid—was accompanied by a press of fingers on her chin. It was this combination of daintiness and cultivated speech that misled Macon and invited him to regard her as merely foolish.

“You should get out once in a while.”

She looked at him.

“Is this your house now? Did they will you this? Is that why you have to stay here?”

She pressed her lips over her gums. “The only reason I’m here alone is because she died. She killed herself. All the money was gone, so she killed herself. Stood right there on the landing where you were a minute ago and threw herself off the banister. She didn’t die right away, though; she lay in the bed a week or two and there was nobody here but us. The dogs were in the kennel then. I brought her in the world, just like I did her mother and her grandmother before that. Birthed just about everybody in the county, I did. Never lost one either. Never lost nobody but your mother. Well, grandmother, I guess she was. Now I birth dogs.”

“Some friend of Reverend Cooper said she looked white. My grandmother. Was she?”

“No. Mixed. Indian mostly. A good-looking woman, but fierce, for the young woman I knew her as. Crazy about her husband too, overcrazy. You know what I mean? Some women love too hard. She watched over him like a pheasant hen. Nervous. Nervous love.”

Milkman thought about this mixed woman’s great-granddaughter, Hagar, and said, “Yes. I know what you mean.”

“But a good woman. I cried like a baby when I lost her. Like a baby. Poor Sing.”

“What?” He wondered if she lisped.

“I cried like a baby when I—”

“No. I mean what did you call her?”

“Sing. Her name was Sing.”

“Sing? Sing Dead. Where’d she get a name like that?”

“Where’d you get a name like yours? White people name Negroes like race horses.”

“I suppose so. Daddy told me how they got their name.”

“What’d he tell you?”

Milkman told her the story about the drunken Yankee.

“Well, he didn’t have to keep the name. She made him. She made him keep that name,” Circe said when he was through.

“She?”

“Sing. His wife. They met on a wagon going North. Ate pecans all the way, she told me. It was a wagonful of ex-slaves going to the promised land.”

“Was she a slave too?”

“No. No indeed. She always bragged how she was never a slave. Her people neither.”

“Then what was she doing on that wagon?”

“I can’t answer you because I don’t know. Never crossed my mind to ask her.”

“Where were they coming from? Georgia?”

“No. Virginia. Both of them lived in Virginia, her people and his. Down around Culpeper somewhere. Charlemagne or something like that.”

“I think that’s where Pilate was for a while. She lived all over the country before she came to us.”

“Did she ever marry that boy?”

“What boy?”

“The boy she had the baby by.”

“No. She didn’t marry him.”

“Didn’t think she would. She was too ashamed.”

“Ashamed of what?”

“Her stomach.”

“Oh, that.”

“Borned herself. I had very little to do with it. I thought they were both dead, the mother and the child. When she popped out you could have knocked me over. I hadn’t heard a heartbeat anywhere. She just came on out. Your daddy loved her. Hurt me to hear they broke away from one another. So it does me good to hear they’re back together again.” She had warmed up talking about the past and Milkman decided not to tell her that Macon and Pilate just lived in the same city. He wondered how she knew about their split, and if she knew what they broke apart about.

“You knew about their quarrel?” he asked quietly, non-chalantly.

“Not the substance. Just the fact. Pilate came back here just after her baby was born. One winter. She told me they split up when they left here and she hadn’t seen him since.”

“Pilate told me they lived in a cave for a few days after they left this house.”

“Is that right? Must have been Hunters Cave. Hunters used it to rest up in there sometimes. Eat. Smoke. Sleep. That’s where they dumped Old Macon’s body.”

“They who? I thought … My father said he buried him. Down by a creek or a river someplace where they used to fish.”

“He did. But it was too shallow and too close to the water. The body floated up at the first heavy rain. Those children hadn’t been gone a month when it floated up. Some men were fishing down there and saw this body, a Negro. So they knew who it was. Dumped it in the cave, and it was summer too. You’d think they would have buried a body in the summer. I told Mrs. Butler I thought it was a disgrace.”

“Daddy doesn’t know that.”

“Well, don’t tell him. Let him have his peace. It’s hard enough with a murdered father; he don’t need to know what happened to the body.”

“Did Pilate tell you why she came back here?”

“Yes. She said her father told her to. She had visits from him, she said.”

“I’d like to see that cave. Where he’s … where they put him.”

“Won’t be anything left to see now. That’s been a long time ago.”

“I know, but maybe there’s something I can bury properly.”

