One

The death in 1953 of light-skinned Miss Ida Carlisle at the Alcanthia County crazy farm is memorable because it happened simultaneously with the closing of the Korean War; it is important in the affairs of Burnside, Virginia, because it marked the end of Miss Ida's color aristocracy and the beginning of a new social order based upon the common barnyard chicken.

Under Miss Ida's regime, the color of a man's skin had been the most important social factor among the Negroes of Burnside. Before she was jailed for the crime of pretending to be white, Miss Ida had been the brightest light in the unenlightened social circles of Burnside because of the curious fact that she was more than fifty percent white in a community where almost everybody else was more than fifty percent black.

Miss Ida's peculiar system of apartheid, as well as the Government's practice of paying inflated prices for farm products during wartime, had both helped to bring prosperity to Burnside. But with the cessation of Miss Ida and the Korean War on the same day, the Government itself stepped in to fill the gap created by the two events.

It encouraged Negroes to raise chickens, perhaps from the idea that Negroes eat more chicken than whites do, but more probably to engage them in some petty labor that would at the same time feed them and keep them from rioting. It subsidized chicken farms and sent poultry experts all the way from Washington who extolled the virtues of chicken, and cited the fact that chicken is easy to raise and exceedingly good to eat.

From then on, a man was known in Burnside not only by the number of chickens he kept but also by his ability to protect his flock from the robber eagles that roosted at Devil's Mountain, and by how clever he was at cooking chicken in the many different ways recommended by the poultry expert. Now, blacks, browns and high-yallers alike angled for dinner invitations to whatever home, in the hope that they would find chicken more appetizingly prepared and more plentiful elsewhere than the chicken they had left behind.

Although, in truth, it must be said that the Negroes of Burnside had long been expert on the subject of chickens. They had known, even some 150 years before the founding of the American government, that a chicken is small enough to be stolen and large enough to be worth the while. And that one chicken is enough alike other chickens to be picked and cooked and served to the very person it was stolen from, without his enjoyment being impaired in the least by his ignorance. It can be stuffed, stewed, boiled, braised, baked, broiled or barbecued. And for those people with more discerning tastes, it can be eaten with its own eggs as a breakfast dish, or fried in the southern manner and served on those dinner occasions when the people of Burnside entertain each other.

It was at one of these dinner occasions—to celebrate the end of the Korean War and to mourn the passing of Miss Ida, in July of 1953—that Eloise McLindon and Henry Hunter met and fell in love.

Eloise McLindon had been twenty-five years old, and was over three months pregnant with her first child—she told everybody that she had pretty much narrowed the list of possible fathers down to three or four men—when Henry Hunter showed up at the chicken dinner given by the Reverend Mr. Winston Cobb. Henry Hunter, a tall, handsome black man with curly hair, had been a sergeant in the Air Force, fresh back from Korea. He was stationed at the airbase near Richmond, and had come to spend the weekend in Burnside with one of the Bartley boys.

Several years later, on the anniversary of the death of the preacher's wife—she had been destroyed in a fire—Eloise had felt compelled to relate the story of how she had met Henry Hunter at the preacher's chicken dinner.

She talked to her best friend, Viola Anderson. The two women drinking peach wine in front of the fireplace in Eloise's

room. It was around midnight at the beginning of 1960. Eloise's two children, Clair and David, slept underneath a pile

of quilts at the foot of her double bed. Eloise didn't worry so much about Clair, who was only three; but David was seven this month, and old enough to understand what was being said. Before she began her story, Eloise tipped over to the bed to make sure he was still asleep. "There are certain things I'd rather David didn't know about right now," she said to Viola.

"I understand that," Viola said. "Children nowadays are just as fresh as can be." She had a ten-year-old daughter named Dolly, who was by herself in Viola's house down the road.

Eloise sat, and began the story of Henry Hunter. "Actually," she said, "practically nobody ever went to those chicken dinners the preacher gave because you couldn't enjoy yourself there. Before the preacher's wife got burned up, she was always sick. And he never served a single drink to liven those dinners up a bit. He tried to act so dignified himself that he got on everybody's nerves. I just went that Sunday because I was pregnant, and I didn't want to be flaunting myself around—you know what I mean?— at one of those real lively chicken dinners that were being given the same day. So, I walked over to the preacher's house. It was a very hot Sunday. The preacher and two or three faithful church sisters were eating chicken on the porch when I got there, talking about how wonderful the preacher had preached in the morning. This certainly wasn't any place for me to have a good time. The preacher tried not to look at my belly, and he called me Mrs. McLindon—I guess he thought it was the polite thing to do. He gave me a little teeny weeny chicken thigh, fried in lard. He rolled his eyes in a friendly way, and asked me why I hadn't come to church in the morning. But I just said Amen and kept on cracking chicken bones. Every time he said something to me, I'd say Amen. Finally, he just gave up trying to talk to me. And the other women, those old hens, they had started to doze in the heat by this time, their bellies full of chicken. I knew the preacher was exasperated, but I couldn't help it. I was so bored! Honey, I'll be all right by myself, why don't you find something to entertain yourself with? I said to him kindly. And you know what he did? He tipped into the house, to keep from waking up his wife, who was always in there sleeping on the sofa, and he came back out with a copy of Aesop's Fables! He sat down and started reading to himself! Some party! I could have smacked him in the head with a chicken bone!"

Viola laughed roundly. "Some party, indeed!"

Eloise filled their glasses again. "Girl, I was so bored there with nothing to do, no music to dance to, nobody interesting to talk to, I started feeling sorry that I hadn't gone to somebody else's chicken dinner after all."

She had been delighted when, a little while later, she had seen a shiny black convertible with three passengers coming down the road. There had been two men in blue caps and khaki uniforms, and old Lizzie Bartley, another church sister. The sound of the car had roused the dozing women on the porch, and they squinted into the sun. "That's Peter Bartley behind the wheel," one of the women had said. But Eloise had been trying to make out who the other man was in the back seat. And when the car had sputtered to a stop right there in the road, and everybody got out laughing, she had gone down from the porch into the scalding sun and had seen Henry Hunter for the first time.

"Hey, Eloise," Peter Bartley had greeted her. "You heard we won the war, didn't you? This here is my friend, Sergeant Henry Hunter. I came by to drop Mama off. Now we done run out of gas.'

"Yes, I heard about the war," she had said. "Everybody's heard. Congratulations," she said, as if winning the war had been something of his own doing. She had looked at Henry Hunter then, and the heat rose up suddenly and knocked her almost lap-legged out there in the road. He was the most beautiful man she had ever seen.

"It was love at first sight, Viola. Henry told me so himself later on. He was just the kind of man I'd always been looking for. Sort of the color of burnt gingerbread. And good-looking enough to eat. With a little teeny mustache about the size of an eyebrow across his mouth. I could nearly have died, my stomach all poked out with some other man's child, and me falling in love with Henry at first sight. The sun made me so dizzy, I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time, I felt so good and so bad."

In his Air Force uniform, he had looked like one of those Greyhound bus drivers, or a State Trooper, and she had always been partial to uniforms.

Henry Hunter had smiled at her—"How're you doing, girl?" he had said— and then, playfully, he had yelled to Lizzie Bartley not to get sunstroke as the old woman had hobbled over to the preacher's porch, almost staggering under the dead weight of the sun. The preacher had put down Aesop's Fables and came down, gratefully, to help her up the steps.

Breathlessly, Eloise had waited for Henry to stop fooling with Lizzie Bartley. "I'm doing right fine, thank you," she had answered him politely. Although it had seemed like a hundred years between the time he had asked the question and her getting up the gumption to answer him. He removed his cap and ran his hand over his hair—crinkly black, cut short, and not greasy, either—and started talking about the weather, while Peter Bartley took the car keys and opened the trunk, looking for a can to bring some gas in.

"Yes, it certainly do get hot hereabouts," Eloise had said. "My own brain, it feels right now like it's frying."

"You'd better go up on the porch, then," Henry had said.

She could have melted down to a puddle, right there in the road; but she couldn't leave him just then. "It get this hot in Korea?" she had asked.

"Hotter. It's partly surrounded by water. Those currents keep it hot in the summer and cold in the winter."

"I bet you're glad the war's over," Eloise had said, in a kind of rapid desperation, for Peter Bartley had slammed the trunk shut and was coming around the car with the empty can. "You got much time left on your enlistment?"

He had held up one finger. "Just a month more, that's all. Then I'm through with Uncle Sam for good."

She had felt much better. There was no danger, then, of his getting himself killed, not in a month's time. She hadn't minded so much his going with Peter Bartley then.

Henry Hunter had touched her elbow. "You better go up on the porch into the shade," he had said. "I'm going to walk Peter Bartley down the highway to buy some gas. You be here when I get back."

It had not been a question; he was telling her plainly to wait for him. "I'll be here."

"Run along to the porch now, before you get sunstroke." But she had disobeyed him, and stood by the car watching him and Peter trudging down the road to the service station a mile away, Peter swinging the empty gas can. She had admired Henry Hunter's bowlegs; it had seemed almost too good to be true. More than she loved men in uniform, she loved men with bowlegs. When she went up on the porch, all the women were eating chicken and talking to each other. "We are indeed doubly blessed,' the preacher had said, about something which she now disremembered.

"But I said Amenl anyway, Viola. And I sat down and started running my mouth with the other women. None of us would talk to the preacher—what can you talk to a preacher about? And he set his mouth in a pout and went back to reading Aesop. A little while later, the preacher's wife woke up inside and asked him in a whiney voice to bring her out on the porch for some air. But I'm reading, the preacher said. We all heard his wife sigh. You're always reading, she said. It doesn't seem like much of a favor I'm asking. Please, dear? So he sighed, too, and put his book down. And went inside, and dragged the sofa through the door. His wife said hello to everybody, blinking her eyes like somebody who was seeing daylight for the first time, and trying to smile. She said what a pity it was that Miss Ida had died. She was a little wasted thing, too tired to even eat a piece of chicken—she nibbled at it like a rabbit. She was so poor she looked like a little white woman, all bundled up in flannel blankets and camphor, in all that heat. We women tried to talk to her, to make her feel at home, so to speak. But the preacher just ignored her. He went over to the opposite corner of the porch and started reading again."

It had started to snow as Eloise talked. And when Viola excused herself to go to the outhouse before the snow got too deep, Eloise stood at the window and watched the large flakes tumbling by.

It always surprised her to find that two or three hills and a ridge or so of pines banking up snow between could create the false pregnancy that winter seemed to bring to Burnside. In Burnside, it is sometimes five miles or more from one house to another, And snow fitted over a fat line of firs in those miles between always made Eloise think of ice cocoons filled with sleeping candle flies, so luminous and white the snow seemed. It always disappointed her, then, when the snow melted and the chrysalis turned out to be just the white pine that they used to saw down and sell to the mill for cordwood. Barefooted in the first red mud after thawing that spring seven years ago, it had surprised Eloise that she had slipped and got herself pregnant during the winter months. And that the pregnancy of winter—which had inspired her to relax in the arms of different men and sneak glances out the window at the snow over their heaving shoulders—had only been a false laying-in.

That year, out picking jasmine, which is the first spring flower to bloom in Burnside, Eloise had noticed for the first time how the earth had been that maroon color underneath the snow, as though the earth had miscarried its burden. She had felt jealous of the earth, for her burden had still been serene inside her, despite all her efforts to lose it. Sometimes now, she felt guilty about not having wanted David. He had grown into an all-right boy, sometimes a little too sensitive for her taste. But she guessed he got that from his father. He certainly didn't get it from her— nobody could ever claim that she was sensitive, not with all the muck a colored woman has to wade through in order to survive.

She went over to the bed and shook David roughly until he opened his eyes. "Honey, don't you be doing the Number One now on my clean sheets, you hear? You hear me, honey?" He mumbled something, and closed his eyes again. Right now, he looked like anybody's child, his face relaxed that way.

She felt Clair and found with satisfaction that the child's rubber pants held their contents intact. Now with Clair, there was no doubting who her father was. Eloise let her fingers linger in the girl's rough red hair. No, there was no doubt who Clair's father was at all.

Viola came back from the outhouse, and Eloise sat down with her again at the fire. "Viola, do you think they'll ever catch the preacher?" she said suddenly. "I mean, for killing his wife like that, burning the house right down on her head? Poor thing. That must be the reason I'm talking so much tonight, remembering how that preacher treated her like a dog."

"They'll catch him," Viola said confidently. "A man like that can't escape the law forever."

Eloise nodded. "It almost shakes your belief in God, a preacher murdering his wife that way."

Remembering that hot afternoon on the preacher's porch, she searched her memory to find some clue that the preacher had intended to set fire to his house, with his wife in it, and become a fugitive from the law.

"I remember there was something in the way he treated her," Eloise continued, "that made me feel very sorry for her. It was clear to me that he didn't love her and that he considered her sickness a burden. So we women tried to entertain her. And all the time, I kept looking down the road to see if I could spy Henry Hunter and Peter coming back with the gasoline. Like I said before, the preacher's wife had some kind of a disease that kept her in bed all the time, and she was wrapped up in blankets there on the sofa on the porch. She was just a thin wasted poor thing, she offered us some fresh water because the day was so hot. I remember the tar was melting on the highway, that's how hot it was. Now, the preacher was dressed up in his Sunday clothes, a necktie and everything, nobody'd expect him to go to the spring for water. Peter and Henry weren't there—they had gone to get the gas. And we were all women, with our good things on, nobody could expect us to go to the spring, either. Just then, the preacher's wife reached under her pillow and brought out a bell that she started ringing. It was a replica of the Liberty Bell they bought in Philadelphia when they just got married. She told us it had Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof inscribed on the rim, and I admired the bell and read it off myself, for the benefit of the other women. The preacher's wife told us that bedridden like she was, she used it to call the servant. Well sir, she must have laid there for ten minutes ringing that bell without anybody ever showing up."

"I don't believe any preacher in Burnside ever had a servant," Viola said. "I bet she was making up a story."

Eloise nodded. "Lizzie Bartley said the same thing, but I don't know. We never heard of the preacher having a servant. Any way, she sure rang that bell. She made so much noise I thought the preacher would have a fit. He jumped up and threw his book down and asked her what the hell she was ringing that god-damned bell for! Just like that, the preacher did, in his own house, on a Sunday! Can you imagine? Well, she kind of winced away and started crying, and he snarled and went down to the spring in his good clothes in all that heat and brought a pail of water! Can you imagine the preacher doing something like that, Viola? I mean, him being a holy man and everything? Well sir, Lizzie Bartley nearly died. She told him, Reverend, you shouldn't have put yourself out so much just for a bunch of women, we could have done without. Naturally, nobody had the nerve to drink a drop of that water that the preacher brought—I mean, there are some things that you just don't do! And the preacher's wife, her disease had made her drop off to sleep again on the sofa. The preacher was all sweaty and red-eyed by this time. It must have been a hundred degrees outside. He just looked at Lizzie Bartley and the rest of us women like he was going to cry when we wouldn't drink that water. Then he pulled his thing out of his pants right there in front of me and Lizzie Bartley and the rest of those good church women, and started doing the Number One all up and down inside that water pail! Well sir, Lizzie Bartley had a fit! Preacher, ain't you ashamed of yourself percolating in all that water pail, don't you know human beings got to drink that stuff? She tried to wake up the preacher's wife, but her disease just left her unconscious sometimes on the sofa. The rest of us didn't know what to do. Some of the women said Jesus! Lizzie Bartley finally made the preacher put his thing away and dump that dirty water off the porch. Some old dogs came up with their tongues hanging out and licked at it steaming. And Lizzie Bartley fussed with the preacher until Henry Hunter and her son got back with one little half-gallon can of gasoline, wringing wet with sweat like they'd been drenched in the sea. When they wanted some fresh water to drink, all of us women fussed after them until they stopped complaining. And we made them boil rain water and scald the bucket out before they went to the spring."

Eloise had been embarrassed after fussing with Henry Hunter the way she had—but there were times when all men got on her nerves—and she waited anxiously for him and Peter to return from the spring. The preacher had gone back to reading at the other end of the porch, and the five or six women there—his wife was still sleeping, they had dragged her back into the house—kept him at a distance with outraged eyes and indignant comments, if he made one move outside of his exile.

Recalling how pathetic he had looked there—huddled over Aesop's Fables and sweating in that hot black suit, determined to hang on to some little bit of dignity, it seemed—Eloise remembered how she had felt sorry for him, beaten to the ground by all those domineering women, herself included. And she had been just about ready to go and try to make friends with him again when he leaped up laughing all of a sudden—it almost scared the life out of her—and started reading to them from the fable about what the fox said to the lion. "The footprints frighten me, all directed toward you, but none ever return." He had said that two or three times, until all the women gave him such a tongue-lashing that he ran inside the house. None of them had understood what he meant—they doubted if he had understood himself. Had he been calling them lions? They debated it among themselves, and decided that they were the fartherest thing from lions, they were Christian women, even Eloise with her belly poked out, the preacher must be crazy.

Seeing Peter and Henry Hunter coming back from the spring, Lizzie Bartley had got some of the women to help her down from the porch, muttering that something ought to be done about that old crazy preacher. But Burnside was stuck with him and he was stuck with Burnside, for the simple reason that no other preacher could be gotten to replace him, the salary was so low. And try as hard as he might, the preacher couldn't get any church anywhere else to take him on, so one of the women had told Eloise in a whisper full of malice and satisfaction.

Peter Bartley had taken all the other women home in his car. But Henry Hunter had offered to walk Eloise to her house, now that the sun was cooling a bit.

"You can walk me home, but you can't come in," Eloise had warned him. She was sure that Henry had been discussing her with Peter Bartley, and that he had some kind of an idea that she was a loose woman, just because she was pregnant without being married.

They had been passing a grove of sumac trees when she told him that, about his not being able to come into the house. She would always remember the sumac grove and the red flowers, how they had formed a pretty background to Henry's head as he held her by the arm and said, with a grin, "I never heard a woman hiss as much as you, Miss McLindon! I want you to be my woman. Will you be my woman?"

Eloise McLindon had patted her hair. "I'd admire to," she had said, as graciously as she knew how, and wondered what in the world he thought it was making her dress stick out like that— the heat, maybe?—and her not married, although he himself had called her Miss McLindon in fun, which meant that old big-mouthed Peter Bartley had let the cat out of the bag when he should have been buying gasoline.

So, they had walked to her home, holding sweaty hands. She went back on her word and invited him in to consummate their love—although she pretended it was only to give him a glass of lemonade, to cool him off after the walk—but it didn't seem to make much difference any way, since a woman couldn't very well have one baby on top of another one. She had dumped some corn liquor in the lemonade in the kitchen, just in case the lemonade conspired to cool him off too much.

Afterward, Eloise had complained about what a mess the house was, she hadn't cleaned it up because it had been Sunday and the heat was so hot. And besides, didn't the Bible warn against working on Sundays?

She said that she hoped Henry didn't think she was always such a messy woman. Or a nagging woman, either. But, as it turned out, Henry Hunter had been that kind of a casual man. He needed a nagging woman like Eloise McLindon, that's what he told everybody. "Ain't much to me," he used to say. "If somebody don't push me, I'm liable to sit on my butt and not do a thing." So Eloise pushed him. He had a little money saved up from the Air Force. He and the Bartley boy had planned to open up a chicken farm in Burnside with their Air Force savings. But Eloise had convinced Henry of the small future in such a venture. She had an even more startling idea. "Let's go North," she had said. "I want my baby to be born in the North."

She had made herself sick to death taking things to keep from having it. But her stomach had grown rapidly, no matter how much she threw up, or soaked in hot water or squeezed her nose and chewed asafetida—it just seemed to make her belly bigger, that was all. So she had made up her mind that if the trip North didn't kill it, then the baby had at least a right to the prestige of being born above the Mason-Dixon line. She hoped to God it wasn't twins.