“Now, that’s a thought worth having. The dead don’t like it if they’re not buried. They don’t like it at all. You won’t have trouble finding it. You go back out the road you came in on. Go north until you come to a stile. It’s falling down, but you’ll see it’s a stile. Right in there the woods are open. Walk a little way in and you’ll come to a creek. Cross it. There’ll be some more woods, but ahead you’ll see a short range of hills. The cave is right on the face of those hills. You can’t miss it. It’s the only one there. Tell your daddy you buried him properly, in a graveyard. Maybe with a headstone. A nice headstone. I hope they find me soon enough and somebody’ll take pity on me.” She looked at the dogs. “Hope they find me soon and don’t let me lay in here too long.”

Milkman swallowed as her thought touched his mind. “People come to see you, don’t they?”

“Dog buyers. They come every now and then. They’ll find me, I guess.”

“Reverend Cooper…They think you’re dead.”

“Splendid. I don’t like those Negroes in town. Dog people come and the man that delivers the dog food once a week. They come. They’ll find me. I just hope it’s soon.”

He loosened his collar and lit another cigarette. Here in this dim room he sat with the woman who had helped deliver his father and Pilate; who had risked her job, her life, maybe, to hide them both after their father was killed, emptied their slop jars, brought them food at night and pans of water to wash. Had even sneaked off to the village to have the girl Pilate’s name and snuffbox made into an earring. Then healed the ear when it got infected. And after all these years was thrilled to see what she believed was one of them. Healer, deliverer, in another world she would have been the head nurse at Mercy. Instead she tended Weimaraners and had just one selfish wish: that when she died somebody would find her before the dogs ate her.

“You should leave this place. Sell the damn dogs. I’ll help you. You need money? How much?” Milkman felt a flood of pity and thought gratitude made her smile at him. But her voice was cold.

“You think I don’t know how to walk when I want to walk? Put your money back in your pocket.”

Rebuffed from his fine feelings, Milkman matched her cold tone: “You loved those white folks that much?”

“Love?” she asked. “Love?”

“Well, what are you taking care of their dogs for?”

“Do you know why she killed herself? She couldn’t stand to see the place go to ruin. She couldn’t live without servants and money and what it could buy. Every cent was gone and the taxes took whatever came in. She had to let the upstairs maids go, then the cook, then the dog trainer, then the yardman, then the chauffeur, then the car, then the woman who washed once a week. Then she started selling bits and pieces—land, jewels, furniture. The last few years we ate out of the garden. Finally she couldn’t take it anymore. The thought of having no help, no money—well, she couldn’t take that. She had to let everything go.”

“But she didn’t let you go.” Milkman had no trouble letting his words snarl.

“No, she didn’t let me go. She killed herself.”

“And you still loyal.”

“You don’t listen to people. Your ear is on your head, but it’s not connected to your brain. I said she killed herself rather than do the work I’d been doing all my life!” Circe stood up, and the dogs too. “Do you hear me? She saw the work I did all her days and died, you hear me, died rather than live like me. Now, what do you suppose she thought I was! If the way I lived and the work I did was so hateful to her she killed herself to keep from having to do it, and you think I stay on here because I loved her, then you have about as much sense as a fart!”

The dogs were humming and she touched their heads. One stood on either side of her. “They loved this place. Loved it. Brought pink veined marble from across the sea for it and hired men in Italy to do the chandelier that I had to climb a ladder and clean with white muslin once every two months. They loved it. Stole for it, lied for it, killed for it. But I’m the one left. Me and the dogs. And I will never clean it again. Never. Nothing. Not a speck of dust, not a grain of dirt, will I move. Everything in this world they lived for will crumble and rot. The chandelier already fell down and smashed itself to pieces. It’s down there in the ballroom now. All in pieces. Something gnawed through the cords. Ha! And I want to see it all go, make sure it does go, and that nobody fixes it up. I brought the dogs in to make sure. They keep strangers out too. Folks tried to get in here to steal things after she died. I set the dogs on them. Then I just brought them all right in here with me. You ought to see what they did to her bedroom. Her walls didn’t have wallpaper. No. Silk brocade that took some Belgian women six years to make. She loved it—oh, how much she loved it. Took thirty Weimaraners one day to rip it off the walls. If I thought the stink wouldn’t strangle you, I’d show it to you.” She looked at the walls around her. “This is the last room.”

“I wish you’d let me help you,” he said after a while.

“You have. You came in here and pretended it didn’t stink and told me about Macon and my sweet little Pilate.”

“Are you sure?”

“Never surer.”