She had sometimes wondered what color the baby would be. She said sometimes that she was pretty certain that somebody like black Robert Bartley was its father, she always had that kind of luck. Robert was so black he was almost blue; she was pretty black herself, what they called mellow molasses. With Robert's black and her black combined, she figured that the only fair thing to do was to give the baby at least a fighting chance up North, if it didn't die somewhere in between. "Let's go to New Jersey," she had told Henry. She had almost decided on New York. But from all that she heard, that was where all the common niggers from down home went to congregate in Harlem. She couldn't stand trash, white or black, and that was one reason she had got so sick of Burnside. Besides, all those civil rights cases that were breaking out just then down South made her nervous. She couldn't figure out why any colored woman would want to go to a university any way, much less to a white university. Trash. Just to be sucking up to all them white boys. She'd seen pictures of some of those colored girls at white schools, with their noses all stuck up, and a pencil stuck in their hair.

Some other nice people from Burnside had already settled in New Jersey, so it wouldn't be so much like going to a brand-new place completely full of trashy strangers. The Bartley boy took them to the Greyhound station in Robert's car. Eloise and Henry arrived in New Jersey in September of 1953, and settled down on Decatur Street in a town called Cousinsville. Eloise's days to be accomplished—she had done a little reading in the Bible; she liked to refer to the impending event in Biblical terms —were close to ninety by that time. When the baby was born in December of that year, she had named him David, after the House of the same name in the Bible, and also because it didn't sound colored. Nearly four years later, Henry had been killed in a street corner scuffle over a bottle of cheap wine. Eloise had buried him in Jersey, and returned to Burnside, carrying the baby of the man who had paid for Henry's funeral, and who had bought the train ticket for her return to Burnside. . . .

A sudden noise at the door brought Eloise from her thoughts. But it had only been the wind. Viola had long since fallen asleep, and was snoring with her mouth open. Eloise looked out the window and saw that the wind had risen, driving the snow with relentless force. It was now past three o'clock in the morning. Which wasn't late for Viola and Eloise, they often stayed up drinking and talking all night long. But Eloise knew that if the blizzard continued, there would be drifts nearly six feet deep in the morning.

She felt terribly alone. She was jealous of the ease with which Viola could fall off to sleep. She herself had lately been tortured by memories which kept her painfully awake.

"Viola?" She called her friend gently, but gave her a hard rap on the shoulder. "Wake up, Viola. The blizzard's got worse. I don't like sitting here by myself. Wake up and have a drink of wine."

"I was only resting my eyes a bit," Viola protested. She never admitted to being asleep, as though she attached some dishonor to sleeping in the presence of others.

"I was thinking about Henry Hunter," Eloise said, after Viola had shown her wakefulness by downing a full glass of peach wine in one breath. "You know that Henry and I never got married, didn't you? Oh, he wanted to marry me right from the beginning. And I liked the idea myself—it would have made David legal, to say the least. Not to mention the excitement of a big church wedding, and wearing a gold ring, and being called Mrs. Henry Hunter, instead of plain old Eloise McLindon like everybody calls me now, despite the fact that I've got two children, and I tell everybody that both my husbands died in the war."

She was quite drunk by now, and close to tears. Tactfully, Viola handed her the wine bottle. "Drink a little of this, honey, it'll settle your nerves."

But Eloise refused. The memory of Henry Hunter was sacred to her; she didn't want to get it all dirty and sticky with peach wine.

"You know why we never got married, Viola? Like I said, Henry wanted to. But he still had about a month left before he was discharged. He said he'd be pretty busy. So he told me to talk to the preacher here and make arrangements for the wedding. Well, one day, in August of 1953, I put on a real pretty white dress and I sent word to Robert Bartley to come and take me to the preacher's house. But I had a funny feeling just before we got there, so I thanked Robert, and paid him, and then I walked the rest of the way to the preacher's house. . . . You listening, Viola?"

"I'm listening,' Viola said, although she had been about to rest her eyes again.

"You know how the preacher's house used to have that high porch, and that basement underneath with that window in it? Well, I was taking my time walking—it was such a pleasant day, and, furthermore, I felt kind of ashamed with my belly all stuck out in that white dress, like I was still a virgin, going to ask the preacher to marry me and Henry. So, I was taking my time, I stopped every now and then to pick some flowers growing along the road. Then, just as I got ready to go up the path to the preacher's, I happened to look at that cellar window. And what do you think I saw? I saw a white man grinning at me out of that cellar window! He had a knife in one hand and a fork in the other! And bright sort of crazy hollow blue eyes big around as saucers. He was just standing still there in the window banging on the sill with that knife and fork—you know how children do when they're hungry and want to eat? He was grinning like a crazy wolf or a dog or something, looking straight at me."

Viola shuddered, "Girl, he was going to eat you!" she said, rolling her eyes,

"If he could have caught me," Eloise said, laughing. "The preacher had come out on the porch, and he was looking at me. And I was there in the road, looking at that white man grinning at me from the cellar window. The preacher must have thought I was crazy, the way I stood there with my mouth open. Good morning, Mrs. McLindon, he called, and waved—like I told you, everybody started calling me Mrs. the minute they found out I was going to have a baby. Any way, the preacher was standing there on the porch, and there was this white man in the cellar window. I remember thinking how funny it was—how strange, I mean—the preacher and his wife living upstairs. And that white man down in the cellar, grinning, with that knife and fork in his hand. I was sure it was a hant, a spook, you know what I mean? It seemed to mean something very special."

"Maybe it was just your imagination," Viola said. But Eloise shook her head. "I saw it, I tell you. I was picking some flowers, and I had a whole handful of them. Some people drop everything when they throw up their hands to run. But not me. All of a sudden, honey, I ran. I went straight home with those flowers mashed in my hand. That's why Henry and I never got married. He kept on trying to get me to marry him, but I kept pulling it off until it was too late. I couldn't forget that white man's face in the preacher's window. It was certainly a hant. I saw a white hant. I knew right then that Henry and I shouldn't get married."

"He was going to eat you with that knife and fork," Viola said.

Eloise looked at her strangely. "Sometimes, when me and Henry were in New Jersey, I thought about that. About how the white man eats up everything, you know what I mean? That's what happened to Henry, really. He was eaten up by the white man, body and soul. He wasn't fit for a thing, after two or three months in Jersey. He couldn't keep a job, he couldn't get a job. I worked as long as I could until David was born, then I was right back working after David was born. I'd go to clean white people's houses, and I'd take David with me and lay him on the bed or the sofa while I did my work. Then we'd go home. And Henry would generally be there dead to the world, drunk on that nasty old Sneaky Pete wine you can buy up there for fifty cents the pint. He used to take money I'd make working for white people, and go out and buy wine with it."

Eloise hunched forward in her chair as if filled with a sudden urgency. "You know that baby Clair of mine, Viola? Well, I'm going to tell you something I've never told a living soul before. I hope you don't go blabbing this all over Burnside." She put her finger to her lips and tiptoed to the bed. Satisfied that David and Clair were fully asleep, she went back to her chair at the fireplace.

"What about Clair, honey?" Viola encouraged, all interest now, "I cross my heart and hope to die I won't tell a soul."

"Her father's a white man," Eloise said. "An old red-headed Jew I used to work for, name of Eisenberg. He's Clair's father. Perhaps that's why I care for her more than I love David. Not that I don't love David. . . . It's just that David's all of one thing-he's black like me. But Clair's going to have a tougher row to hoe, being half one thing and half another. That's why I let her get away with so much, I guess—like keeping that mangy old cat you gave her and she fell in love with. And look what happened! That old cat went out and got herself pregnant, that's why I keep her locked up out there with the chamber pot in the pantry." Eloise drank the last of the wine from the bottle, and smiled wryly. "Come to think of it, I guess she got it honest, that cat. How many kittens you done had, Viola, and don't know the name of the torn that made them?"

They were both very drunk now; and Viola laughed in high good humor, because her daughter Dolly was also a natural child. "I was hoping that Mango was Dolly's father," Viola said. "I ever tell you about Mango? Honey, he was one of those Porto Ricans, one of the most beautiful men God ever made! My my my, I still get goose pimples when I think about him!" She wrapped her arms around herself and gave an exaggerated shudder. "He taught me a whole lot, he even taught me some Spanish. Que bueno means how good, que dulce means how sweet!⁷ She preened under Eloise's admiration. "He used to call me his little hura'cano" she added, laughing self-consciously. "His little what?" Eloise said, dismayed. "Hoo-ra'-ca-no," Viola said, stringing it out. "It's a kind of large Porto Rican bird with a big mouth and a loud voice. Mango said that the hura'cano bird beats the air with its wings, and darkens the sky, and then swallows the sun with a loud screech. That's where our word hurricane comes from, you know that storm? Mango said I caused that kind of storm in him. His name, Mango, is a kind of juicy fruit, real sweet, that all the Porto Rican women like to eat," she murmured, laughing, remembering.

Despite herself, Eloise was intrigued. "Like you say, he certainly wasn't Dolly's father, she's pure coon if ever I saw one. What ever happened to that Mango?"

"Mango? Oh, he went back to Porto Rico. He came here once just to help pick tomatoes. I sure hated to see him go, but he had his wife and ten or fifteen children back there."

The women laughed together, comfortably. "Sounds like some niggers I know," Eloise said.

"Sounds like all the niggers I know," Viola amended. There was no wine left, and the fire had burned low on the hearth. "I think I'll spend the rest of the night here in this chair," Viola said. "I certainly don't feel like going out in all that weather."

Eloise went to get her a blanket; and when she came back, Viola was already asleep. Eloise spread the blanket over her, tucking it around her neck and feet. It was almost four o'clock. She was surprised, and disappointed, that day was so long in coming.

She turned off the lights and wrapped a blanket around her shoulders. She stood by the window and looked out at the swirling snow. Henry Hunter was still strong in her thoughts. And Norman Eisenberg, the Jew who had paid for Henry's funeral, and for her ticket back to Burnside, without even knowing that Eloise had been carrying his child back below the Mason-Dixon line to be born. As she had carried an unnamed black man's child North to be born.

Watching the frantic snow whipped to a frenzy by the wind, she felt a terrible mixture of longing and sadness. The last embers crackled and died in the fireplace. As Henry had died there on the street corner. As the preacher's wife had died in flames on a winter night three, maybe four, years ago. Eloise remembered the preacher reading Aesop's Fables. "The footprints frighten me, all directed toward you, but none ever return." She thought of returning to New Jersey with Clair and David. Henry hadn't been able to find work; but there was always a job for a colored woman.

Eisenberg had liked her very much in New Jersey. He had been sorry when she went back to Burnside. "Eloise, you always got a job here and the place to live next door, if you ever decide to come back." Well, why not? She had not thought about Norman Eisenberg for a long time now, not with the checks from Henry's insurance money that were coming in regularly. But the last check would come some time around the middle of summer. What was a woman to do then, with two children to look after? She could go into Viola's kind of business, but she had the secret notion that a woman really low-rated herself, doing it with any man just for the money. With Norman Eisenberg, for example, she had cooked his meals and kept his house clean. And with Henry? Well, she had given him a certain kind of comfort and companionship; he had got his money's worth. The footprints frighten me.

Now the snow lay in a smooth, deep blanket, hiding the ground and whatever tracks underneath. She sometimes felt that for Henry Hunter, all tracks had led to her, and none had returned. That, through some inexplicable chemistry, she had been the white ghost in the preacher's window . . . she and Norman Eisenberg. The red earth that spring after thawing—had it been a warning of Henry's blood wasted like cheap wine on a New Jersey sidewalk, while she was working for Norman Eisenberg, keeping his house clean, cooking his meals, sleeping—sometimes—in his bed?

Sometimes, she could not help thinking that she might have somehow been as responsible for Henry's death as the white policeman who had shot him ... as responsible as the preacher had been for murdering his wife, as if she had started a fire where no fire ought to have been.

She had tried to explain that to the lawyer that the NAACP had sent around after Henry's death. But he had not understood. He had been too busy trying to get her to sign some papers so they could take the case to court. In the interest of all the colored people, the lawyer had said. But she had heard all about the NAACP, they had even tried to get her to join once or twice. But she was having none of that NAACP, that National Association of Airs-put-on by Colored People, that's what she called it right to the lawyer's face.

She was suddenly very tired. She heaved a long sigh, and staggered to the other rocking chair. Pulling it closer to Viola's, she slumped down underneath the blanket; and her snores were soon blending with Viola's.

At the sound of her snoring, David threw back the covers and crawled out of bed. He was disappointed that Eloise had not poked him awake—although he had been pretending to be asleep almost from the start of their conversation—and made him go do the Number One out in the chamber pot in the pantry.

He crept over to Eloise and Viola and peered in first one sleeping face, and then the other. He could see their faces quite plainly in the last light from the dying embers. He liked Viola just as much as he liked his own mother. And he was glad Dolly's father hadn't been that Porto Rican man. That would have just given Dolly one more thing to shake her behind and brag about.

Then he sneaked back to the bed and turned on the small lamp there. Clair was almost hidden under the blankets, but he pushed them back gently and stared down into her face with a curious, almost detached interest. Her eyes were blue when they were open. That real white face. And that nappy red hair. He had always been very aware of the fact that she was much different from him. Now he knew the reason why. Gently, he covered her face as he had seen them cover the faces of dead people in the Dillwyn movies.

He felt a sudden urge to do the Number One. He switched off the light and went quietly out to the pantry, where he relieved himself in the porcelain chamber pot. Eloise kept it out there in the pantry where it wouldn't smell up the living room. He heard a soft purring at his feet; and he stared down into the dilated green eyes of Clair's cat. He knelt and stroked her fur. Eloise had said there would be kittens. Around the commence of warm weather, Eloise had said.

Clair's cat. He was black himself, he hated the idea of having a sister as light as Clair. He patted the cat's heaving side, trying to feel the unborn kittens there. "Wait till spring," he whispered. He'd show that old Clair and her white father.

He felt a bitterness in his mouth, like the sour taste of fear. "Wait till spring." Lee's creek would be thawed by then. He'd drown the cat and all her kittens. That ought to show old Clair. With her scrawny little body and nappy red hair. Even he knew she was pretty small to be going on four years old, she wasn't much bigger than a doll.

He went back to bed, and dreamed that the hurricane bird had come screaming to swallow the sun. And that he had shot it with one of those bazookas from the Dillwyn movies. The sun came out as the large bird flew away, beating its wings. Darkness rose from the face of the earth.

In his dream, it was spring again, and he had saved the world and defeated winter by chasing the hurricane bird away. It was spring again, and he was fulfilling the promise he had made to the cat.

TWO

But as it happened, when spring did come, it was ugly and muddy, not at all beautiful as it had been in David's dream. The harsh March wind blew hot and cold, and carried, at the same time, a hint of snow and of spring. Miss Poindexter, the teacher at school, had pointed out to them the first robin poking about in the red mud. Lee's Creek thawed with a roar that could be heard over most of Burnside, and from the top of the hill, David could see the pussy willows budding along its banks. But it was still too wet and soggy to go to the low ground, and sometimes, Eloise kept him home from school, saying it was too muddy for him to be slogging about. On good mornings, when the sun had warmed some, and the wind had lost some of its sting, David walked with Dolly Anderson to the mailbox, to wait for Mr. Pizens to come speeding along in the school bus.

Mr. Pizens, who drove the mail truck as well, was also the local numbers man. Mornings and afternoons, he carried the children to school and brought them home. In between, he delivered what little mail there was from Alcanthia Post Office and picked up the numbers that were left for him, weighted down by a small pile of coins, on slips of paper in the mailboxes. As most women in Burnside did when they could scrape together the change, Eloise and Viola played a number every day. Part of David's and Dolly's morning chore was to place the numbers and the money in the box that both families shared, and to be certain that the small red flag was pulled out to signal Mr. Pizens in his role as mail carrier. The numbers game paid twenty-five dollars for every five cents played, if one was lucky enough to hit; and Viola and Eloise had recently taken to gambling a quarter daily, ever since Viola had said that she would like to spend a couple of weeks up North this summer, if they did hit the number, and if Eloise would go with her when school closed. David and Dolly attended the school named for St. Matthew's Baptist Church, but operated by the State under some remote sentiment of the legislators in Richmond that second-rate education could be made more palatable to the Negroes of Burnside by associating it with religion. The school was a single, ramshackle building of gray-pine weatherboarding. It consisted of one room with a heater, whose wood was provided by the State, as were the American flag and the portraits of Booker T. Washington and the present governor of Virginia, which formed a kind of tribunal behind Miss Poindexter where she sat. Each of the six rows of desks was a separate grade, all taught by Miss Poindexter, who had come to Burnside from a course in Home Economics at a large university for Negroes in the South. Miss Poindexter was a prim, light-skinned woman of around thirty-five, and she impressed upon her pupils how fortunate they were to be living in Alcanthia County and not in nearby Prince Edward, where all public schools had recently been closed to prevent the mixing of white and Negro children under present integration laws. Being all Negro, Burnside did not have that problem; and Miss Poindexter 's curriculum demonstrated her gratitude for that fact. Raised herself under the accommodative theories of Booker T. Washington, Miss Poindexter taught only enough of the three Rs, along with the fourth one of Resignation, to keep herself from falling off to sleep in the overheated classroom.

David sat in the second row; Dolly sat in the fifth, where she and five other children learned about such things as the Equator and the Tropic of Capricorn in a proud singsong while Miss Poindexter pointed to a circle awkwardly drawn in red crayon on a flat piece of paper that she called, drowsily, The World.

Sometimes, David felt that Burnside was the beginning and the end of the world. The home of the Princess of the Moon, and the Four Winds, and of ogres and hobgoblins—that was what he learned in second grade from the State's textbooks, along with the alphabet, and the multiplication tables up to ten-times-ten-equals-one-hundred, and about Uncle Remus, and Brer Rabbit, and Little Black Sambo who made the tigers turn into butter and ate them on pancakes. Miss Poindexter read the stories to them from a pretty book. There was a picture of Little Black Sambo with round white eyes, and hair like burrs, and thick red lips, watching with an extravagant grin from behind a clump of bushes while the furious tigers went round and round a palm tree in a golden-brown whirligig. Then, Miss Poindexter would seem to be wide awake in her reading. She would smile over her words and her eyes would flash in delight at the idea of little black boys almost being eaten up by tigers. Recalling her courses in Home Economics, she explained to them the nutritional value of pancakes. She reminded David of Clair with her yellow self.

There were many things that reminded David of Clair. She was everywhere, it seemed. She was in the Easter lilies, and the spring sun, the planting moon, the sly-winking stars and the luminous clouds; her voice shrilled in the vinegar wind that gradually turned April warm. Clair was Daughter of the Sun, and Princess of the Moon in the pretty book.

He searched for his own color, and saw it in a few places—the putrid dark at the bottom of the outhouse, the bark of the wet spring trees, the murky seep from the weatherboarding, the loam in the woods where the leaves had rotted under the blanket of snow. On those nights when the moon was not out, he hugged himself in darkness, and felt secure.

Although he liked going to school, he was jealous of the seven or eight hours that Clair had Eloise all to herself while he was gone. "Honey, she shine them big blue eyes and transfix me, I just can't resist her, I just let her have her way!" Eloise had said that about Clair when she permitted her to keep the mangy old cat that Viola had dug up for her from somewhere. So that David lived in constant terror of coming home one day and finding that Clair had wormed away from Eloise even that small amount of love she saved for him. Getting off the bus at the mailbox, he always looked down the road and saw with relief that the house was still standing, that Clair hadn't yet asked Eloise to burn the house down just for meanness, and for the two of them to run off and leave while he was in school. When he burst into the house, he inspected their faces carefully, and paid attention to every little thing they said or did, to see if they had formed some kind of coalition against him while he had been gone.

He whined around Eloise for attention, but succeeded only in aggravating her. She praised God that April had come so she could break some green willow switches to whip that boy, he whined around her all the time.

He tried a new tack. He pinched and slapped Clair on the sly. But Eloise soon put a stop to that with more switches. "You're the meanest black nigger God ever breathed life into!" she said, in rhythm to the rise and fall of the supple switch. "You put your hands on that sweet child again and I'm going to kill you!" He believed she would, too. He felt himself recede inside a cold anger that soothed the sting of the willow switch. He knew enough then not to make attacks upon Clair's person; he decided to attack her property instead.

But there was very little that she owned, aside from the talking Mama doll Santa Claus had brought her for Christmas. He had got a pair of shoes, and some shirts and socks and underwear, but no toy to match the elegance of the talking doll. There was a string in the back of its head, and when Clair pulled the string, the doll jabbered in a prissy little metallic voice until the motor ran down. Mama I love you the very best of all Mama I love you the very best of all Mama I love you. . . . Fluffing its frizzy hair, Eloise had told Viola about how the old Dillwyn Jew had tried to cheat her when she bought it. "But I told him a thing or two about himself, honey, and he knocked off a dollar and let me have it for just five ninety-eight." Listening, David realized that the father of the doll was also a Jew. He hated the doll. It was like having another light-skinned sister to share Eloise with. Except this one had that nappy blond hair, and pink cheeks, and large blue eyes rimmed with lashes like cattails. And said things that he wished he could say and get away with.

Clair also had little play dishes, and crayons, and jacks. But none of those seemed important enough to damage or destroy. And he was terrified of damaging the doll, the way Eloise made such a to do over it. Then, mercifully, the cat had got pregnant.

But his earlier plan to drown her seemed less attractive the fatter she grew. The cat rested in the pantry, in a corner there on an old burlap bag. David changed his school clothes in the pantry, where Eloise had hung their good things to keep them from mildewing. The cat watched him from wide, suspicious eyes as he dressed. He knew it would be a difficult thing to do, to destroy her, because she had become more vicious with him the more her belly grew. Sometimes, she hissed at him like a snake and bared her claws when he approached. She reminded him of a lion or a tiger from one of Miss Poindexter's books. Eventually, she permitted only Clair to come near her, so that in the final days of her laying-in, as the weather turned warm, David rarely entered the pantry except to change his clothes. He watched the cat, instead, through the glass-paneled door, his eye intent on her swollen sides as Clair fed her scraps of meat.

He was jealous of the easy way Clair handled the cat. "One of these days, that old cat's going to grab you with her claws and eat you up," he would tell her, trying to frighten her. But Clair did not seem to be afraid of the mothering cat, and this bravery in her impressed him in spite of himself.

"She won't eat me,' Clair would reply to David's taunting. Sometimes she would touch the cat's sheathed claws, something that he would never have tried to do. He supposed it had to do with her being light-skinned. Or that her watery blue eyes gave her the same power over the cat as they gave her over Eloise, always getting her way. He was shocked every time he looked into Clair's eyes. And at those thin, raspberry red lips of hers that were constantly drooling, as if inviting a kiss. Not that she was ever lacking kisses. Everybody made so much to do over her and her nappy red hair. He thought it looked like one of those Brillo soap pads, the kind you scrub pots with. But Eloise thought it was the last word, that's what she told everybody about Clair's naps. "Honey, that child's hair is the last word, you ever seen hair like that on anybody's child before?" He watched Clair and the cat through the pantry door; they were one and the same to him.

"Why you always peeping through that door into the pantry?" Eloise asked him one day when she was ironing. She hardly ever left the farm, for there was really little for a woman to do in the new Burnside. But Eloise kept her clothes neatly pressed for what she called the eventuality, "You never can tell what might happen," she would say. "Harry Belafonte might decide to divorce his wife and come driving up here for me in a white Cadillac, singing Day-O, I certainly wouldn't want him to find me in these old rags I wear around the house." She kept clean clothes for David and Clair hanging with hers in the pantry, in case Harry Belafonte wouldn't mind some ready-made children, after he divorced his wife.

Now, Eloise tested the iron with a wet forefinger and went on with her trousseau. "You always peeping out there at that cat," she said accusingly. He wondered if she knew what he had in mind. Frightened, he crept away from the door. Eloise and Clair. Harry Belafonte. And the cat—a sleek, fat, pulsating partner in their scheme for abandoning him.

The day after that, his worst fears were realized when he came running home from school and found that Eloise and Clair had gone.

He walked into the empty house to the hollow ticking of a clock. "Mama?" A terrible panic seized him; it was difficult for him to breathe as he staggered to the pantry.

But Eloise's good clothes were still there. So were Clair's. He wondered where they might have gone. They were always home when he came from school.

He looked, and saw that the cat was still there. She was also breathing heavily, making a funny kind of growling noise in her throat. He wondered if she was crying because they had left her behind. "Mama done gone and left us!" he wailed to the cat, and she winked at him from green slits in the corner.

David stumbled back into the kitchen. His heart beat a mile a minute. Gasping for air, he reeled out into the yard.

A hot hand squeezed his heart now. He tried not to think of Eloise, for he was sure he would die of pain. At the same time, he felt a frightening awareness of a newly discovered self. It was as though he had parted in two and become twins. One of him remained black and trembling inside his skin. The other seemed to be out of himself and beyond him—somewhere, perhaps, even beyond the borders of Burnside but looking at him in almost cold detachment, like a camera focused on itself.

For the first time, too, he became aware of an existence outside of Burnside and Dillwyn, the desolate farms he knew, the ruined mansions battered to the ground by time and the elements, oversown by vines and creeping things. He had heard people talk about the splendor of Burnside in the days of Miss Ida Carlisle, but he knew only the wasted fields with their crumbling chimneys and abandoned plowshares, and woods that grew like a jungle all around. He was aware now of the white world that surrounded everything. Clair's world ... the world outside of Burnside.

Now, he could hear the roar of the suckhole in the low ground. The people of Burnside said that, in the old days, the suckhole had claimed the white men and hounds of a search party in pursuit of runaway slaves from a tobacco plantation. ''Lord, they sure was lucky, them niggers! They ought to be thankful to that dirty old suckhole for saving them from the white man and his hounds." People said that whenever the story was told. They called the suckhole Nigger's Luck. But, to David's mind, the suckhole was the most dangerous enemy of all, because it had swallowed even the white man and his sleek hounds, the supreme hunters in never-ending pursuit. He feared the suckhole even more than he feared the rats that ate the chickens, the snakes that ate the rats, the eagles that ate the snakes—and sometimes even children. There had been stories of eagles carrying away small children. He shuddered at the thought of dark, dreadful wings. But he feared the suckhole most of all. He braved the low ground almost every day in good weather and made his pilgrimage there, where he threw sticks into the downward spiraling maw, to appease the muddy god that stank of green slime and white men. He listened to the suckhole now, its dark belch reverberating in the low ground; and he felt like throwing up.

He wondered if the suckhole might have swallowed Eloise and Clair. If they might not have wandered into it some kind of way. Maybe if he went there and threw sticks into the suckhole, Eloise would come back again. Or maybe he'd have to kiss a frog, if he could catch one, the way some of those princes did in Miss Poindexter's stories.

He heard the shrill whining of a jet, and he raised his eyes almost without interest to watch the silver plane slice toward the sun. Maybe Eloise was up there on that plane. And Clair with her. The Princess of the Sun, going home. He wished he had a fairy godmother. Or even a father to go to.

He wondered if his father lived here in Burnside. Eloise said that she didn't know. "Honey, I haven't the faintest idea who his Daddy is," she told people. "I can just give you the names of likely candidates." Maybe Viola would know. But he disliked the idea of Dolly finding out that his mother had run away and left him.

He could smell the slow stirring of life in the wet ground. And the rancid weatherboarding, the ugly fumes like a plague in his nostrils where the sun was drying out the winter wetness. The oak tree above his head had already leaved. The chatter of birds was everywhere. The sun blinded him, and he closed his eyes. "Mama," he whispered. But he could not cry.

For a wild moment, he thought of Viola's story about the hurricane bird, how its dark wings beat up a storm, its mouth gapped open to swallow the sun. He felt a huge shadow fall on him, and he opened his eyes fearfully and saw the dim outline of Eloise standing over him, holding Clair in her arms.

"What you standing out here like somebody paralyzed for?" Eloise said. "How come you haven't changed your school clothes? I bet they all filled with burrs, I bet you been down in that low ground again. What you been up to?"

He blinked rapidly, to clear his eyes. He had neither seen nor heard Eloise coming down the road. He wondered if she might have dropped to earth from that jet plane. He gazed at her, almost in tears. Clair nestled in her arms, and looked down on him from those strange blue eyes. The color of sky.

He was tingling all over with relief as he followed Eloise into the house. "I ain't been doing nothing," he mumbled.

Eloise grunted in disbelief. "Your nothing would fill a book. Get yourself a biscuit and go play."

But he just stood there in the open door, crossing his feet one over the other, until Eloise put Clair down and came back to him. She seemed as large as Devil's Mountain to him. Violently, he threw both arms around her waist and cried into her dress.

"David, what's the matter with you?" she said angrily. "Somebody done something to you? What is the matter with you, son?"

He fought to control himself. "I just want a biscuit," he finally said. Eloise laughed and frowned at the same time, and cupped his wet face with her large, rough hands. "Well, you don't have to cry about it," she said. "Sometimes you certainly do act like a great big baby, to be going on eight years old." She opened the bread box and gave him two biscuits. She watched with a careful eye while he wolfed down one. "Now, what's the matter with you?" she said. "Somebody do something to you?"

She held him by the shoulder in a strong grip. "Somebody mess with my children, and I nearly go crazy." He had heard her tell that to Viola many times, explaining the terrible strength she called on when she felt one of her children was in danger. David was suddenly frightened of her. But he could not tell her how scared he had been when he found the house empty; she would think he was acting like a baby again. "I got chased by a snake," he said; and he closed his eyes so that she would not see the lie there.

He felt her grip loosen. "Lord a-mercy! Is that all you crying about? Boy, you better learn how to start killing snakes, you can't just break out crying every time one gets after you. Not as many snakes as we got in Burnside, there're more snakes here than niggers. . . . Where you think you off to now?" she said, with small interest in her voice. She had already turned back to Clair, now that she knew David was in no real danger, no crisis that required her strength. "Where you off to?"

He felt the old bitterness returning. "Just to play." It was his second lie in five minutes. They said your teeth rotted out from telling too many lies. He ran his tongue around his and was relieved to find them still intact.

Eloise was setting up the ironing board. "You change your school clothes first. Then run along, I've got a lot of ironing to do. I know I'm always here when you get home, but Clair and me were down to Viola's," she said, explaining her absence. "We've been talking about taking a little vacation up North, Viola and me. We might leave you and Clair here for Dolly to look after, we're not sure yet, it would only be for a week or two. But, like I say, ain't nothing been settled yet, Viola and me just running our mouths. There's hardly enough money to stay in Burnside, much less to go to New Jersey. If only I could make some money. . . . You change your clothes now, David, and then run along and play. And close that door to keep the flies out, I can't stand them flies buzzing. . . ."

He went into the pantry. The cat was still making that strange, rattling noise in her throat, now almost as if she had the hiccups. He felt a great kinship with the cat. Her green eyes winked on and off at him like movie neons from the dark corner. He turned on the light and quickly changed his clothes.

The cat's breathing had changed to a kind of soft bleating now. He wondered if she might be sick. Because of the crisis they had shared, he felt bold enough to kneel a foot in front of her.

She seemed swollen up large enough to burst. With the light on, her eyes had eclipsed to mere slits. But he could see her gazing at him through the narrow openings. Her heart-shaped face, with the broom-straw whiskers, startled him with its almost human expression of pure rapture. He heard a muffled, squishing noise, and saw a tiny, furry, sticky black creature ooze from underneath her as she grunted, and raised slightly to let the kitten out.

His jaw went slack in astonishment. He jumped back in fear and disgust as the cat snaked her head around and began licking the black kitten with quick darts of her pink tongue. He felt an electric thrill shoot through his body, as if that pointed tongue was touching him. "Mama!" He shrieked at the top of his voice. "Mama!"

He heard the door explode behind him. "Boy, what is the matter . . . ?" She bit the sentence in two, and stepped around him, and fell to her knees at the cat. After a quick inspection, she turned with a slow burning radiance in her eyes that he had never seen before. "She's having her babies," Eloise said warmly. "Imagine that! And the first one's a pretty little black."

"I saw it," he said. He was trembling with excitement.

As the cat's tongue moved up and down the black kitten's body in tiny kisses, David felt every touch of her tongue in his own skin, like a pointed flame dabbing here and there, striking sparks of pleasure along his spine. The cat seemed to sense his enjoyment. She paused in her task and leveled a long green stare at him. He felt a sharp pain stab his heart; the room seemed to spin. He reached out and grabbed Eloise's hand. Her fingers curled protectively around his. "Mama," he said. He lost himself inside the starch and folds and sweat of her dress, ramming hard against the opening of her belly. He had never known such pleasure before, the warm, damp protectiveness of her cavity where she pressed him into her with both hands, the engulfing folds of her dress that formed a womb around his head. "Ah . . . David . . . David son. . . ." Eloise lurched against him and almost suffocated him with her thighs.

He heard soft mewling from the new black kitten at the same time that Eloise moved his head quickly aside and he saw Clair watching them from the doorway, holding her talking Mama doll.

Clair pulled the string in the doll's head, and the doll began to jabber. Mama I love you the very best of all Mama I love you the very best of all. . . .

Eloise frowned. Mercifully, she was not frowning at him but at Clair. He had not known her to frown at Clair before.

Mama I love you the very best of all. . . .

There was something unreal and out of place about the doll's mechanical chatter in the presence of the mothering cat. He moved toward Clair to stop the white doll's chatter; but Eloise restrained him gently by the shoulder. His skin burned from the heat of her hand. "You take Clair down to Viola's," Eloise said. He could not speak; he nodded, to let her know that he had heard.

Mama I love you the very best of all. . . .

Even though she was still frowning at Clair, Eloise's hand rested tenderly on his shoulder. He had never known her to be so gentle before. "Run along, son," she said. "Don't you worry yourself about the cat. She'll be just fine."

But when he tried to take Clair's hand, to lead her away, Clair protested. She had not known what was going on, and the mention of the cat alerted her. "I don't want to go," she said peevishly, talking in her three-year-old way like the white doll.

Without further ado, Eloise grabbed her roughly and spanked her behind. Clair was so surprised that she dropped the doll. The creature landed on its head, and the motor whirred out its message of love.

Mama. . . .

Eloise ground her fists into her ears. "Get that child out of here!" she ordered David. "Making all that noise! Disturbing this poor cat!"

Clair was too surprised even to cry. Instead, she tested the magic of her eyes, opening them wide in a powerful stare. But Eloise turned deliberately and attended to the cat.

David snatched up the jabbering doll in one hand and grabbed Clair with the other. "Come on, Clair," he said gruffly, feeling almost like a man. "Didn't you hear what Mama said?" He took a last grateful look at the cat and her new black kitten, Eloise bending over them like in pictures he had seen of the Wise Men at the manger; and then he all but dragged Clair out of the house and up the muddy road. She trotted along behind him in a daze all the way to Viola's, dragging the silly doll—that, strangely, did not talk any more—by its pudgy white arm.

Viola was very impressed, hearing about the cat. "My my my," she said. "And the first one was black? I might've known. That means the daddy's a nigger, that's for sure."

David and Clair spent the rest of the afternoon at Viola's, playing with Dolly, who told them in whispers as much as she knew about the origin of kittens. Viola was getting together a costume to wear to St. Matthew's school in a couple of weeks when voter registration began. Although she had never registered to vote before, she had made up her mind to do so in this primary election, because she had seen pictures of young John F. Kennedy and decided he was pretty. She was getting together a lavish costume to help support the man she told everybody would be our next President. "I'll be so glad to see Eisenhower go, honey. He's so tired. I've been hoping I'd hit the number so I could send him a donation, that's how tired he is." She had decided on a blue Betsy Ross decolletage for Kennedy; she worked at the hem and shoulders, making one higher and the other considerably lower in the name of the Democratic Party. "So that old mangy cat had kittens? My my my," she said, biting off blue thread between her teeth, and working on her dress for Kennedy.

For several days after the birth of the kittens, David lived inside an intense uncertainty, waiting for the old Eloise to reappear. But she was as delighted as if the kittens had been real children, and she puttered in and out of the pantry with evaporated milk for the cat, and left David and Clair pretty much to themselves. It was true that she seemed different now. She frowned less and smiled more, and sometimes sang lullabies in a booming voice while she was ironing, aiming her song toward the pantry door so that the newborn kittens could hear.

Viola came and adored them; and even Dolly, with all her worldliness, fell to her knees with a great sighing, and poked the five little babies while all the mothers—Eloise, Viola, and the cat—watched with a kind of benign apprehension.

David recalled how everybody had carried on about Clair in the very same way when she was born. But rather than being jealous, as he had been about the attention Clair had got, he stood around proudly and repeated countless times how he had seen the black one born. The women all laughed, the way his eyes got round and white in the retelling.

May had come—the apple and peach and pear blossoms sucked by the monotonous bees, the muddy roads turning to red dust under the white sun; and a million flowers, it seemed, in bloom— the dogwood, the redbud, honeysuckle, lupine and azalea, the lilac flowering out like lavender snow—all in wild disarray around the house, along the roads, and scattered through the fields and woods of Burnside. Later on, David knew, the trembling of the flowers caused by the spring breeze in their blossoms, would be replaced by the heavier vibrations of snakes squeezing about the roots for small prey that favored the shadows of flowers for their nests. But for the present, there was only a calm, sweet beauty, without fear, until the snakes awakened from their winter sleep.

As for the kittens, David was too happy now to think of destroying them and the cat. Eloise's new attitude, the way she almost ignored Clair in favor of the newborns, gave David a warm, protective feeling for the kittens. There was only the one black, which pleased him. The other four were varying shades of gray. Lined in a row along the mother's belly on the sour old burlap bag, and tugging at her teats to the cadence of her heart, they seemed to David to grow almost visibly, especially the black. So that by the end of the third week, when the mother cat suddenly disappeared, the kittens themselves seemed to him to be nearly as large as the missing mother had been.

Clair took the cat's disappearance very hard. Her eyes filled with blue tears and spilled over. David was dismayed, watching the blue water become crystal clear on her cheeks. "What you crying for that old mangy cat for?" he said to her roughly. Which only made her cry all the more.

By that time, only three kittens remained, Eloise having made presents of one to Viola and another to Mr. Pizens, who always complained of rats. David tried to entice Clair from her sorrow with the remaining kittens. But she only cried louder the harder he tried.

Finally, Eloise interceded. "Go look for the cat, son," she said, touching David on the shoulder. She was always touching him now, it seemed, since the birth of the kittens. At first, he had hardly been able to stand it, the pervading warmth that flowed from her fingers and wounded him deliriously along his spine, even down into his feet, until he curled his toenails under the incredible spell of her fingertips.

He had suspected, from something in her aloofness to Clair's tears, that she had asked Robert Bartley or one of her other friends to do away with the cat. But now, she was asking him to look for it. He was grateful for the chance to do so. "Aw, she's around here somewhere, I bet," he said, in a confidential way to Eloise, as if they were on equal footing and Clair's tears made her inferior to them both. Eloise nodded agreement. "Yeah, she can't be too far away. She wouldn't leave her babies just like that. You look for her, David, like a good boy." He strutted off into the flowers with his chest stuck out like one of Miss Poindexter's white princes.