They both stood and walked down the hall. “Mind how you step. There’s no light.” Dogs came from everywhere, humming. “Time for their feeding,” she said. Milkman started down the stairs. Halfway down, he turned and looked up at her.

“You said his wife made him keep the name. Did you ever know his real name?”

“Jake, I believe.”

“Jake what?”

She shrugged, a Shirley Temple, little-girl-helpless shrug. “Jake was all she told me.”

“Thanks,” he called back, louder than he needed to, but he wanted his gratitude to cut through the stink that was flooding back over the humming of the dogs.

But the humming and the smell followed him all the way back down the tunnel to the macadam road. When he got there it was ten-thirty. Another hour and a half before Nephew would be back. Milkman paced the shoulder of the road, making plans. When should he return? Should he try to rent a car or borrow the preacher’s? Had Nephew got his suitcase? What equipment would he need? Flashlight and what else? What story should be in his mind in case he was discovered? Of course: looking for his grandfather’s remains—to collect them and take them for a proper burial. He paced further, and then began to stroll in the direction Nephew would be coming from. After a few minutes, he wondered if he was going the right way. He started back, but just then saw the ends of two or three wooden planks sticking out of the brush. Maybe this was the stile Circe had described to him. Not exactly a stile, but the remains of one. Circe had not left that house in years, he thought. Any stile she knew of would have to be in disrepair now. And if her directions were accurate, he might make it there and back before twelve. At least he would be able to check it out in the daylight.

Gingerly, he parted the brush and walked a little way into the woods. He didn’t see even a trace of a track. But as he kept on a bit, he heard water and followed the sound, which seemed to be just ahead of the next line of trees. He was deceived. He walked for fifteen minutes before he came to it. “Cross it,” she’d said, and he thought there would be a bridge of some sort. There was none. He looked across and saw hills. It must be there. Right there. He calculated that he could just make it in the hour or so left before he should be back on the road. He sat down, took off his shoes and socks, stuffed the socks in his pocket, and rolled up his pants. Holding his shoes in his hand, he waded in. Unprepared for the coldness of the water and the slimy stones at the bottom, he slipped to one knee and soaked his shoes trying to break his fall. He righted himself with difficulty and poured the water out of his shoes. Since he was already wet, there was no point in turning back; he waded on out. After half a minute, the creek bed dropped six inches and he fell again, only now he went completely under and got a glimpse of small silvery translucent fish as his head went down. Snorting water, he cursed the creek, which was too shallow to swim and too rocky to walk. He should have pulled a stick to check depth before he put his foot down, but his excitement had been too great. He went on, feeling with his toes for firm footing before he put his weight down. It was slow moving—the water was about two or three feet deep and some twelve yards wide. If he hadn’t been so eager, maybe he could have found a narrower part to cross. Thoughts of what he should have done instead of just plunging in, fruitless as they were, irritated him so that they kept him moving until he made it to the other side. He threw his shoes on the dry ground and hoisted himself up and out on the bank. Breathless, he reached for his cigarettes and found them soaked. He lay back on the grass and let the high sunshine warm him. He opened his mouth so the clear air could bathe his tongue.

After a while he sat up and put on the wet socks and shoes. He looked at his watch to check the time. It ticked, but the face was splintered and the minute hand was bent. Better move, he thought, and struck out for the hills, which, deceptive as the sound of the creek, were much farther away than they seemed. He had no idea that simply walking through trees, bushes, on untrammeled ground could be so hard. Woods always brought to his mind City Park, the tended woods on Honoré Island where he went for outings as a child and where tiny convenient paths led you through. “He leased ten acres of virgin woods and cleared it all,” said the men describing the beginning of Old Macon Dead’s farm. Cleared this? Chopped down this? This stuff he could barely walk through?

He was sweating into his wet shirt and just beginning to feel the result of sharp stones on his feet. Occasionally he came to a clear space and he’d alter his direction as soon as the low hills came back into view.

Finally flat ground gave way to a gentle upward slope of bushes, saplings, and rock. He walked along its edge, looking for an opening. As he moved southward, the skirts of the hills were rockier and the saplings fewer. Then he saw, some fifteen to twenty feet above him, a black hole in the rock which he could get to by a difficult, but not dangerous, climb, made more difficult by the thin smooth soles of his shoes. He wiped sweat from his forehead on his coat sleeve, slipped off the narrow black tie that hung open around his collar and put it in his pocket.