"Kitty kitty kitty kitty," he called. He looked under every flower and bush, working his way slowly back down the road to the house. He was glad that the cat had disappeared, because it gave him another chance to impress Eloise with his usefulness. He frowned and took his time to make it seem that he was searching hard. She would applaud him all the more for hard work.

He was also glad that Clair had made such a to do about the missing cat. That showed just how young and silly she was. He would never make such a fuss just because some old cat had disappeared.

Flowers grew everywhere around him; drunk on their perfume and the essence of his own self-importance, blinded by the white May sun, he felt lost inside of paradise. "Kitty kitty kitty," he called; and he listened for her answering meow.

At the lilac bush, he thought he saw her dark tail curled down around the roots in a kind of question mark. "Kitty kitty kitty," he said, and he grabbed the cool, dry tail.

The lilac bush exploded with the wild musk of an enraged snake—he had grabbed a sleeping moccasin by the tail. He saw the long, monstrous body arching up through the bluish flowers, angling in a frantic effort to strike. With a terrified grin, David dropped the tail and ran.

He moved in a kind of slow stupor, like someone in a dream. The snake's angry smell, mixed with the sweetness of flowers, enveloped him in a powerful funk that was strangely familiar to him. He had the feeling that he had dreamed this dream before— the queer sensation of running, and yet, of not running, of not going anywhere, as though his feet were moving up and down inside some kind of gum that held him to the same spot, although his legs were pumping with the lazy motion of slow pistons. The smell of flowers, and of the angry snake, was almost overpowering.

He looked over his shoulder—his head felt like a heavy rock jammed down on his neck—and saw the moccasin flailing down the road straight behind him. He was intrigued for a brief moment by the sensuous disorder of the rampaging snake, its eager undulations that seemed to throw it from side to side in a kind of crazy wobble. Except that it managed to keep a beeline down the dusty road, heading straight for him with its jaws unhinged and its mouth yawned open in a cavernous gap, the keen fangs gleaming whiter than the sun.

A light came on then in his head, like someone pulling a chain there. The dreamlike trance disappeared at once, and he found himself really running now. He heard the snake's dry pursuit behind him, the contact of its belly scruffng the ground, the sound a hand makes rubbing up and down dry bark. He held his breath and picked up speed, and ran into the house.

Except for the half-basement in the front, the rest of the house had been built flat on the ground. Sometimes, in heavy rain, water seeped under the back doorjamb, or poured through the small rectangular hole cut in one corner for the cat. David was thinking of that cathole when he slammed through the kitchen door, with the snake hot behind him, and darted underneath Eloise's dress.

Eloise had been ironing. She said later that she thought it was some kind of game David was playing when he hid under her dress. Until she saw the snake head probing at the cathole. Then she gave a screech loud enough to be heard in Dillwyn and jammed the red hot iron at the cathole. But the snake was already churning through. His scorching skin had the peculiar smell of singed flesh. Eloise snatched David up in her arms, and stomped the snake to death.

Her eyes almost bulged out of her head. She stomped with both bare feet, jumping off the floor and landing with such force that the very house seemed to rattle. She stomped the snake and cursed it at the same time. "Chase my boy, will you? I'll teach you whose boy to chase! Come through my kitchen door while I'm ironing? I'll teach you whose kitchen door to come through!" She jumped up and down like he had seen women shout in church, when the music and the preaching got good. Squeezed to her breasts like that, he broke into a cold sweat. He didn't know who frightened him more, Eloise or the snake.

Finally, Eloise got tired of stomping, and she put David down and inspected the snake. She had mashed all the insides out of it. The long gray body quivered even in death. Eloise picked it up on the poker and went to throw it into the ditch behind the house. "You keep your eye on Clair," she warned David. "She's sleeping on the sofa in the living room. I'm glad she wasn't awake to see this old snake. . . ." She towered in the door for a second, holding the dead snake away from her with a look of triumphant disgust on her face. She wore a mustache of sweat across her lip. Then she closed the door behind her, softly, to keep from waking Clair.

He was almost too weak to walk. He inspected the blood and entrails on the kitchen floor, recording the exact spot in his mind so that he would never step there again. The unholy smell of mashed snake was wild and sickening in the kitchen. He thought that he was going to throw up. He went into the living room and lay down with Clair. Her scrawny little body next to his was a comforting feeling. He did not want to see Eloise when she came back into the kitchen. There was something about her that frightened him now. He would never forget the savage look on her face as she jumped up and down on the snake. Gently, he eased his arm around Clair, and pulled her warm body slightly to him. Eloise's body, when she had squeezed him against her, also frightened him—its hugeness, and hotness—the heat that soaked through her skin into his, like heat thrown off by a coal stove. He was glad that Clair was so small, only a little bit smaller than himself. Even if she was half-white. He appreciated her more than ever now, the fact that she was his sister, and that she was small, like himself. Without the heat and the violence of Eloise. He could hear Eloise scrubbing the kitchen floor. He shuddered at the thought of what she was cleaning up. He remembered the flowers, how beautiful they had been.

He was utterly exhausted. In a little while, he fell asleep, his arm wrapped around Clair. He dreamed that he was lost in a world of giants, and running in a slow, trance-like way from the bloody tread of naked feet.

Something struck him in the ribs. "David?" He opened his eyes, half-expecting to see the snake's head weaving in to strike again.

"David, you awake, honey?" Eloise poked him again in the ribs, and helped him sit up on the sofa. He saw a man's long legs, and looked up into the black grinning face of Robert Bartley.

He saw that it had turned dark. Desperately, he reached out for Clair. But he saw that she was sleeping now on the bed, propped on one cheek and her knees, her butt poked up in the air.

Eloise sat beside him in a rustle of starch. She had on a pretty yellow dress, and lipstick, and a ribbon in her hair. He looked at her feet to see if any of the snake's blood was still there; but she wore high-heeled shoes and stockings that shone in the electric light. Her legs looked like they were made of glass.

"You awake, honey? Robert Bartley just came by to visit for a while. I left you some fried chicken and biscuits covered up on the kitchen table. You eat, and then go to bed, you hear? It's such a pretty night, Robert and me thought it'd be nice to sit on the swing and look at the moon. We're going to be right outside on the swing, so don't you get scared, you hear . . . ?"

Robert Bartley wrapped his arm around her waist and half-lifted her away from David. Laughing together, they went out the front door. David heard the springs squeak as they sat on the swing in the yard.

Eloise had said there was a moon, and for the first time, he saw its specter at the window, waiting to come in. He snapped off the light, and the moon entered almost noisily, falling in great swatches through the filmy curtains and across the floor in a kind of hungry progression until it engulfed the sleeping Clair. White as she was, and dressed in white, she seemed to glow with an unnatural radiance that frightened him.

He was still overwhelmed by the largeness of things; and he thought immediately of the small black kitten in the pantry. The moon was alive there, too, like a moving, pulsating thing. He could see motes of dust in the slanting beam where it crashed to the floor and bounded back again, raising the dust from the floor boards. The three remaining kittens were piled like small serpents together. The black kitten was sandwiched between the dark gray kitten and the lighter-colored one. Gently, as he had seen Dolly do, he stroked the dark gray kitten's head while he plucked the black from underneath her belly. The dark gray kitten winked at him knowingly, as if recognizing his need for small things, and snuggled closer to the other one. Cradling the black against his heart, David went into the kitchen.

The moon had not penetrated there, and he felt secure. He put the kitten on the table while he ate. Eloise had left him a glass of sweetened cherry Kool-Aid covered over with a cup. It was warm, for they had no ice box, and drinking it warm like that brought back the memory of flowers to his mind, the too-sweet scent that smelled of danger. He left the Kool-Aid, but ate the chicken breast and biscuits, chewing slowly and concentrating on the kitten, so as not to notice the dark stain in the still-damp floor where Eloise had mashed the snake.

Eloise had told him to go to bed; but he was not sleepy. Besides, he didn't want to brave the moonlight again in the living room. He recalled how, when he had turned off the light, it had rushed to Clair, as though returning to its origin. The sleeping Princess of the Moon.

He could hear Robert Bartley and Eloise laughing and squeaking on the swing, and he decided to go into the cellar and watch them from the window there. He took the cat with him down the narrow, musty stairs leading from the pantry.

Although cellars were not a usual feature of house construction in Burnside, some of the old houses did contain them, and those houses were said to have morbid histories, in which the cellar played a prominent part. The one at Reverend Cobb's, for example, had supposedly been the prison for the mad, half-Negro son of its former wealthy white owner, who had locked away the evidence of his coupling with a black woman from the proud white world that Burnside had been before Reconstruction. Miss Ida Carlisle's cellar was thought to have been headquarters for a band of white guerrillas who had opposed General Grant even after Appomattox; and, before her incarceration in the County crazy home, Miss Ida had been fond of taking visitors down into the dark cavern and showing a black gibbet and a rotted rope where, she claimed, dissident Negroes had been lynched on the spot.

Eloise had inherited her cellar from her great-grandmother, whose only morbidity had been a great passion for homemade wines, which she had brewed with great energy, despite her advanced years, and sold throughout Burnside. Now, the odor of wine hung like a mellow presence in the dark cellar, and made David's head swim as he moved carefully across its narrow length and climbed onto a stool beneath the open window, where he could view Robert and Eloise on the swing without being seen by them.

Aware as he was of the fact that he had no identifiable father, he often went to the cellar window to spy on Eloise and her boy friends, in the hope that one of them would let something slip and give himself away. For, while David was sure that Eloise was telling the truth when she told everybody that she didn't know who his father was—she admitted it proudly nowadays, as though she had just won a turkey in a raffle, while everybody else was eating chicken—he and Dolly Anderson had decided that David's real father, whoever he was, certainly knew that David was his son. He and Dolly agreed that a man would know something like that, even if Eloise didn't. Stroking the black kitten—it seemed to him to be all heart, surrounded by that black fur, the way it thundered against his chest—he listened carefully to Eloise now as she talked and giggled with Robert Bartley—making sport, she called it—and watched the silhouettes of their bodies against the naked moon.

"Viola wants me to go register with her to vote for that Kennedy man," Eloise said with a giggle. "She thinks he's the sharpest thing."

"You going?" Robert said.

"Going where?"

"To register. It begins in three or four more days."

"Now what would I look like voting?" Eloise said, with great disdain. "It don't matter who I vote for any way, it's still going to be a white man that wins."

"Ain't nothing running but white men," Robert said.

"That's what I mean. One white man's just as bad as another, as far as I'm concerned." David heard a sharp slap. "You move your hand, Robert Bartley!" Eloise said, and then she laughed. "I ought to tell Rosa Mae on you, all them thirteen children she's taking care of while you're out sporting me."

"You always say that. But you never tell Rosa Mae. You never will."

"Some day I will."

"When?"

"I don't know. Some day. . . ." The swing gave a loud squeak as she shifted position and moved away from him. "Robert, is it true that you and Tumsey Wilton paid that Belshazzar man a hundred dollars for a special number to play?"

"Well now, I don't like to talk about it," Robert said. "But as a matter of fact, we did. We saved us a hundred dollars, Tumsey and me. We went to see Blessed Belshazzar where he has his church in Dillwyn. He gave us a number, all right. He said it was sure to hit in a month. Well, a month's nearly up, and we ain't hit yet."

"What was the number?" Eloise said eagerly.

"Can't tell. Belshazzar said it sure wouldn't come out if we told. You know that me and Tumsey have been playing two dollars a day on that number for nearly a month? That's a lot of money for a poor man in Burnside."

Eloise sighed. "But if you hit, you'd have a thousand dollars to divide between you, playing two dollars a day like that. Would you give me some money, Robert, if you hit?"

Robert snickered, and grabbed her. "What you give me?" he said huskily.

David watched in a kind of quiet alarm as they squirmed together, kissing in loud smacks that he could hear through the open window. Writhing and twining in a dark silhouette against the far-off moon. Like Clair's round yellow face watching from a distance. Until Eloise fought Robert off, and got down on her hands and knees and told Robert to help her find her earring that had fallen to the dust.

"Whew!" Robert said, fanning himself. "Girl, you do lead a man on!"

But Eloise was turned upside down, looking for her earring. "My late husband gave me these earrings, Robert. I'd sure hate to lose one. Help me find it. Please?"

He got to the ground with her. But when he tried to kiss her, she crawled away. "Robert, we got fifteen children between us. Don't you think we ought to act grown up?"

"You didn't say that on the swing," he protested.

"You didn't give me a chance to."

"All you're interested in is my money, if I hit the number. What would you do with money anyway? Buy yourself a wig like Viola did?"

"Don't make fun of me, Robert. I got better sense than that. I'd take my children and go back to New Jersey, that's what I'd do. It's hardly safe here any more. Do you know that David got chased by a snake just today? If I hadn't been home, that snake would've eat my child up. I sent him out to look for the cat. . . ."

Robert laughed. "You weak in the head, girl? Don't you know I got rid of the cat like you told me to? How come you send David out to look for it? You knew it was already dead."

"I knew. But Clair was raising such a ruckus, I had to do something to try to calm her. Finally, she wore herself out crying. She fell asleep just before David broke into the house with that snake right behind him."

"With warm weather," Robert said, "everything's on the move again, looking for food."

Now it was Eloise's turn to laugh in a good-natured way. "He sure would've got the colic, that snake, eating David as black and sweaty as he was."

"Now what you got against black?" Robert said, moving toward her on his knees.

"Black is stingy," Eloise said, and she crawled toward him. "When black hits the number, black wants to keep all the money for himself."

"Not all black," Robert said, choking slightly before he grabbed her.

"Robert . . . wait ... the earring is under my knee . . . it's hurting me ... I can't move . . . Robert . . . Honest to God . . . you going to give me some money ... if you hit the number . . . ?"

"Honest to God," Robert said. They came together in a tight embrace.

The moon cut a stark path through the oak branches, and David could see the gray of their faces glued together as they held each other, kneeling, and kissed with loud, wet noises. He jumped down from the window. A terrible sense of outrage almost choked off his breath, and he felt the sour taste of anger squeezing into his throat.

So Eloise had asked Robert to kill the cat. And Eloise had known the cat was already dead when she told him to look for it. He felt completely betrayed. Once again, he was impressed by how big everything seemed to be in comparison to himself— the old house towering over his head, the oak in the yard, even the glow from the moon, and the man-sized squeaks the swing made underneath the slow agony of Eloise's moaning.

Only the kitten gave him comfort. Although now he felt that it was nasty, the way it clung to his shirt over his heart, its own heart beating like a triphammer. It mewed in a small voice when he put it on the cellar floor. He felt large, because of its smallness. He hated Eloise for making a fool out of him. And Clair for crying. He decided to leave the kitten in the cellar all night.

He went upstairs, and undressed, and crawled into bed with Clair. But he slept far away from her. And when Eloise came later on in the night and ordered him to go do the Number One, he went dutifully to the chamber pot in the pantry, where the two remaining kittens slept locked together in a tight, furry ball. He would not look at Eloise, who was already in bed when he came back. He noticed that she had dragged Clair up to the pillow with her. He crawled into the foot of the bed, and arranged himself carefully so as not to touch Eloise, even if he fell off to sleep. He never wanted to touch her again, or for her to touch him, with those lying fingertips. He fell off to sleep almost at once.

The next day was Saturday; and he arose earlier than Eloise and carried the black kitten down to the low ground. Holding the kitten carefully, he picked his way through the honeysuckle, crossed the rickety log bridge over Lee's Creek, and bounced into the meadow on the other side. He felt a huge sense of relief that he had not fallen from the log into the snake-infested creek - he could see the gray ghosts of moccasins sunning themselves there in all the deceptiveness of shimmering sticks—and that no Snake had leapt out and dragged him into the funereal stench of the honeysuckle vines, where bees already murmured over the pale flowers.

The suckhole under the willow tree roared a vibrant welcome as he threaded his way through the dew-wet weeds. Nigger's Luck. Standing close to its edge, he gazed down into the boiling gray mud, "Hello,' he said, half under his breath, as if greeting an old and frightening friend. This was his first visit to the suckle this year. Behind him on the high hills, the houses of Bumside stood in a kind of rickety splendor against the warming sun.

The kitten squirmed in his hand, and tickled him with its young claws. He inspected the half-blind eyes, sticky even then from the goo of birth. He hunted through the low ground, with the kitten mewing in his hand, until he found a piece of rotten twine left over from the tying of corn shocks when a field had been there. He tied the kitten to the willow, and ran home.

All that night, he wondered if the kitten would be alive when he went back. Perhaps a snake or rat would get her—he did not know if rats even ate kittens, but they certainly ate everything else. Or perhaps, by some miracle, the suckhole would overflow around her. He did not feel guilty about leaving the kitten there, or even throwing her into the suckhole, if he ever decided to. Once or twice, when there had been cats to be gotten rid of, he and Dolly had tied them into paper bags and thrown them into Lee's Creek. But he was not anxious to offer the kitten—he could not forget how delighted he had been at her birth—even though he felt that the suckhole would be pleased, after so many dry sticks.

Still, on the second day, he was relieved when he found the kitten still alive. He petted her, and gave her clover leaves to eat. But the kitten poked at the leaves and would not eat them. She mewed into his face with gummy eyes. He saw that the tip of her nose was pink, almost as pink as Clair's talking doll. Her black fur was matted from the dew, and reminded him of the color and texture of Eloise's hair after she had washed and straightened It. Her small body shivered in the shade of the willow where the Suckhole roared a deep, hungry gurgle. David untied the kitten and stroked her in the sun until she dried. Then he tied her back in the shade.

That had been Sunday morning. On Monday after school, he was somewhat disappointed to find that the kitten had again escaped the terrors of the night. Lord, if that had been him tied there all that time, he'd bet some old moccasin, or a weasel, or something bad already would have carried him away. But that kitten had been out there two nights now, and not a thing had happened to her. If anything, she seemed even livelier than before. He picked her up and inspected her eyes. He saw with a shock that they were blue, open now, with only traces of goo in the corners, and looking at him like the eyes of a small person. He was so surprised, and disgusted at the same time, that he turned and took a quick, careful step, and dropped her into the suckhole, string and all.

If she cried, he did not hear her, for he jammed his fingers into his ears and closed his eyes. When he opened them there was no trace of her in the boiling mud. He felt a little sick. His hands seemed to him now to be dirty, and he took his fingers from his ears and walked to Lee's Creek where he washed them in the clear, cold water.

That night, he dreamed of the hurricane bird that Viola had talked about. He dreamed that he had become a man, and that he was protecting a world of dark, squirming figures from the fury of the bird. But this time, the bird did not fly away. Instead, it swallowed the sun with a noise like the crunching of human bones. It seemed, irrevocably, the end of childhood and the emergence of an ever-present demon to haunt him the rest of his life. In his dream, he was a man, and he sat down in darkness, and cried.

He awakened several times before morning, in a cold sweat. But the solitary blackness of night withheld its usual protection. And he tossed and turned until dawn, when he awakened to the shrill voice of Viola Anderson, who was trying to talk Eloise into going with her that morning to register to vote.

Viola was stunning in her Betsy Ross dress. Tumsey Wilton was coming to pick her up in a little while, she said. "But I had to come and show off my dress, Eloise. You sure you like it?" She twirled for Eloise to admire her.

"It's a pretty dress, Viola. You look like the Union flag."

"Well, that's the idea, honey,' Viola said, patting her hair. The top of the dress was red-and-white peppermint stripes. The full skirt surrounded her like the Liberty Bell and was colored a sort of patriotic blue, with puckered silk stars sewn all around.

David tried to sneak into the pantry while Viola was running her mouth with Eloise. But Viola didn't miss a trick.

"Ah ha!" she said, turning on him, while Eloise tended to Clair. Her voice squirmed with pleasure, as though she had caught him trying to steal one of her precious silk stars. "How come you still in bed, David?"

"There's no school today," he stammered. He liked Viola Anderson, but only when she was barefoot and sloppy around the house. Whenever she was dressed up, she frightened him. She seemed to be a different person then. Dolly called it "putting on the dog," Viola's dressed-up airs.

Up close, David could see that the shiny black hair she patted from time to time was really one of those Jackie Kennedy wigs all the women had recently started wearing. Her eyes raked him once, suspicion and mascara making them resemble the shadowed eyes of a raccoon. She stank like a funeral parlor, that smell of flowers mixed with the musk of dead people. He saw half-moons of sweat staining her armpits.

"What you sneaking round behind me for?" she said, inspecting her stars.

She terrified him. "I ... I was going to the pantry," he stammered. Panting, her breasts aimed at him like live cannons.

"You Democrat or Republican?" she said surprisingly. And when he frowned, trying to form an answer—to tell her that he was neither, actually, he was only seven years old—she popped her fingers high in the air and said, "Answer me, honey! You old enough to know whether you for John Kennedy or against him!"

"I'm for him," David gulped, although he had never thought about it one way or another. But he was afraid to tell her that. He was sure now that new clothes made her completely crazy. For a wild moment, he wondered if they'd give him ten dollars for her at the County crazy home if he could coax her there with him on a Wednesday, he had heard they paid for bringing crazy people there on Wednesdays. But then, Viola Anderson smiled somewhere deep inside the hollows of her eyes, and it was like seeing a far-off light come on at the end of long tunnels. She wasn't so frightening when she smiled. "John Kennedy's going to win, you wait and see," she said, with great assurance. Framed by the blood-red lipstick, her teeth were large and white when she smiled, like one of Sambo's friendly tigers.

Eloise, who had gone to the pantry with Clair, came back then. "David, what happened to the other kitten?" she said. "The black one. I just noticed it's missing."

He put on a mask of innocence. "I don't know," he said. "Maybe a rat ate it up."

"That black kitten?" Viola said. "No rat would eat something black as that. If it was like all the other niggers I know, it probably run off with somebody." She nudged Eloise with her spangled hip, and they laughed together.

They heard a car going down the road, and Viola teetered to the window in her red high heels. David saw that the heels of her black stockings were in the form of long, thin butterflies. "That's Tumsey Wilton going down to my house to pick me up," Viola said. "Eloise, I got to run, honey. You sure you don't want to vote for Kennedy? I think you're making a big mistake if you ask me. But this is a democracy, after all. I got to run, honey. Keep an eye out for Dolly, will you? She's home all by herself while I'm doing my civic duty. . . ." She took off her shoes and stockings and ran down the road in a dusty cloud of red, white and blue, calling Tumsey's name.

"That Viola!" Eloise said. She laughed, and clapped her hands, and fried Aunt Jemina pancakes for breakfast, which she always did when she was pleased.

The remaining two kittens died of starvation some time during that week, although Eloise gave them evaporated milk, which they stepped in, and walked through, but would not eat.

"They were weaned too soon," Eloise told Viola. "But it was just as well. Having babies is one thing, taking care of them is another."

She threw their small dead bodies out into the ditch with the snake.

THREE

In the heart of David Hunter, there was a bottomless pit and a hunger for love and life that shouted loud enough to wake up watermelons. Lacking love, he plunged all the deeper into the act of existing in Burnside, as June came, and school finally closed. So that he floundered about, it seemed, at the bottom of a deep well, and sent his voice ringing up the walls into the leafy ear of summer. Not that Eloise Hunter was completely deaf to his cries. Her own craving for love and life sometimes made two children a heavy burden, and what might have seemed to be a lack of love for David was only the result of Eloise's trying to spread herself too thin over too large an area. Finally, David became wrapped up in June days that were colored blue and smelled of green trees. Like morning dew, the sun burned away the ghosts of dead winter things. And if David thought at all about the tragic spring, it was to wonder whether the horror had not been a more pleasant nightmare, the kind that causes the least amount of sweat.

The June days pranced by like children in a school play, costumed like clouds in the shape of dumplings, and trees and flowers with colored labels. Inside such a climate, the idea of unhappiness was a winter sentiment-—yesterday's winter, rather than tomorrow's. Costumed like the days in sneakers and tee shirt and smelly jeans, David felt most of the time like burnt toast; the sun soaked into his pores like some kind of mellow chocolate, as if summer itself dunked one into the other.

When he was thinking dreary thoughts at all-—and there were somber times, of brooding clouds, and rain like straight pins slanting down, the primitive rapport of lightning and thunder— then it came to him that the crudest punishment he could wish on Eloise Hunter was that she become a snowman forever, except when he needed her to plumb the bottomless pit. And for Clair to become a lump of coal in Eloise's eye. Except when he needed a half-white baby sister to orient himself. Somebody's nappy red head like Brillo pads to use to scrub chicken gravy and egg yolk out of frying pans. For Eloise had him washing dishes now; she swore prodigiously that she had washed them at the age of five, and he was certainly going on eight.

But the truth was that summer had enchanted Eloise. She spent her mornings washing. And the afternoons peering first at the sun, then at her wash on the line, as though making sure that one was getting all the best benefit of the other. Later in the afternoon, she ironed dresses which she dirtied up at night on the swing with Robert Bartley and one or two other men who came by, sometimes with lavish presents, to entice her out. But Eloise never went anywhere with them, not even to Viola's down the road, reminding her boy friends that because they were all married, and she was the mother of two children, didn't they think it was time for them to settle down?

Watching from the cellar window after school closed, David wished many a night that Eloise would turn to snow. Without the benefit of Clair's coal eyes, as though blindness were punishment enough for the eloquence of the swing.

He knew how babies are made. Dolly Anderson, age ten going on eleven, was very graphic on that point. She called it cutting cake. And she insinuated that perhaps David's lack of success at making babies in their single experiment was due to some essential shortcoming in his cutting knife. Since Dolly insisted that her cake, like her mother Viola's, was certainly perfect.

She teased David that he had hardly no vanilla at all to flavor her cake. She bragged about its size and sweetness, so that when she finally showed it to him, in an orgy of self-admiration, he had been pleased and disappointed at the same time to find that it favored a plucked chicken's naked behind more than the confection she had bragged about. He was glad she had waited until he turned seven; an earlier demonstration at a more tender age might have stunted his growth forever. No, it certainly didn't look anything at all like cake, not to him.

As for Clair, she responded to summer by turning brown. If anything, her hair flamed redder than the rhododendron; but David could forgive her that, since she did her best to dry dishes for him on tiptoes, and helped him to amuse himself as they lay sleepless those hot nights while Eloise entertained on the loquacious swing.

One night, Viola squeaked with Eloise under the oak tree as the two women drank warm beer that Viola had scrounged from one of her clients.

"Whew," Viola said, fanning herself, and dabbing at her bosom with a man's red bandanna, "I should have asked him for a refrigerator instead of this here beer, honey. These men will be the death of me yet. I don't even know if my kidneys can stand this warm beer, I always seem to have the backache here of late.'

Eloise laughed. "I wonder why?" she said, with a small amount of acid in her voice; for there were times when she considered Viola to be decidedly trashy, especially in hot weather, when she herself had other people to talk to. She considered Viola to be valuable as a winter friend, for it could not be denied that Viola was good company on a snowy night. Whatever her shortcomings were, the most damning one was that she was a poor woman rather than a rich man. Because, with the commence of summer, Eloise had been thinking increasingly of how to finance the trip North that Viola herself had proposed.

Viola was well aware of Eloise's summer impatience with her. But she stuck to their friendship, as she told all her political friends, for the sake of Eloise's two children, who got little or no mothering at all from Eloise, Viola claimed. She felt that it was inside her patriotic duty to continue a relationship with Eloise in the hope that some of her own good motherly qualities just might rub off. For the sake of Eloise's children, then, Viola saw fit to ignore Eloise's earlier sarcasm about her backaches. "When you seen Robert Bartley?" she asked, instead, in a casual fashion.

"Oh, not for some time now," Eloise said, with an equal amount of casualness. "And when you seen Tumsey Wilton? Is he still living with his wife?"

"About as much as Robert's living with his wife," Viola said cuttingly, unable to pass up two sarcasms in the same night. "Any way, Tumsey was still with her when I saw him last night, after he dropped Robert off here." She took a sip of the beer. "Or don't you remember that Robert was here last night?"

"Why, I'd almost forgot!" Eloise said, with surprise that fooled nobody, least of all Viola.

"Must be old age, honey," Viola said, "you forgetting something like that."

"Must be," Eloise said, patting her hair, which was really a new wig only a little less elegant than Viola's. "And who did you get this beer from, Viola? It certainly ain't no champagne," Eloise said, digging.

An intense kind of rivalry often cropped up between the two women, because Viola was paid in money by her men. Eloise thought that receiving hard cash made a woman trashy, and she got paid in other ways.

"I got this beer from the same man you got that wig from," Viola said, digging deeper. "And it certainly ain't no high fashion Jackie Kennedy, if the truth must be told," she added, patting her own authentic creation.

Eloise rocked in silence while Viola planted her feet solidly to try and hold her end of the swing still. It was another night of the full moon; the crickets had already begun their hypnotic litany. Eloise swung; and Viola resisted with her feet braced firmly.

After a while, Viola sighed. "I sure wish Tumsey had hit that number, him and Robert. Living in Burnside, the only recreation a woman has is tearing her friends apart."

Eloise knew that Viola was offering an apology, in her indirect way, for her crack about the wig; and she herself unbent. "Oh Viola, I do too wish they had hit! I get so bored just sitting home all the time! Wouldn't it be fun, you and me in New Jersey? We'd drive them nigger men wild, they ain't never known no women equal you and me! Oh, I wish we could go, before I stop being pretty!"

Inside, David did not hear Viola's response, for he had fallen to thinking about New Jersey. Although he had been born there, it was like a presence which he could not see hidden around a corner. But he did remember that Jersey had not been at all like Burnside, that its odors and colors and sounds had been different, and that Eloise had always been with him then. They had lived on the first floor in front of a tavern. Through the frosted window, David had been able to see many bottles of liquor reflecting blue, green, and red from neon signs in the tavern across the street. Sometimes in the night, waiting for Eloise to come home from work, he had felt wet blankets on his skin. Nights colored gray, a sharp wind at the sashes, ice on the street, and a glittering moon overhead. Everything so cold as he had listened for Eloise's steps coming past the A&P on the corner, past the barber shop, Jeter's candy store, a house, a church, Mr. Eisenberg's. . . .

"David?"

"Ma'am?"

"You still wake? You go to sleep right away, you hear?" Her voice not difficult; pleased, actually. "You hear?"

"Yes ma'am."

"Where's Henry Hunter? I bet he's across the street in that tavern getting drunk! Is he across the street?"

"I don't know." He had not been able to see into the tavern because of the frost.

Soon after that, Eloise would come and change the wet blankets and sheet or put something dry between him and them. He did not remember much about Henry Hunter, except his perpetual absence, or loud, drunken snoring. He had known even then that Henry Hunter was just some man who lived with Eloise, and that Henry was not his father. He didn't remember any summer in Jersey, either; he wondered if it was a place of always winter.

For some reason, thinking about Jersey depressed him, and gave him terrible nightmares. In one of these, he dreamed he was a cat.

The nights were hot and quiet, in his dream. Eloise got up softly in the dark and walked around him where he slept. She brought chickens and other things to his little pantry room and cut them up with a bone-handled knife when she thought he wasn't looking. "As I kill this chicken, feel the blood run down and drop between my pretty legs," he heard her sing, something like that.

One morning—in his dream—he woke up to the sound of screaming hens. Eloise had thrown a turtle's head out into the yard and it lived after sundown. It had lain there all night in the dust waiting for the careful hen. They could not pry its beak from her thin leg, so they killed the hen and ate her fried in lard. As usual David ate the head and guts.

Eloise had wept. She cried all day. In his dream, David had heard Robert Bartley explain, "If you really knew Eloise, you would not think that she was worried about things like death. But she wants to know where we go when we die. For that reason, she kills the chickens and turtles. She thinks she can find out the answer by looking at their insides. Death always upsets Eloise." So she had wept about the hen, and would not eat any. Although she did sop up some of the gravy with her biscuit.

That night, Robert Bartley had come again to see Eloise. He went with her to hunt turtles, and they spent all night opening shells and reading the insides by lantern light.

Finally, they became disgusted. "We certainly won't find the answer inside a turtle," Eloise said. Robert Bartley was quiet, but it was clear that he agreed.

David had known all the time they were thinking about him, even before Eloise wiped her knife on the hem of her dress and said, "Maybe it's the wrong insides we've been looking at. Why don't we try the insides of a cat?"

"My pretty legs are furry," David had thought. "I would not be disturbed if I really believed in nine lives."

His father had also been murdered by those same two. Hot afternoons, to escape the boredom of dozing, they had rounded up all the cats and drowned them in Lee's Creek in brown paper bags.

So he had run, in his dream. He discovered how the world is to a cat—opaque, everything caught in a slant. The sexual funk of rats nesting in a strawstack. But no time for that. The night was quiet, carried on fuzzy feet.

The hills of Burnside were torture for a cat. There were snakes that resembled roots, coiled around the sycamore to look like roots knotted in exposure where flashfloods had washed the topsoil away.

Burrs caught in his sleek hair. And always the hot feet of Robert and Eloise behind him.

They grabbed him. The bone-handled knife went straight to his heart. He woke up, trembling. Dolly said that dreams sometimes come true. He wondered if Eloise really wanted to destroy him, if there was any truth in that. But the thought made him feel unpleasant, and he decided that the dream was not true. Besides, how could he ever turn into a cat?

Another time, in what also seemed to have been a dream, he played with his plastic bazooka in the yard while Clair crooned to her talking Mama doll and rocked it in her lap. It was a mild summer day, and they played in the full sun without seeking the shady protection of the oak tree. "Rockabye my little baby," Clair sang, and David aimed his bazooka right at her heart and fired an imaginary shot.

He looked up then and saw a huge bird falling down on them in lazy spirals. Its wings seemed as large as a barn. David aimed his bazooka and fired; but the bird kept falling in ever-decreasing circles over the open yard.

Its shadow fell over them like a fanning cloud. The spinning darkness engulfed Clair, and David blinked, closing his eyes for only the length of a camera shutter. When he looked again, he saw the giant claws spread like yellow calipers and gouge into Clair. Imbedded on either side of the hooked beak, the bird's sharp, slanting eyes observed David in a kind of wry humor. David nodded and smiled back at the bird.

"Rockabye. . . ." Clair was singing. When the bird grabbed her, she dropped the talking doll and started crying. Mama I love you the very best of all, the doll whirred in the dancing dust as the bird beat its wings, holding Clair in its yellow talons. Then, in a sudden rush, it rose skyward, as though jerked slantwise there by strings which David could not see. Casually, he aimed his bazooka and fired. "Boom," he said, and he laughed as the bird flew away. Mama I love you the very best of all ... He thought he saw Clair wave with one hand and wipe her tears away with the other. He waved back as the bird rose higher and higher in the air, curving at the same time in its flight, as though blown by a strong wind. He watched the fanning wings as the bird climbed with dreamlike stealth into the higher brightness. A single feather floated down, rotating like an errant maple seed.

It seemed the end of a dream, and he braced himself for the inevitable awakening. His mouth tasted salty, as though he had been eating popcorn at the Dillwyn movie. It had seemed to be that kind of dream. Like a movie. The large fanning wings moving stealthily toward Devil's Mountain. He half-expected to see them flash The End on the wide-angle screen where the clouds hung as heavy as snowballs, and the sky held the peculiar cast of winter in its milk-white hue. A cold chill passed over him. Dreams sometimes did that, shifting from one season to the other. Now was certainly time to wake up. He did not want to dream about winter.

But the sun persisted; the evil smell of feathers tickled his nose. He walked over and picked up the doll. Mama, it said weakly, and stopped. Gently, he brushed the dust from her yellow hair.

He sat flat in the dirt and stared at the sky. There were the snowball clouds, the milk-white sky, the mild sun, gentle as in a dream. He looked down, and saw a single gray feather placid in the dust. He looked at the sky again. He felt tears drying on his cheeks in delicate crusts; it surprised him that he had been crying.

He sat there in the cool dust. "Rockabye my little baby. . . ." Clair had sung.

So it had not been a dream.

He remembered how the bird had smiled at him and he had smiled back. He wondered if that bird had taken Clair off to heaven. He had seen pictures in Sunday school of angels carrying away children to God. He felt a twinge of jealousy at the idea of Clair getting to heaven before him.

He heard the sound of bare feet slapping in the layers of dust, and he looked and saw Eloise running down the road. She ran right past him and into the house. He realized that her mouth was wide open, and that she was screeching at the top of her voice. But he could not move, even when she staggered back with the shotgun. The loud explosion in his ears deafened him, and his eyes clicked shut, and then open again, and recorded the scene of Eloise firing the shotgun in the direction that the bird had gone.

When the shotgun was empty, Eloise dropped to her knees in front of David and cried with her face torn up like a thundercloud. David said, "A big bird came, Mama, and carried Clair off to heaven." But Eloise was babbling about how she had been on her way home from Viola's when she saw the bird swoop down and take Clair away. He couldn't understand why Eloise was sorry that Clair was gone. He was glad she was gone. Now she would be with God in heaven, that's what they said in church. And he would be alone with Eloise. He remembered the vivid pictures, the shining angel wings, the childrens' enraptured faces. Clair would be happy there ... as happy as he would be here.

He heard another commotion in the dust, and he stretched his neck around Eloise and saw Viola Anderson, and Dolly behind her, running down the road. Dolly was waving her hands; and Viola was holding her dress up like breeches between her legs, the way Burnside women do when they have to run.

"I heard the shotgun!" Viola cried; she had a voice stronger than any man's. "What happened, honey?" Eloise jumped up and fell into Viola's arms, screaming at her about what the big bird had done to Clair. "Good gracious a-life!" Viola yelled, hugging Eloise. But Eloise pushed her away and flew to the danger bell and started hitting it with the stick. "Lawd Lawd Lawd," Eloise said. She hit the bell so hard that the stick broke. Panting and snorting like a racehorse, she stood there crying and wringing her hands.

Suddenly, she took off across the pea patch, screaming at the top of her lungs. "Why don't somebody help me?" she cried. Viola took off after her. "Honey, you'll have yourself a heart attack in that pea patch!" Viola yelled. And she dived and tackled Eloise around the knees.

Dolly hugged David in high excitement. "Mama's going to fight!" she squealed, right in his other ear. He was deaf for a moment and thought he might wet his pants, there was so much excitement going on. He couldn't understand why Viola was going to fight, maybe because her wig jarred off when she tackled Eloise like that.

The two women struggled until Viola finally wrapped her big thighs around Eloise's waist and sat on her in the dust. "Girl, you stop this foolishness," Viola panted. "You'll have yourself a heart attack in all this heat! There ain't a thing you can do about Clair!" She had her legs wrapped around Eloise like somebody riding a horse, and Eloise bucked and tried to throw her. "I got to do something!" Eloise cried, and she bucked.

But Viola rode her. She looked a mess, Viola did. Her wig hung on one nap, and swung every time Eloise jumped. She was covered with pea vines and dust. Her dress had come up over her thighs, and David saw the incredible muscles there, squeezing Eloise like some kind of thick, dark snake.

"I told you Mama was going to fight," Dolly said. David squirmed uneasily. He wanted to run out there and help Eloise, but he was scared of what Viola might do. He was amazed at the way Viola was treating his mother. Until now, he had thought that his mother was the strongest woman in the world.