The salt taste was back in his mouth and he was so agitated by what he believed, hoped, he would find there, he had to put his hands on warm stone to dry them. He thought of the pitiful hungry eyes of the old men, their eagerness for some word of defiant success accomplished by the son of Macon Dead; and of the white men who strutted through the orchards and ate the Georgia peaches after they shot his grandfather’s head off. Milkman took a deep breath and began to negotiate the rocks.

As soon as he put his foot on the first stone, he smelled money, although it was not a smell at all. It was like candy and sex and soft twinkling lights. Like piano music with a few strings in the background. He’d noticed it before when he waited under the pines near Pilate’s house; more when the moon lit up the green sack that hung like a kept promise from her ceiling; and most when he tumbled lightly to the floor, sack in hand. Las Vegas and buried treasure; numbers dealers and Wells Fargo wagons; race track pay windows and spewing oil wells; craps, flushes, and sweepstakes tickets. Auctions, bank vaults, and heroin deals. It caused paralysis, trembling, dry throats, and sweaty palms. Urgency, and the feeling that “they” had been mastered or were on your side. Quiet men stood up and threw a queen down on the table hard enough to break her neck. Women sucked their bottom lips and put little red disks down in numbered squares. Lifeguards, A-students, eyed cash registers and speculated on how far away the door was. To win. There was nothing like it in the world.

Milkman became agile, pulling himself up the rock face, digging his knees into crevices, searching with his fingers for solid earth patches or ledges of stone. He left off thinking and let his body do the work. He stood up, finally, on level ground twenty feet to the right of the mouth of the cave. There he saw a crude footpath he might have found earlier if he had not been so hasty. That was the path the hunters used and that Pilate and his father had also used. None of them tore their clothes as he had, climbing twenty feet of steep rock.

He entered the cave and was blinded by the absence of light. He stepped back out and reentered, cupping his eyes. After a while, he could distinguish the ground from the wall of the cave. There was the ledge of rock where they’d slept, much larger than he had pictured. And worn places on the floor where fires had once burned, and several boulders standing around the entrance—one with a kind of V-shaped crown. But where were the bones? Circe said they dumped him in here. Farther back, probably, back where the shallow pit was. Milkman had no flashlight and his matches were certainly wet, but he tried to find a dry one anyway. Only one or two even sputtered. The rest were dead. Still, his eyes were getting used to the dark. He pulled a branch from a bush that grew near the entrance and bending forward, let it graze the ground before him as he walked. He had gone thirty or forty feet when he noticed the cave’s walls were closer together. He could not see the roof at all. He stopped and began to move slowly sideways, the branch tip scratching a yard or so ahead. The side of his hand grazed rock and he flung the dry bat shit off it and moved to the left. The branch struck air. He stopped again, and lowered the tip until it touched ground again. Raising it up and down, and pressing it back and around, he could tell that he had found the pit. It was about two feet deep and maybe eight feet wide. Frantically he scraped the branch around the bottom. It hit something hard, again something else hard. Milkman swallowed and dropped to his knees. He squinted his eyes as hard as he could, but he couldn’t see a thing. Suddenly he remembered a lighter in his vest pocket. He dropped the branch and fumbled for it, almost faint from the money smell—the twinkling lights, the piano music. He pulled it out, praying it would light. On the second try, it burst into flame and he peered down. The lighter went out. He snapped it back and held his hand over its fragile flame. At the bottom of the hole he saw rocks, boards, leaves, even a tin cup, but no gold. Stretched out on his stomach, holding the lighter in one hand, he swept the bottom with the other, clawing, pulling, fingering, poking. There were no fat little pigeon-breasted bags of gold. There was nothing. Nothing at all. And before he knew it, he was hollering a long, awwww sound into the pit. It triggered the bats, which swooped suddenly and dived in the darkness over his head. They startled him and he leaped to his feet, whereupon the sole of his right shoe split away from the soft cordovan leather. The bats drove him out in a lopsided run, lifting his foot high to accommodate the flopping sole.

In the sunlight once more, he stopped for breath. Dust, tears, and too bright light were in his eyes, but he was too angry and disgusted to rub them. He merely threw the lighter in a wide high arc into the trees at the foot of the hills and limped down the footpath, paying no attention to the direction he was going. He put his feet down wherever was most convenient. Quite suddenly, it seemed to him, he was at the creek again, but upstream where the crossing—about twelve feet here and so shallow he could see the stony bottom—was laid across with boards. He sat down and lashed the sole of his shoe to its top with his black string tie, then walked across the homemade bridge. The woods on the other side had a pathway.