Eloise bucked and bounced until she wore herself out. "I'm all right now," she said after a while. "You can get off my back, Viola, before you break it. You must weigh a ton!"

But Viola was still suspicious. "You sure you through with all that foolishness, girl? You know you can't do a thing when something like this happens except try and forget it."

"She was my baby!" Eloise screeched. She beat her forehead in the dust.

"You have to forget her," Viola said firmly.

"We can go to Devil's Mountain! That's where he took her! That's where them birds hang out!"

Viola tightened her legs around Eloise. "You must be sun-struck, honey! Who ever climbed Devil's Mountain? Who you ever heard of climbing Devil's Mountain? It'd take you a week to get to the top." She swung her wig on straight. "And even if you could climb it, what do you expect to find?"

"We could at least go!" Eloise complained. But her voice was considerably calmer now. And Viola bent down and inspected her face.

"When the men come," Viola said. "We'll go then, when the men come to find out why the danger bell rang."

She got off Eloise and helped her to her feet. She untwined the vines from both of them, and led Eloise back to the yard, brushing dust off their dresses.

"Oh my baby!" Eloise moaned. The tears and dust were making mud tracks on her face.

"Now now now, I understand," Viola comforted. "Dolly, you and David draw some water from the well so Eloise and me can get cleaned up." She hooked her arm around Eloise and half-dragged her to the porch.

Suddenly, Eloise broke away from Viola and ran to the end of the porch where she picked up the ax there. "You don't want me to get my child back!" she cried. She came at Viola with the ax. Viola screeched, and flew up the road. Eloise chased her as far as the oak tree. David and Dolly hid behind the well, watching her. "Eloise, you better put that ax down and stop acting a fool,' Viola called from far up the road.

"You don't want me to get my child back,' Eloise said. She sat down on the swing. Then she got up. She sat down again. "My baby's gone," she said. "Everybody was jealous of her because she was half-white. And now she's gone."

"Eloise, you put that ax down," Viola said. She took a tentative step toward the house.

"My baby's gone," Eloise said. She stood up with her shoulders slumped.

"You still got David," Viola said. "You forgetting about David, Eloise?"

It was plain that she had forgot about him. "David?" She perked up like an electric light coming on, the way the mud on her cheeks cracked and she bared her teeth in a fierce smile. "David!" She screamed at the top of her voice. "Where you at, David?" He poked his head from behind the well. "I thought somebody stole you, too," she said, half apologetically. She came toward him across the yard. "Come here, son, give Mama a hug. Mama still has David." But he was terrified of her, that ax in her hand, and he darted back behind the well.

Viola tiptoed down the road. She sneaked up behind Eloise and caught her in a bear hug. But Eloise sighed and dropped the ax. "I'm all right now, Viola," she said. She butted Viola away and went to the porch where she set the ax up on one end. "Let's get ourselves cleaned up," she said tiredly. "Like you say, the men'll be here soon. I'd hate for them to see me looking a mess."

"You children draw that water," Viola said. And she went into the house with Eloise.

Dolly chatted on like a magpie but David helped draw the water in silence. When the mossy old bucket came dripping up, he was glad that Dolly was so excited about taking it in the house. He was still afraid to get too close to Eloise. He remembered how she had looked at him dumbly—she had forgot about him— when Viola reminded her that he was still here. He almost hated her for carrying on so much about Clair, and forgetting him. He was glad Devil's Mountain was too high to climb. Besides, Clair wasn't at Devil's Mountain, he could have told them that. Hadn't he seen the angel, close up? The angel had smiled at him. Clair wasn't at Devil's Mountain. Clair was in heaven.

He started crying again. Why hadn't Eloise been at home when Clair went away? If she had been home, she could have saved Clair. Maybe. After the way he'd seen Viola throw her around like that, he had his doubts. She couldn't save anybody, all she could do was cry.

He felt unprotected and alone. But he was too weak to move, or to care. Nobody even knew he was alive, they were all in there drinking wine. He started crying, and couldn't stop. He remembered Miss Poindexter in school talking about how birds tear their food up in little pieces and feed it to their babies. He was certainly glad Clair was in heaven. He sat down in the dust, and cried.

Finally, Tumsey Wilton and some other men showed up. Eloise and Viola had cleaned off some of the dust and were a little high. "Tumsey will find Clair, you'll see," Viola said. And Tumsey said to Eloise, "That's a pity about your child, ma'am." He reloaded the shotgun and set off on his mule for Devil's Mountain. Tumsey was that kind of man.

But some of the other men were doubtful that anything could be done. "That old eagle, he's got his nest in Devil's Mountain," some of them said, rolling their eyes toward the west. "Nobody's ever been able to climb Devil's Mountain." Later on, they would creep back to their homes to inspect their children and chickens, to see what marauders might have struck while they had been gone. They had responded to the danger bell because the bell usually signified a death or a fire, something that could be handled locally, without having to go all the way out to Devil's Mountain, out beyond Dillwyn where the sun set, which really was not very far to go, but which was still an inconvenience even on a warm, mild day. Especially considering that the mountain couldn't be climbed. They milled about in small groups, murmuring, shaking their heads and rolling their eyes at the westward sky.

By that time, Tumsey Wilton was halfway up the road on his mule. 'Tumsey baby wait for me!" Viola called—she had been in the house loading Eloise's pistol—and she grabbed Dolly by the hand, and ran up the road after him.

Robert Bartley had come in his brother's shiny black Ford convertible. Eloise asked him to take her and David to Devil's Mountain. "I'll buy you the gas," she offered; but Robert held up his hand. "In a situation like this,' he said, "I'd be more than glad to do it for free."

Eloise snatched David up and ran into the house, where she put some clothes on him, and then powdered her own face with nut-brown face powder while she jammed her feet into her high-heeled shoes. "I'm certainly glad I kept your clothes and mine ready," she said to David. "Like they say, you never can tell what's liable to happen, it's a good idea to always have some clothes ironed to wear. Lord a-mercy, if I get my hands on that old eagle, I'll tear him to pieces!" She stuck her lips into the mirror and painted them bright red. Then she changed her dress and put on her wig.

"I guess I look good enough to go in this old blue dress?" she asked Robert Bartley on the porch. "You look good enough, Eloise," Robert said. "You ain't going to no church meeting, you understand, a situation like this."

"I know that," Eloise said, poking her mouth out. "But you never can tell who you might run into, out there on the road. Besides, we have to go through Dillwyn, don't we? Them white men there, always standing around the gasoline pump, I certainly don't want them to see me looking like no cotton picker."

She stuffed David into the back seat, and sat up front with Robert Bartley, tying a purple bandanna firmly around her wig as Robert started the car and moved out up the road to overtake the caravan of mules.

Eloise waved excitedly to everyone as the car whizzed by. "I'll see you at Devil's Mountain!" she called to Viola, who rode with her arms wrapped around Tumsey Wilton's big chest and carrying Dolly squeezed between them.

"You act like you're going to a picnic," Robert Bartley said to Eloise, coughing at the same time, for the car whipped up a lot of dust.

"Well, it's not every day I get to go somewhere," Eloise said, pouting. "Do you realize this is the first time I've been off that farm in nearly six months? Oh, I know I'm down to Viola's all the time. But I'm still a young woman, I like to get out and kick up my heels once in a while." She turned, and seemed surprised that David had not been bounced out of the back. "Pretty baby," she said loudly, reaching back and plucking lint from his hair. "You're too little to know what this is all about," she said.

She turned back to Robert Bartley. "You know, Robert, what David told me about the eagle?" She laughed, covering her mouth. "He thought it was an angel come down to take Clair away to heaven. Now wasn't that a lovely thought?"

Robert ground the car to a stop. The dust, which had been pursuing them in long streamers, swarmed in around them like bees. "I think it's a damn disgrace," Robert said to Eloise, "how you're so unconcerned about your baby girl. I know it's none of my business how you act. But I've got a gang of children of my own. If one of them was stolen that way, I think I'd have a fit."

"You think I'm not worried, Robert Bartley? You think I'm not almost out of my mind about my poor child? If I don't stop thinking about her ... if I don't think of something else . . . I'm going to go crazy." Her eyes bulged at him in a strange, glassy way. "You know you can't do a thing when something like this happens, except try and forget it. That's what Viola said, and she's right. I know we'll never see Clair again. I've known it all the time. I just thank the Lord I still have David. I've got to preserve my health and strength to look after him." She turned briefly and half-smiled at David in the back seat.

Robert frowned. "If you know we won't find Clair, how come you're going to Devil's Mountain then?"

"I've got to do something, Robert! Maybe we can buy a watermelon in Dillwyn. David loves watermelon! We can all laugh and talk and joke like nothing happened. What would you have me do, Robert? Go to St. Matthew's and pray? Sit home and read the Bible? I've had enough religion for one day. I just want to do something to set my mind at rest." Her face twisted bitterly, and she started to cry.

"Well, that's a long sight better," Robert said, as though he had been waiting for tears to verify her sorrow. Eloise wept copiously for several minutes. Satisfied, Robert had to pull the choke out before the car would start. "I'm just about out of gas," he said. "I guess we'd better stop and buy some in Dillwyn, like you said."

"By all means, considering the situation," Eloise said dryly, patting her purple bandanna into place. "My my! Dillwyn! Them white men always sitting at that gas pump. Now don't you mention a word to them about that eagle carrying off my child, Robert Bartley. They always think we colored people into nothing but trouble any way, I certainly don't want them knowing all my business."

"You got a point there," Robert said. "A dollar's worth of gas ought to do."

Eloise settled back in her seat. "I've got a little money put aside. I keep it just for such emergencies. I tell you what, Robert . . . I'll buy you two dollars' worth of gas, it's worth that much to me just to be getting off that farm for a while. Lord, I haven't been to Dillwyn in a coon's age!" She smiled at David again; but he turned away this time, pretending that the dust had overcome him.

He was doubly disappointed in Eloise. First of all, the way she had let Viola beat her and sit on her like that. He'd never be able to look Dolly in the face again, now that Dolly's mother had beat his mother. Boy, he sure did like that old strong Viola, she was really something! He bet he could depend on her to help him if he ever needed protection. It was a comforting thought; it made him feel a little better.

They drove on. Peering backwards over the rear seat, David could just make out the other men and their mules strung out behind them, the dust was that thick. Also, looking backward, he did not have to look at Eloise in front of him.

He mistrusted her tears, and the unusual interest she was showing in him. He knew that if Clair was here, she would be riding in the front seat with Robert and Eloise.

He was also horrified that Eloise could think of eating watermelon at a time like this, even if she was going to buy it for him. If he had been in her shoes, he would climb Devil's Mountain, even if it took a thousand years. Like some of those princes in story books. That's what he would do. He'd climb the mountain, and kill the evil bird, and rescue Clair, even if he didn't like her. Even if he was glad she was gone. He decided that he wouldn't touch a piece of that old watermelon, if Eloise was dumb enough to buy it.

Robert turned off the dirt road near Carlisle House, high and lofty white on the hillside. He drove past the swamp, following the highway into Dillwyn. The car rode easily now, rattling only sometimes in the joints; the balloon tires smacked like kisses on the hot asphalt. Eloise propped her feet against the floorboard, and braced her back, riding importantly with her chest stuck out. "Lord, Robert, you fly in this car, I do declare!" She turned her head and blinked into the wind. Robert grinned proudly and poured on the gas until they pulled up at the pump in Dillwyn.

Several white men leaning back in rocking chairs watched them as Robert steered up to the pump. But before Robert could order gas, Eloise decided that she was too hungry to open her pocketbook. She bounced from the car, calling to David and Robert to follow her—"Come on, boys!" she said cheerily—and she went into the general store across the highway, swinging her hips. Shrugging, Robert flashed a grin at the white men. "We'll get two dollars worth of gas after she eats," he explained to all of them, pointing after Eloise—he didn't know which one of them would handle the pump today—as though the largeness of his order would forgive the fact that his car was blocking the pump.

Eloise was busily ordering when he went into the store. ". . . sardines, and saltines, and a bag of peanuts for my baby boy," she said importantly, opening her pocketbook. An old white woman stacked up the order, which included several bottles of soda pop, a cellophane bag of marshmallows, and a small watermelon that looked as though it had been left over from last year. Eloise handed David the peanuts and a bottle of pop. "Don't you drip soda pop on your clean clothes," she instructed him. "You can have some watermelon later."

"How come you ordering so much?" Robert wanted to know.

"Traveling always makes me hungry," Eloise said, smiling at the white woman. It was clear that she wanted the white woman to think they were travelers from a far-off place. But the white woman moved in a kind of studied disinterest. "That'll be two dollars and seventy-three cents," the white woman said. Eloise paid with a five-dollar bill. "My my my," she said, "things are certainly cheap here in the country, far cheaper than the ridiculous prices we have to pay in New Jersey, up North there."

The white woman looked as though she had been sleeping before Eloise interrupted her; she turned, without commenting, in a kind of wooden way, and disappeared into a back room, presumably to sleep again. "Trash," Eloise said, but only loud enough for Robert and David to hear. She gave Robert the watermelon, and she carried the bag herself.

"I still don't see why you bought so much," Robert said, once they were outside again.

"Well, Viola might be hungry too,' Eloise explained. "And Dolly. And you know the appetite Tumsey Wilton has. He's always hungry, that's what Viola says. Now, why don't we sit on the bench there under the oak tree, and enjoy ourselves until the others show up?"

But Robert was undecided. "I think we ought to be getting on to Devil's Mountain," he said, holding the watermelon. "We ought to get there before sundown."

"We will, we will," Eloise said. She squinted into the sun, since none of them had a watch. "It's only around two o'clock, not even that late. We'll make it in plenty of time," she said, tugging him toward the bench. "I'm just as anxious to get to Devil's Mountain as anybody else. After all, it was my child that was stolen, wasn't it? But you're certainly going to need some help at Devil's Mountain. And we might as well refresh ourselves a bit until the others show up."

"What about the gas?" Robert said. "I don't think them white men like my car blocking the pump like that."

"Don't you worry about the gas, I've got the money for the gas. Besides, we're buying two dollars' worth, you'd think they could at least provide parking space for a while. Now, sit down over here and open me a can of sardines. Lord, I haven't had me a can of sardines in a coon's age! David . . . don't you dribble on your clean shirt, you hear me?" She plunked herself on the bench with a generous sigh. "Oh, I do love Dillwyn!" she said; and she praised the curving highway in front of them as Robert fed her sardines on crackers, which she ate holding one hand cupped underneath, to prevent dribbling oil on her dress.

It was a highway not unlike other main roads in the South-spattered now in splotches like a summer disease where the sun cut through the oak tree—but Eloise made much to do about it. "A lovely highway!" she exclaimed, eating sardines. Dutifully, Robert agreed, and looked for its special qualities that so inspired Eloise. But as for David, he was less impressed by the highway than by the lean, naked buildings skirting it—a mill; a motel, which catered exclusively to whites; a dentist's office next to the blacksmith's shop with its gaping doors—and the white men who surveyed them around Robert's car at the gas pump. Next to the store they had just left was The Emporium, owned and operated by the man they called the Dillwyn Jew. Eloise had bought Clair's talking Mama doll there last Christmas. "I feel like buying something nice right now," Eloise said; but Robert persuaded her not to spend money foolishly. And Eloise scraped away the ivy from the historical marker behind them, and exposed the high, brazen letters there.

She read that Dillwyn had been the center of the most notable gold-mining region in the country before the California gold rush in 1849, and that the Morrow Mine nearby, which opened before 1835, was one of the earliest gold mines in which underground mining had been employed. Proficiently worked for a number of years, it had been finally closed. Many other unworked mines were near by, the marker read.

Also, it continued, part of Lee's army had passed through Dillwyn on April 8, 1865, retreating westward. The II Corps of Grant's army had passed in pursuit in the afternoon of the same day. Grant had spent the night near Dillwyn, receiving early in the morning of April 9 a note from Lee in regard to surrender. Grant had sent a reply and then had gone on to Appomattox.

"I've always found history so fascinating," Eloise said, in a loud voice designed to carry to the white men dozing now at the gas pump. "I didn't know there used to be gold mines around here, I'd certainly like to get my hands on a gold mine right now."

Although Robert squirmed uncomfortably, Eloise talked in a loud voice and drank soda pop and ate marshmallows under the historic oak until Tumsey arrived about an hour later with Viola and Dolly on the mule, "You certainly can't beat modern transportation," Eloise said approvingly, nodding toward Robert's car, as Viola and Dolly slid backward from the mule and came toward them walking bowlegged.

Viola was sweating and very excited. She threw her arms around Eloise and whispered into her ear. Eloise listened, nodding, her eyes lighted with joy.

"Robert Bartley, you sly old dog!" Eloise said, and she poked him in the belly. "Why didn't you tell me you and Tumsey hit that number?"

Robert squirmed and grinned sheepishly. "I reckon it sort of slipped my mind, Eloise, I declare to goodness it did."

"I bet it did! How'd you find out, Viola? How much did they hit for?" Viola whispered again. "Five hundred dollars apiece? Robert . . . honey . . . you've had five hundred dollars in your jeans all the time I've been sitting here eating sardines and running my mouth about Dillwyn . . . ?" She moved toward him threateningly, her fists closed, as though to beat him for his deception.

But Robert backed away, pleading with hands open. "Eloise sugar . . . you got to remember I got a wife and thirteen children to take care of. ... I don't exactly have five hundred dollars, not any more. . . ." He looked daggers at Tumsey Wilton.

Dolly had borrowed Tumsey's knife and she cut the watermelon. Tumsey sank his teeth into a slice, "I didn't figure there was any harm, Robert, telling Viola. . . ."

Viola laughed. "He couldn't help himself, Robert. Once me and my daughter get behind somebody, they got to tell the truth." She looked at Dolly proudly. "My daughter's going to grow up to be just like me. Smart." She tapped her temple, under the hairline of her wig, with a gaudy finger.

Dolly said, "Mama, this here watermelon stinks, I bet it's from last year." Although everybody knew that a watermelon really couldn't survive that long, even before Tumsey Wilton said so, and kept on eating. Dolly offered David a piece; but he staunchly refused. He was glad that it stank.

"Well, well, well," Eloise said. "Five hundred dollars. Well, well, well."

"I don't exactly have five hundred left, Eloise. . . ."

"I've got an idea," Viola said. "Why don't we send David and Dolly back home on Tumsey's mule? Then the four of us grownups can continue on to Devil's Mountain. There's hardly anything they can do there any way, except to watch. That way, too, they won't get so tired. Besides, I forgot that my cow needs milking."

"You already milked her this morning and this afternoon, Mama," Dolly cut in, spitting watermelon seeds.

Viola frowned. "Well, she's got big udders. It won't hurt to milk her again."

"I've never heard of nobody milking a cow three times a day," Robert said.

But Eloise supported Viola. "You can't beat these modern scientific methods," she said. "Sometimes, in New Jersey, they milk them five and ten times a day. With machines. And music. Ain't that right, Tumsey?"

Tumsey Wilton was bent over double, laughing. "Come on, Robert . . . give in, old buddy. They got you beat." He threw his arms around Robert's shoulders, and laughed until Robert laughed with him.

"Well, I'm glad that's settled," Viola said, all business. "Now, let's not get too colored. That's all them white people want to see, along with the watermelon and everything else. Dolly, you take David home on the mule. We'll be along shortly, Eloise and me."

"Should I milk the cow, Mama?"

"Well, that's what you're going for, ain't it? Girl, you're so dumb! Why you think I'm sending you back home? To play Chinese checkers? I already fed the chickens, so it must be to milk the cow . . . we got anything else in the low ground you can milk . . . ?" She was getting very colored herself.