Milkman began to shake with hunger. Real hunger, not the less than top-full feeling he was accustomed to, the nervous desire to taste something good. Real hunger. He believed if he didn’t get something to eat that instant he would pass out. He examined the bushes, the branches, the ground for a berry, a nut, anything. But he didn’t know what to look for, nor how they grew. Trembling, his stomach in a spasm, he tore off a few leaves and put them in his mouth. They were as bitter as gall, but he chewed them anyway, spit them out, and got others. He thought of the breakfast food Mrs. Cooper had put before him, which had disgusted him then. Fried eggs covered with grease, fresh-squeezed orange juice with seed and pulp floating in it, thick hand-cut bacon, a white-hot mound of grits and biscuits. It was her best effort, he knew, but perhaps because of the whiskey he’d drunk the night before, he could only bring himself to drink two cups of black coffee and eat two biscuits. The rest had nauseated him, and what he did eat he had left at Circe’s door.

Some brush closed in on him and when he swept it angrily aside, he saw a stile and the road in front of him. Macadam, automobiles, fence posts, civilization. He looked at the sky to gauge the hour. The sun was a quarter of the way down from what even he knew was high noon. About one o’clock, he guessed. Nephew would have come and gone. He felt in his back pocket for his wallet. It was discolored at the edges from the water, but the contents were dry. Five hundred dollars, his driver’s license, phone numbers on slips of paper, social security card, airline ticket stub, cleaners receipts. He looked up and down the road. He had to get food, and started walking south, where he believed Danville lay, hoping to hitch as soon as a car came by. He was not only ravenous; his feet hurt. The third car to pass stopped—a 1954 Chevrolet—and the driver, a black man, showed the same interest in Milkman’s clothes that Nephew had shown. He seemed not to notice or care about the rip at the knee or under the arm, the tie-tied shoe, the leaves in Milkman’s hair, or the dirt all over the suit.

“Where you headed, partner?”

“Danville. As close as I can get.”

“Hop on in, then. Little out my way. I cut over to Buford, but I’ll get you closer than you was.”

“’Preciate it,” answered Milkman. He loved the car seat, loved it. And sank his weary back into its nylon and sighed.

“Good cut of suit,” the man said. “I guess you ain’t from here’ bouts.”

“No. Michigan.”

“Sure ‘nough? Had a aunt move out there. Flint. You know Flint?”

“Yeah. I know Flint.” Milkman’s feet were singing, the tender skin of the ball louder than the heels. He dared not spread his toes, lest the singing never stop.

“What kinda place is it, Flint?”

“Jive. No place you’d want to go to.”

“Thought so. Name sounds good, but I thought it’d be like that.”

Milkman had noticed a six-bottle carton of Coca-Cola on the back seat when he got in the car. It was on his mind.

“Could I buy one of those Coca-Colas from you? I’m kinda thirsty.”

“It’s warm,” said the man.

“Long as it’s wet.”

“Help yourself.”

Milkman reached around and pulled a bottle out of its case.

“Got a bottle opener?”

The man took the bottle from him and put its head in his mouth and slowly pried the top off. Foam shot all over his chin and his lap before Milkman could take it from him.

“Hot.” The man laughed and wiped himself with a navy-and-white handkerchief.

Milkman gulped the Coke, foam and all, in three or four seconds.

“Like another?”

He did but he said no. Just a cigarette.

“Don’t smoke,” said the man.

“Oh,” said Milkman, and struggled against and lost to a long belch.

“Bus station’s right around the bend there.” They were just outside Danville. “You can make it easy.”

“I really do thank you.” Milkman opened the door. “What do I owe you? For the Coke and all?”

The man was smiling, but his face changed now. “My name’s Garnett, Fred Garnett. I ain’t got much, but I can afford a Coke and a lift now and then.”

“I didn’t mean…I…”

But Mr. Garnett had reached over and closed the door. Milkman could see him shaking his head as he drove off.

Milkman’s feet hurt him so, he could have cried, but he made it to the diner/bus station and looked for the man behind the counter. He wasn’t there, but a woman offered to help. There followed a long discussion in which he discovered that the bag was not there, the man was not there, she didn’t know if a colored boy had picked it up or not, they didn’t have a checkroom and she was mighty sorry but he could look at the station-master’s if the boy didn’t have it, and was there anything else she could do?

“Hamburgers,” he said. “Give me some hamburgers and a cup of coffee.”

“Yes, sir. How many?”

“Six,” he said, but his stomach cramped on the fourth and bent him double with a pain that lasted off and on all the way to Roanoke. But before he left, he telephoned Reverend Cooper. His wife answered and told him that her husband was still at the freightyard and he could catch him there if he hurried. Milkman thanked her and hung up. Walking like a pimp in delicate shoes, he managed to get to the yard, which was fairly close to the bus station. He entered the gate and asked the first man he saw if Reverend Cooper was still there.

“Coop?” the man said. “I think he went on over to the station house. See it? Right over there.”

Milkman followed his finger, and hobbled over the gravel and ties to the station house.

It was empty save for an old man dragging a crate.

“Excuse me,” Milkman said. “Is Rev—is Coop still here?”

“Just left. If you run you can catch him,” the man said. He wiped the sweat of exertion from his forehead.

Milkman thought about running anywhere on his tender feet and said, “Oh, well. I’ll try to catch him another time.” He turned to go.

“Say,” said the man. “If you ain’t gonna try to catch him, could you give me a hand with this?” He pointed down to the huge crate at his feet. Too tired to say no or explain, Milkman nodded. The two of them grunted and groaned over the box, and finally got it up on a dolly, where they could push it to the weighing platform. Milkman slumped over the crate and caught his breath, barely able to nod to the old man’s thank yous. Then he went out of the station into the street.

He was tired now. Really tired. He didn’t want to see Reverend Cooper and his success-starved friends again. And he certainly didn’t want to explain anything to his father or Guitar just yet. So he hobbled back to the bus station and asked for the next bus leaving that was going south. It had to be south. And it had to be Virginia. Because now he thought he knew how to find out what had happened to the gold.

Full of hamburgers, sore of foot, sick to his stomach, but at least sitting down, he couldn’t even feel the disappointment that lay in the pit in the cave. He slept heavily for several hours on the bus, woke and daydreamed, napped a little more, woke again at a rest stop and ate a bowl of pea soup. He went into a drugstore and replaced the shaving equipment and toilet articles he’d left at Reverend Cooper’s, and decided to wait and get his shoe fixed (it was sealed with chewing gum now), his suit mended, and a new shirt in Virginia.

The Greyhound bus made a sound like the hum of the Weimaraners as it sped down the road, and Milkman shivered a little, the way he had when Circe glanced at them, sitting in the “last room,” wondering if she would outlive them. But there were over thirty of them and reproducing all the time.

The low hills in the distance were no longer scenery to him. They were real places that could split your thirty-dollar shoes. More than anything in the world he’d wanted it to be there, for row upon row of those little bags to turn their fat pigeon chests up to his hands. He thought he wanted it in the name of Macon Dead’s Georgia peaches, in the name of Circe and her golden-eyed dogs, and especially in the name of Reverend Cooper and his old-timey friends who began to die before their facial hair was out when they saw what happened to a black man like them—“ignorant as a hammer and broke as a convict”—who had made it anyway. He also thought he wanted it in the name of Guitar, to erase what looked like doubt in his face when Milkman left, the “I-know-you-gonna-fuck-up” look. There wasn’t any gold, but now he knew that all the fine reasons for wanting it didn’t mean a thing. The fact was he wanted the gold because it was gold and he wanted to own it. Free. As he had sat chomping the hamburgers in the bus station, imagining what going home would be like now—not only to have to say there was no gold, but also to know he was trapped there—his mind had begun to function clearly.

Circe said that Macon and Sing had boarded that wagon in Virginia, where they both came from. She also said Macon’s body rose up from the ground at the first heavy rain, and that the Butlers, or somebody, dumped it in the hunters’ cave one summer night. One summer night. And it was a body, a corpse, when they hauled it away, because they recognized him as a Negro. Yet Pilate said it was winter when she was there, and there were only bones. She said she went to see Circe and visited the cave four years later, in the snow, and took the white man’s bones. Why didn’t she see her father’s bones? There should have been two skeletons. Did she step over one and collect the other? Surely Circe had told her the same thing she told him—that her father’s body was in the cave. Did Pilate tell Circe that they had killed a man in there? Probably not, since Circe didn’t mention it. Pilate said she took the white man’s bones and didn’t even look for the gold. But she lied. She had not mentioned the second skeleton because it wasn’t there when she got to the cave. She didn’t come back four years later—or if she did, it was her second trip. She came back before they dumped the Negro they found in the cave. She took the bones, all right; Milkman had seen them on the table in the jailhouse. But that’s not all she took. She took the gold. To Virginia. And maybe somebody in Virginia would know.

Milkman followed in her tracks.