But Dolly was already halfway across the highway, tugging David by the hand. "I bet don't nothing come out but milky water," she called back heatedly; and Viola threatened her with a watermelon rind. "These children nowadays!" she complained, while Tumsey went to buy a case of cold Champale and more marshmallows for Eloise, and Robert ordered two dollars worth of gas, for which Eloise made him pay.

"It's all these modern things they learn in school, that's what makes them so fresh," Eloise agreed. She put on more make-up in the rearview mirror; Viola repaired her image in the shiny gas pump.

When Tumsey came back with the Champale and marshmallows, Robert pulled off in a cloud of dust. The white men shifted in their chairs to watch.

Laughing, Eloise sat in the front seat with Robert Bartley. "I'm certainly glad I got something else to occupy my mind with," she said. For an instant, a shadow crossed her face. And then she was laughing again.

Viola sat in back with Tumsey Wilton, who knocked the tops off Champale and handed the cold bottles around. They sped off in the direction of Devil's Mountain.

From studying her mother, Dolly Anderson had realized about a year ago that life had a kind of cruel magic in it; that reality could be watered down with a little bit of pee and shaped like mud pies to her own design. She found Miss Poindexter's sixth-grade lessons bearable because she sometimes pretended that she was the teacher, or Little Black Sambo's tigers, or sometimes Asia or South America, or some kind of sandy white foreign land surrounded by blue water. She sometimes pretended to be a white girl of sixteen named Alba, her favorite character.

It was difficult for Dolly to think of herself as just plain, black Dolly Anderson of Burnside, Virginia. Viola said it was because Dolly was large for her age, that her body was too big for her brain. But Dolly Anderson was not "dumb"; she just found dreaming more pleasant than reality, and she had made reality into an extended dream—a malady common to all generations in Burnside, which sometimes itself had the quality of a gaudy nightmare.

Now, on her way back home, Dolly talked to David about the recent tragedy. "They don't seem to be worried about Clair at all," Dolly said. "David, are you worried about Clair?" she said around her shoulder to him where he rode behind her on the mule.

Actually, he was very worried about Clair. He realized now— if he had ever thought otherwise—that Clair had not been taken to Heaven, that what waited for her at Devil's Mountain was probably some terrible kind of mayhem committed by gray feathers like the eagle had left in the yard. He was filled with a ^naggⁱⁿg guilt because he hadn't done all that he should have when the eagle swooped down on Clair. That's why he had refused the watermelon and drank only half the bottle of pop. He knew that he could have done more than just sit in the dust and smile at the eagle. "I believe," he said, taking a deep breath, "that Clair is already dead." Admitting it, he felt a certain relief.

Dolly crossed her fingers and touched blue. "It's bad luck to talk about dying," she said.

But he would not follow the childish ritual; that part of his life seemed behind him. He was riding with his arms around Dolly's waist and his face flat against her back. Sometimes, as the mule moved, he let his fingers sneak up to Dolly's forming breasts, where she would let them stay until he dropped them in confusion.

He felt extremely daring. It was as though the world had taken on a different coloration since the disappearance of Clair. He had witnessed his first real tragedy; and while his mind had not yet admitted that terrible evil did exist, the incident had unbalanced his drowsy sense of well-being and had imposed, instead, the exciting suspicion that all was not good, either, as the mellow summer days had tried to impress upon him. Now, he drifted with the sexual motion of the mule. He supposed he should have done something when that bird fell like a storm on Clair. He supposed he should have done something. But he hadn't. Guilt fanned in his loins like a spreading passion.

The hurricane bird. The eagle had been the hurricane bird that Viola talked about. The sun drenched him like a tropical storm. He felt a little dizzy at the enormity of what he had done. Of what he had not done, except to smile. He reached back and placed his hand on the hot, wet rump, his other arm around Dolly's hard breasts, as though to steady himself.

He felt good, being with Dolly. One reason he would miss Clair was because she was somebody around his own size. Dolly was three years older and a whole lot bigger than he was. But she was not yet as big as Eloise and the rest of them. He did not have to lean too far back to look into Dolly's face. And the temperature of her body was nearer the degree of his own, not that scalding hot of Eloise and Viola when they touched him, that he associated with the heat of being grown up.

"I'm glad I'm with you," he said to Dolly, "even if this old mule is as slow as molasses." There was something wild and unrestrained about Robert Bartley's car that frightened him.

Dolly dug her heels into the mule's sides and gouged until it trotted. The mule's hard spine hurt David between his legs; but he gritted his teeth and withstood the pain until the mule, wheezing, slowed to a loping walk; and it would not run again, despite Dolly's cursing and kicking. David curled up behind her, hanging on for dear life, and giggled at Dolly's anger.

"I'm a pine fire," Dolly said, almost exhausted now. "I'm a pine fire built under this mule, and I'm burning him to death."

Although David could feel the rising heat of her body, the mule apparently could not; and it took its sweet time while Dolly crackled and blazed.

They rode on in this manner, facing traffic, until they heard a car squeal to a stop on the other side of the highway. Robert Bartley and the rest of them had come back.

"You children tie the mule to that elm tree yonder, and then get in the car," Robert called from across the highway.

Dolly was very happy. "We going with you all?" She jumped down to tie the mule.

"Just shut up and do like you're told," Viola growled. It was obvious that she and Eloise had been arguing, the way she flounced into the front seat between Robert and Tumsey. "It certainly ain't my idea to carry no children to Devil's Mountain," she said angrily. "I had me other plans."

"I'm sorry, Viola," Eloise said. "I just want David with me right now. Suppose something happens to him on the way home?"

"Dolly is old enough to look after him," Viola said. But she unbent somewhat, and she was her old self again by the time Dolly had tied the mule and scrambled into the back seat with Eloise and David. "Well, I suppose we didn't lose too much time," she said, smiling, as Robert made an elaborate U-turn on two wheels, and they resumed the journey to Devil's Mountain.

"I just wanted David with me," Eloise said. "Why, we were nearly out to Devil's Mountain, but I made Robert turn around and come back and get you, David. I was so scared something might happen to you!" She kissed him all over, and he recoiled from the drunk rotten odor of alcohol on her breath. She held his hand firmly, until Tumsey offered her another Champale; and then she drank, and rode more comfortably, and seemed to forget about David altogether.

For some reason, David thought then of the black kitten he had drowned last spring in the suckhole. He remembered how its eyes had been a helpless, misty blue. His color, and Clair's eyes. Across his mind, there flashed a quick picture of Clair's eyes being pierced by an eagle's beak. Blood spurted everywhere. Ahead of them, he saw Devil's Mountain standing tall and somber in the distance, with the sun red behind it. He snapped his eyes shut.

Devil's Mountain stands some fifteen miles southwest of Dillwyn near the Commonwealth Colored Cemetery, where the Commonwealth of Virginia buries its colored criminal dead. The mountain got its name from the shape of its slender gray pinnacle, which resembles the tail of Satan protruding a thousand feet from the ground as though Satan, expelled from heaven, had been imbedded into the ground with his tail sticking straight up. No one has ever climbed the pinnacle to the horny spear point that supports the eagle's nest. The lower part of the mountain, at what would be the Devil's rump, rises in a mound some hundred feet high supporting the stem of the tail.

The closeness of the colored cemetery to the mountain is by no means accidental. In the old days, runaway slaves from all over the Commonwealth were brought to Devil's Mountain for punishment. They were chained for two or three nights like cattle to stobs at the base of the grotesque mountain. For it was said then—and is still believed by some now—that the mountain is the home of evil spirits. And it was not uncommon for some of the slaves to die of stark terror before daylight; they were buried in the nearby cow pasture that the Commonwealth took over for all its colored criminal dead.

At night, when the wind slides like dark serpents down the mountain, it is said that Satan's imps and these souls from the Commonwealth Colored Cemetery carouse in an unholy orgy until sundown. Colored travelers on the lonesome highway that angles in front of Devil's Mountain like a taut bowstring have claimed to see a naked white woman running up the phallic column perpendicularly, with a coffin on her head.

Now, this story was first circulated in the old days of Alcanthia County, of which Bumside is the black core. In those days, it was considered extremely criminal for Negroes to even think about naked white women; although such thoughts are somewhat permitted now, thanks to foreign motion pictures and the advancement of civil rights. But the opportunity of seeing even a ghostly white woman naked, in those days before Emancipation, caused many a bold slave to sneak away to Devil's Mountain at night from their plantations.

It is not known what they saw there, although many lies were told, with much lip-smacking and rolling of the eyes. Some claimed to have actually seen the white woman, naked and all, running with ladylike steps up the column to the love nook above with a big black nigger slave laughing on her head.

When this story was heard by the white master—there was very little that he did not know about his black slaves—he silenced such lies with a few lynchings and many more whippings. The practice of tying slaves to Devil's Mountain was soon eliminated, lest there be even some small truth to the account, Southern white ladies being what they are. Over the years, however, the story persisted and gradually changed until, in this summer of 1960, it was generally agreed by both blacks and whites that such a woman did haunt the horny phallus, and that she was certainly not a white woman, but a naked black nigger woman from the swamp, and that the burden she spirited away to the love nest above was not a laughing nigger man, but a laughing white one. Thus, progress is marked in Burnside; and Devil's Mountain stands, mighty and erect, as a symbol of male complaisance and female aggression on the flat southwestern plain, the tail of Satan imbedded in a field of red clover, with an eagle's nest on its tip.

Viola, who had been retelling the story to the people in Robert's car, had her own idea about who the ghostly woman was. "Only a white woman would climb a thousand feet to hide while she's cutting cake," Viola said. "She certainly wasn't a nigger woman, we don't care who sees us earning our daily bread. Ain't that right, Eloise?" she finished up, with a lewd laugh.

She had been talking on to try and take Eloise's mind away from the reason for their grisly mission. But Eloise had become more and more excited as the car neared Devil's Mountain, and the closer they got, the louder Eloise whimpered and growled until David thought she might be changing into some kind of beast, like they sometimes did in the movies. Eloise rode between him and Dolly in the back seat; every once in a while she took off her purple bandanna and wiped her eyes, then tied it back on again. Viola rode on her knees in the front seat between Robert and Tumsey so that she could talk and keep an eye on Eloise. She seemed a little exasperated that Eloise was still grieving about Clair and she sometimes winked at David and Dolly, when Eloise's eyes were closed sobbing, as though she had entered some kind of agreement with them in which they would all disbelieve Eloise's sorrow. "I'm not going to sympathize with you any more, Eloise," Viola said flatly. "The more I try to get your mind off your troubles, the less it seems to matter to you." She flounced around in her seat just as Robert stopped the car at the foot of Devil's Mountain.

Beyond them, the Commonwealth Colored Cemetery shimmered under a haze where the sun fell in a rich yellow-gold on the tombstones. "My child didn't even have a chance for a decent burial," Eloise moaned, and she stared angrily up the pinnacle at the eagle's nest.

Tumsey Wilton opened Champale and served all the adults. Dolly and David refreshed themselves with soda pop that Eloise had bought in Dillwyn. Eloise drank two Champales in a row, and seemed a little calmer. "That's my girl," Viola commended her. "There's hardly much else you can do." To which Eloise responded with a fresh shower of tears. "There ought to be something we can do," she said. "Robert, will you at least try to climb the mountain with me? It seems a shame not even to try."

Robert was reluctant, but he finally agreed. He went with Eloise over to the low rocks, and they scrambled to the base of the pinnacle together. Eloise motioned to Robert, and he hoisted her from behind and held her there while she wrapped her legs partly around the gray column and tried to shimmy up.

Watching from the car, Viola shook her head. "She didn't even take off her high heels," Viola said. "David, your Mama might never be right again, after this. I just want you to know, honey, that I'll always be around if you need me." She smiled at him like a wolf, with her long yellow teeth.

He felt a sudden new and immense love for Viola. At that moment she seemed the most important thing in his life and he felt like laughing at Eloise as she scrabbled about trying to climb the mountain with Robert Bartley pushing from behind.

"She sure do seem crazy," David said. Viola nodded. "They call it temporary insanity," she explained. "Usually it happens only to white ladies, I've never seen a colored woman have it before." She made it sound like some kind of disease, like the measles, maybe; and David crossed his fingers to keep from getting it himself.

Tumsey Wilton, who was usually neutral in most matters, had kept deliberately quiet. But now, he seemed compelled to speak. "Don't you think you might not be just a little hard on Eloise?" he said. "After all, it was her child that was stolen.'

Viola pouted and slumped back. "She didn't care that much for that child, if you ask me."

Tumsey frowned. "Watch your mouth," he warned. "Girl, you must be drunk. You know what they say about little pitchers having big ears. You shouldn't say things like that in front of children."

Dolly and David began to hum together and looked the other way so that Viola would think they weren't listening.

"These children don't know what we're talking about," Viola said, obviously fooled. And she went on with her tirade. "Did you know that Clair was a w-h-i-t-e-m~a~n-s-c-h-i-l-d?" she spelled rapidly. "And a j-e-w at that? Eloise told me so herself, I nearly fainted I was so surprised."

David could see the disapproval on Tumsey's face. "Is that a fact?" he said. "Well, I certainly didn't know that. I wonder if Robert knows?" He gazed wistfully out at Robert, his best friend, as though Robert stood in danger of being diseased, touching Eloise like that. "I bet he don't know."

"Not that it makes any real difference," Viola said hastily. "It's just that I can't get too shook up over some w-h-i-t-e-m-a-n-s-c-h-i-l-d"

"And a j-e-w at that," Tumsey Wilton said, his face dark. He handed Viola a Champale, with great unconcern, and drank one himself.

David stopped humming. He gazed up at Devil's Mountain. The sun was like liquid fire in his eyes. So Tumsey and Viola didn't like Clair, either. He looked at Dolly, who was still humming. He was surprised at the malicious orange furrows on Dolly's face, where she frowned evilly into the sun. Nobody didn't really like Clair, he thought. His heart thundered at the revelation.

Robert brought Eloise back to the car, supporting her around the shoulders. "My poor baby," Eloise moaned, with her eyes closed. "I know my child's up there. I can feel it."

Tumsey said, "Robert, I want to talk to you for a minute, old buddy." He wrapped his arm around Robert's shoulder, and they went together into the little clump of bushes that curved in a fringe around the bottom of Devil's Mountain.

Sitting there in the open car, with the tangerine sun glinting on the Champale bottles, Viola became very practical. "Eloise, I know you're all tore up about your child, honey. And you have my deepest sympathies. But, darling, them two nigger men got nearly a thousand dollars between them! And they're dying for some action! We could go to New Jersey, Eloise! We could leave tomorrow, if we wanted to! But we got to hustle, sweetheart! We got to hustle!"

Eloise started to cry again. "It's a judgment on me for loving that child too much," she said, "and you talking about action." She shook an angry fist at Devil's Mountain. "I know you up there, you old mean bird! You ain't fooling me!"

"Eloise, you got to control yourself, honey. You just don't meet somebody with five hundred dollars every day. You got to think about the living, not about the dead."

"Clair ain't dead yet," Eloise said. "I'll know when she's dead. She's alive right this minute. Besides, why don't you go with Tumsey, if you're so anxious?"

Viola frowned impatiently. "You know he don't make a move without Robert. Now try to control yourself, dear heart. Here come Robert and Tumsey. You remember that your only obligation now is to that child David. You try to get some money off Robert so we can go to New Jersey, you hear me, sugar? You know Tumsey won't do nothing if Robert won't."

Reluctantly, Eloise agreed, and dug at her eyes with her fists. "Let's get them to take us down to the creek," she said. "I always function better near water. Some place cool to wet my feet, afterward."

Viola nudged her lewdly. "That's my girl," she said. "You forget about Clair. There ain't a single thing you can do to help her."

Eloise looked up at the eagle's nest. The tears were drying now like black pearls on her cheeks. "Clair ain't dead yet," she said. "I'll know when she's dead."

"Think about the living," Viola admonished, in a low whisper, as Robert and Tumsey approached. "Think about the money!"

Robert's eyes were red and mean looking. "I don't have one bit of respect for a colored woman that goes with a white man," he growled.

Viola looked daggers at Tumsey, who shrugged and slouched against the car. But Eloise seemed completely unconcerned. "I don't either,' she said, wetting her finger to smear the pearls on her cheeks. "Ain't it a good thing you're black, Robert Bartley."

He seemed surprised. "You know what I'm talking about, girl? I'm talking about Clair."

"About Clair?" Eloise frowned in a terrible way. "I guess I know who my friends are," she said. She glared at Viola, who squirmed uncomfortably. "Now now, honey," Viola tried to pacify.

"Now now my red ass!" Eloise cried, and she flew at Viola with both fists.

But Robert caught her before she could connect. "No sense in fighting, girls," he said, in a kind of frightened way. "I personally don't believe in violence. Maybe I was a little hasty in my judgment."

"Well, I must say!" Viola fumed, patting her wig. "I think this whole thing has unbalanced you, Eloise. Darling, why on earth would you want to fight me?"

"You know why, you black bitch! You swore you wouldn't tell!"

"Tell what, sugar?" Viola said.

But before Eloise could answer, Tumsey Wilton stepped in to mediate. "I think this has gone far enough," he said. "As long as Robert knows the facts, we might as well forget it." He grabbed Viola by the arm. "Let's you and me go down to the creek," he said, "and let Robert and Eloise hash out their own troubles."

Viola agreed. "Dolly, you and David pick some nice white daisy flowers and put them on Miss Ida's grave out there in the cemetery," she said. "Don't pick them black-eyed Susans, Miss Ida couldn't stand nothing black."

Robert was standing behind Eloise and talking softly into her ear. Eloise was breathing hard and still glaring, but she seemed to be calmer now.

"Run along to the cemetery, you children," Viola said. "We'll call you in a little while. And . . . Eloise . . . dear heart . . . you remember what I said before? About being practical? Don't be mad with me, honey. I'm sorry. Remember what I said? I really am very sorry, honey."

"Mouth Almighty, that's what you are. I'll talk to you later," Eloise said haughtily to Viola. With Robert's arm around her waist, she followed Viola and Tumsey to the creek. Hugging Viola with one arm, Tumsey carried a case of Champale under the other. "Run along, children," Viola said, over her shoulder. "We're just going out there behind the bushes and dab our feet in the water. That's all we're going to do."

David and Dolly watched them until they disappeared inside the bushes. "I know what they're going to do," Dolly said with a nasty grin.

"I know, too," David said. "I'm nobody's dummy."

"That's a matter of opinion, honey," Dolly said archly. Running with long strides, she let David chase her to pick white daisy flowers for Miss Ida. Whey they had their arms full, they went into the cemetery, where graves grew like oblong bellies in the red clover.

Miss Ida Carlisle had died in 1953 at the Alcanthia County crazy farm to which she had been committed in 1939. Both Dolly and David were too young to have witnessed this event, but Miss Ida's life and deeds had become something of a gospel in Burnside, and hardly a day went by without some aspect of her teachings being mentioned. Miss Poindexter at St. Matthew's church school, for example, was especially fond of talking about how Miss Ida had been the matriarch of Burnside for more than fifty years, ordering the color lines between blacks, browns, and high-yallers like Miss Poindexter and herself. "She was almost like a Queen," Miss Poindexter would comment, with a slavish kind of medieval pride choking her voice.

Of a texture that had been nearly white, Miss Ida had established white as the highest virtue; the color black was considered the most cardinal of sins, with brown-skinned people like Tumsey Wilton occupying a kind of neutral middle ground between the two extremes. Yet, the blacks and browns of Burnside had paid Miss Ida a certain grudging respect, perhaps because her cheek and color had been high enough to justify her distaste for them. She had played the Virgin Mother in the Christmas pageant at St. Matthew's Baptist Church for fifty years in a row, until it had been discovered that she was hopelessly insane. David and Dolly had heard the story of her life told and retold a thousand times. Hers was a constant presence in the capitol at Richmond as well, where the legislators promulgated her silly theories of racial apartness with an energy that was surprising, despite the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling that the practice of "separate but equal" was unconstitutional. So that even while Miss Ida's body lay a-moulding in the Commonwealth Colored Cemetery, a large part of her peculiar truth went marching on.

As for the Commonwealth Colored Cemetery, it is a broad expanse of crosses, markers and tombstones slanting toward the point in the southwest foothills of Alcanthia County near which Lee's Creek begins its serpentine trek down through Burnside and on to the sea. As if to acknowledge the strange prominence Miss Ida had enjoyed while living, the Commonwealth has planted her here on a high hill overlooking the cemetery and the creek. The rest of the markers are almost pitiably small and inconspicuous in comparison to Miss Ida's. They fan away from Miss Ida's high grave in irregular rows of obeisance down the hillside to the creek named after Robert E. Lee, the gentleman general. It was his defeat in 1865 that had marked the beginning of Miss Ida's emancipation and of her own special kind of despotism. Tolerant of despots as always, the Commonwealth of Virginia had gratefully granted Miss Ida the hilltop and a much larger headstone than the other colored criminals; and it had also taken considerable care to misspell her name, as was their custom, since it had been assumed that visitors to the Commonwealth Cemetery would not be able to read any way.

"They spelled her name C-a-r-l-y-l-e," Dolly said. "They should have spelled it C-a-r-l-i-s-l-e, they sure are dumb. If anybody spelled my name wrong, I'd come back and hant them to death." Together she and David dropped white daisy flowers on Miss Ida's grave, shunning the black-eyed Susans.

As he stood there dropping daisy flowers on the dead woman's grave, David was filled with a variety of confusing emotions. He had heard enough about Miss Ida to know that Clair had been her spitting image—the same mixture of black and white seething inside a skin that had the sickly yellow cast of old hog guts—and he felt a sudden profound sense of his own worth-lessness. When he died, he knew he would never be buried on such a high and prominent hill as Miss Ida. He let his eyes trace the horny gray outline of Devil's Mountain, the eagle's nest so lofty over his head. Clair's grave was the highest of all, a thousand feet straight up in the air. The way Clair had died—if she was dead—also struck him as being part of some elevated high-yaller drama. Black niggers like him never died in any really kind of exciting way. Usually from snake bite. Or blood poisoning from stepping on a nail. Or from the colic, as Eloise threatened him when he ate too much.

But Miss Ida had died in the crazy home. And Clair had been stolen by an eagle. And the preacher's light-skinned wife, the preacher himself had set the house afire on her head. David felt his heart quicken at the idea of high-yaller death. There was something more exciting, more worthy, about it. Almost as though skin that color had to be destroyed in a certain dramatic way.

His hands were empty now; he looked around for more daisy flowers to decorate Miss Ida's grave. But the slanting expanse of gravestones made him feel morbid. Black people under all those mounds. He was almost overwhelmed by the cloying smell of clover. "I'm Robert Bartley," he blurted out to Dolly. The graves seemed a terrible threat, the cold import of those oblong mounds. He felt immensely weak; Robert Bartley was the strongest man he knew. He remembered all the times he had seen Robert with Eloise on the swing underneath the oak tree, how Robert had dominated and smothered Eloise with all his wonderful bulk. "I'm going to make believe I'm Robert Bartley," he said, more firmly now, because Dolly's silence made him afraid that she would disagree, that she would want to be Robert, instead of being Alba, her favorite character.

But Dolly smiled with pleasure. "All right. You be Robert Bartley. And I'll be Miss Ida."

He was very suspicious. "Why you want to be Miss Ida? I thought she didn't like black people."

"She didn't. But everybody likes Robert Bartley, he's so strong and good-looking."

Which was true. Robert stood like some kind of black giant over Burnside. Beautiful, black, laughing Robert Bartley. He had more children than anybody else in Burnside, thirteen children alone; that seemed to indicate that Robert was a man.

And so they began their fantasy.

David could see immediately that being pure black like Robert was a higher virtue than being merely half-white, like Clair or Miss Ida. Although he still shuddered at the idea of being led by the ghost of Miss Ida. For wasn't Miss Ida dead? And was this not a ghost that tugged at his hand and led him between the graves and through the red clover down to Lee's Creek?

"I am Robert Bartley," he said. "I am a black man. I really can't stand any black niggers except me."

"Me neither," Miss Ida said. "If I was still living, I wouldn't let no black woman have no white man's baby, like that Eloise."

"Me neither," David said. He wondered if Eloise had really wanted Clair. David frowned. She certainly hadn't wanted him; he'd heard what she'd told Viola. The heavy image of the late afternoon sun almost blinded him. If he really was Robert Bartley, he'd sure get a lot more attention from Eloise, he knew what she and Robert were doing right now down by the creek. He remembered how, on a winter's night, he had heard Eloise talking to Viola about how she had tried to get rid of him before he was born. He felt very bitter about that, and about not knowing who his father was. Eloise reminded him of some of those cows he had seen being mounted by anonymous bulls who were later led back to their own farms. Eloise reminded David of that, of a soft-eyed cow filled with the unowned and possibly unwanted seed, looking out a far window at the snow, saying, "I love Clair more than I love David." He felt a lump rise in his throat. "I almost forgot I was Robert," he said, forcing a brawny laugh. "My Mama didn't want me to be born." Saying it, he felt a pain like a knife slice through his heart.

Miss Ida laughed, too, with a false note in her voice. "Nobody ever wants black children," she said. "They just happen, like bumps on the face." At that moment, Miss Ida seemed stronger and wiser than Eloise and Viola combined. David felt protected, being with Miss Ida. The old woman would deliver him from all evil, like in the prayer. He thought, "Eloise is going to really run away this time and leave me here at Devil's Mountain. She's never coming back to get me. But I don't care. Miss Ida is here. Miss Ida will protect me."

But they had been standing over Miss Ida's grave. He felt a crazy kind of madness in the air, a special sweetness that marked the hot afternoon. "I am Robert Bartley," he thought. And he swelled his chest and sucked in the fragrance of clover and milkweed in bloom. He felt uncomfortable and sticky in the thin summer clothes. Miss Ida led him down the hillside, carefully skirting the mounds that were all grown over with weeds and the red clover. The graves of black people. Miss Ida plucked a clover blossom and stuck it in her hair.

He heard the small, hurried rustling of little things scurrying through the cemetery. Far away, a cow lowed. The shrill call of birds around him seemed like a breathless cry in a wild dream. He remembered the dream in which he had destroyed the hurricane bird. Had that been a foretelling of the eagle?

He heard the far-off sound of a cowbell and the whisper of the creek that was, he knew, at the foot of the slanting hillside below and beneath him, but which seemed to go gliding over his head. There was the stirring of life around his knees—not so much sound or sight as it was a sensation—and he thought about snakes as a wild, cloying odor tickled his nostrils. They were passing honeysuckle, the serpent's cloister; and Miss Ida instinctively lifted her skirts, because snakes were sometimes known to run up the long dresses of old women, all those petticoats underneath. He remembered how Eloise had stomped the snake to death, after sending him out to look for the cat she knew was already dead. "I am Robert Bartley," he said, to protect himself from evil. Almost ominously, Miss Ida said into his ear, "We're nearly there. The creek's beyond those bushes yonder. Can't you hear the water?"

Yes, he could hear the lazy gurgle of water dappling over pebbles. Lee's Creek. "It was here that me and Eloise drowned the cat," he thought, for he was still Robert Bartley. He shuddered with horror. Should he tell Miss Ida about his other dream, the one in which he had been a cat? And how the real Robert and Eloise had chased him and killed him with a knife?

He thought about the kitten he had killed. "I threw the black kitten into the suckhole," he confessed. "Because it had blue eyes, that's why I did it. And because it was black."

"Everybody drowns cats," Miss Ida said. "That's all they're good for, is drowning. Especially when they're black," she said, smacking her lips at the delicious idea.

David laughed uncomfortably. "I just can't stand black niggers, except me," he said. "Black cats neither."

"You and me both," Miss Ida agreed. "Although I stand you, Robert Bartley, because you're pretty."

"Everybody stands me. I am pretty." I am truly Robert Hartley, he thought swelling his chest out. I will be Robert from now on.

They pushed their way through the heavy bushes and stood at the creek's side, where it sang a smooth, gliding song over its cache of slime and rocks and pebbles. The slate-green water undulated underneath a red-orange haze where the sun hung reflected in its surface. He looked for a snake, and saw none. Sometimes you could see them waiting for prey like long, lazy gray poles, although he didn't know whether snakes could bite you in the water or not, some people said they could.

The sun dropped another notch behind the woods; its reflection swam away from them briefly downstream and then glimmered in a kind of oily and stabilized radiance, shredding the water through its round red carcass. The woods beyond the creek shimmered between daylight and darkness—-night was coming on - imbued now with a haze that was a mixture of dark pink and pale blue.

He felt a slight chill pass through his body, a feeling like the water sieved by the sun. The creek, the graveyard, and the mountain—each had something to do with death. He peered into the water, looking for snakes. Miss Ida sighed at his elbow. "1 hear ghostly voices," she said, and she began to hum under her breath.

He heard only the abrasive creek as it wore and rounded the insensate stones. "I am a pebble in the creek,' he thought. It would be fun to be caressed and smoothed that way by water. No more pain, no sorrow. He looked back at the imposing column of Devil's Mountain, and the smaller elevation beyond it where Miss Ida's grave dominated the exact peak of the hill.

It seemed important that he was here on the edge of the Creek with the ghost of Miss Ida. But what did it mean? His mind raced back to Eloise's story about seeing the white man in the window of the preacher's cellar when she had been on her way to arrange to marry Henry Hunter. Eloise had said that was a ghost white man who had looked at her, grinning. Henry Hunter had died later.

Life was undeniably a menace. He had watched a fat-chested robin eat a worm one day. Before the robin could fly away, a gray moccasin had come along and eaten him. So life was like that—a series of ever-increasing mouths to swallow you down, like receding concentric circles created by pebbles tossed into the creek. The worm inside the bird, the bird inside the snake, the snake inside of Eloise. . . . Yes, that had been a kind of devouring, too, the way Eloise had mashed the snake to death and then thrown it into the gutter behind the house.

The gutter. He shuddered. The gutter was the grave. The last and largest mouth of all, high on a hill of red clover, the mountain looming behind, the creek depressed in front, the sun going to set midway between the mountain and the creek. He looked away.

"Truthfully, I will remain Robert Bartley," he thought. A pebble. And Jesus the rippling creek. Divine undulations. He reveled in an exotic euphoria that stroked his senses like feathers. In his mind's eye, he saw himself being lifted to the top of the mountain in the warm, strong arms of a white woman.

Jesus is the light, He leadeth me,

Jesus is the wind, He calms the sea

Of Life, and brings me joy eternally,

For I am blind and cannot see.

It was one of the hymns from St. Matthew's Baptist Church that he sang inside his head as the ghost of Miss Ida came up suddenly and kissed him with her cold lips.

He did not resist, although he jumped in surprise. He heard somebody scream, and he wondered if he had screamed.

But Miss Ida jerked away, and he knew that the scream had come from downriver, around the bend in the creek.

He heard Eloise screaming at the top of her voice. "Oh my God! Clair's dead! They just this minute killed her! I can feel it! Let me up, Robert Bartley! I want to go to my child! She just this minute died!"

He grinned nervously at Miss Ida, who craned her neck out over the creek as though to see. He looked up at Devil's Mountain, not knowing what he expected to see. Blood running over the edge of the tall stone nest, maybe.

But the tall peak stood clean and bathed in red sunlight. He could not see Clair. He could not see her blood. He saw nothing, only the lean gray column standing erect against a baleful sky.

"Robert, let me up!"

"You hold her there, Robert!" It was Viola's voice. "There ain't a blessed thing she can do. She's got to think about the living now."

He turned his eyes to the creek. And saw the ghostly outline of a snake treading water with subtle ripples of its long gray body against the current. Just lying there. Waiting. His scalp prickled. He hadn't seen the snake come up. It had snuck up just like that.

From beyond the bushes, Eloise's voice came to him in a high, rich lament. A long, drawn out Oooooooooooooooooooo! like that, like a shrill wind reaming the inside of hollow tunnels. "Clair's dead," he whispered, so softly that he wondered if Miss Ida heard him. For a sickening moment, he felt a light, joyous lilt stagger through his heart. Then he felt ashamed.

"Did you know Clair's father was a white man? A Jew," Miss Ida said, with great distaste. So she had heard, then. She spoke with a curl in her lip, as though the death of a white Jew man's child was really no loss at all.

"Sure, I know." His feeling of shame deepened. Miss Ida's contempt seemed to imply something shameful about Eloise. "I even knew him, I remember him from New Jersey. His name is Mr. Eisenberg, he's a real nice man." He did not remember whether Eisenberg was nice at all or not—was it possible for a j-e-w to be nice? But he wanted Miss Ida to untwist her lip. He would kiss her again to uncurl her lip, no matter how cold her mouth was, if that's what it took. That twist in her lip was about his mother.

"Robert, please!" She was saying something more, but it was cut off suddenly, as though a hand smothered Eloise. Or a mouth.

Viola bellowed, "There're other things we ought to be concentrating on now! I'm going to take charge of this situation, Eloise! I refuse to let you destroy it!"

"Please, Robert! Have mercy!" Her voice came to him as though carried on the clear surface of the creek.

"Ride her, boy!" It was Tumsey Wilton's voice, ending in a laugh. That hand smothered again. Tumsey's laugh, and Eloise when she tried to speak.

He looked and saw that a second snake had come upstream and joined the first. They vibrated side by side in the creek's quiet glissade, underneath the lavender surface. He felt they were looking at him.

A sour taste filled his mouth. The reflection of his body fell across the snakes—the snakes were longer than his reflection was tall—and made a cross there in the slate green water with the orchid flecks on top. He listened for Eloise. He heard nothing. He kept his eyes glued to the snakes. He wondered if Miss Ida saw them. Two snakes side by side. Undulating. Quiet.

"He's kissing her," Miss Ida said into his ear. He thought at first she was talking about the snake, that one snake was kissing the other. But when she grabbed his hand in a steel grip, he realized that she was talking about Robert and Eloise.

"I'm Miss Ida," she said. "And you're a great big black nigger, you're Robert Bartley. . . ." He thought it was odd that Robert Bartley could be down the creek with his mother and here with Miss Ida at the same time. She pinned both arms behind him. Bending him backward over the creek, she kissed him on the mouth. Her lips were ghost cold now.

When she allowed him, he twisted his head away. "Please don't push me into the creek," he said.

"Don't be afraid. Haven't you ever kissed a white woman before?"

She frightened him, the wild glitter in her red eyes—for she was looking beyond him into the setting sun. The clover blossom was nearly purple in her hair. She held him bent backward over the creek, almost breaking his spine. "I am Miss Ida. I am white," she said.

She was the ghost of Miss Ida, his mind told him, automatically correcting her error. And she was only light-skinned, not white at all. "Please don't push me in the creek," he pleaded. Behind him lay death. It seemed impossible that he would die this way. He had thought that a more surprising end awaited him, something more exciting than snake bite or drowning in Lee's Creek. Or dying from a broken back.

He thought about throwing himself into the water where it ran now in the color of grapes, and dragging Miss Ida with him. Maybe the snakes wouldn't bite. People said that snakes couldn't bite in water. But he was afraid to take that chance. "Please don't push me in the water," he whined.

Miss Ida kissed him again. Her lips felt cold and slimy on his mouth, his throat. He struggled to break away from her, but he was too weak to resist the weight of her as she dragged him to the grass now, still holding his hands behind his back in a tight grip. When she had him sprawling, she lay on top of him and took quick little kisses from his lips, like sucking up spurts of water from a drinking fountain. "You're a great big black nigger . . ." she said in between, "and I am Miss Ida . . . I am white. . . ."

Already the grass was steaming with dew. Over them, he saw a blue-purple haze now, shot through by the dark red eye of the sun. He thought that he would die from the weight of Miss Ida moving like a sharp-crested mountain along his belly and thighs. DollyDavidDollyDavid! Viola and Eloise calling them. So, they had finished dabbing their feet in the creek. But something in the women's voices, some jagged way that they encountered the rising wind, told him that Viola and Eloise were drunk on Champale.

I am Robert Bartley, he thought—it seemed his only escape from her violation of him—I am Robert Bartley and she is my mother Eloise with Robert on the swing under the oak tree and in those bushes down by the creek. He clenched his teeth and squirmed closer into her sharp, oppressive warmth. "Baby," he said, as Robert sometimes did.

Then, in a single motion, he arched his back and humped his belly and twisted at the same time until Miss Ida lay beneath him. She breathed heavily, her eyes drawn tightly together, mouth hanging wide open. Welcoming. Like a barn door, he thought. He felt a terrible thudding in his head. His eyes ran water. "Baby baby baby," he murmured, ready to smother her.

The next thing he knew, she was standing over him, brushing the dust from her dress in an arch manner while she smirked down on him. He had never completed the kiss.

"My my my,' she said, kneeling to pull up her anklets. "Mama told me to be careful of you, David Hunter. Imagine, trying to cut my cake, an old white woman like me. I most certainly will tell your mother as soon as we get home. You know what they do to colored boys in Virginia that mess with old white women the way you messed with me."

"Don't tell," he whispered, humiliated, almost in tears. ˆ am Robert Bartley, he thought. He felt the tears pause at the edge of his eyes. Robert Bartley is big and brave and strong, he thought. Robert Bartley does not cry. Robert Bartley is mean and black.

Bounding up, he laughed in a round, virile way, showing white teeth. He saw that the snakes had gone from the creek. If they had ever been there at all. Unaccountably, he was very grateful. He laughed gleefully because he had escaped the fate of Clair and of the kitten. And of Miss Ida, too, sleeping yonder on the hill.

"Girl, you sure do lead a man on!" he said, grabbing her arm. When she turned on him with that slow, tantalizing smile at the corners of her lips, he said, in Robert Bartley's booming voice, "Let's go. You hear them calling us?"

They listened. Eloise and Viola had started calling them again in a strident chorus that echoed over their heads like the cracking of a whip. DollyDavidDollyDavid! Something like that.

Defiantly, she flounced her dress out like wings around her; now the air seemed diffused with gray and purple dust. "I am Miss Ida, I am a white woman," she said. "'You're Sambo and you're black. I usually never talk to black boys, except to Robert Bartley. But I'll do you the favor today, Sambo."

So, she had demoted him, like Miss Poindexter sometimes did with dumb children. He was immediately tired of playing her game. He might not be Robert Bartley, but he certainly wasn't Little Black Sambo, either. "I am David Hunter," he said, in his voice. "And I'm going back before Mama whips me." Besides, it was getting dark very fast now, and he didn't want to go through the graveyard after dark.

"If you run away from me," she warned, "I'll tell your mother that you tried to cut my cake. You know what she'd do to you if I told her that, don't you? She'd skin you alive, that's what she'd do."

At that moment, her face seemed almost blue-black where she hovered over him. He saw the last tatters of daylight die there in her face, in the shadows on each side of her nose and the hollow of her neck. Night fell on them almost noisily and the air was filled with the sudden strident shrill of cicadas, like a conversation among the dead. The creek was almost quiet, silenced by the specters of dark gray trees and the finger of tumbling twilight across its purple mouth. DollyDavidDollyDavid! It seemed that Viola and Eloise were calling them at regular intervals now, the silence in between extending about the length of time it took to drink a bottle of Champale.

David hated Dolly for calling him black. Black as she was, pretending to be somebody white. Calling him Sambo. But he stayed with her as they ran up the hill through the dark cemetery —he was terrified of stepping on a grave and sinking into it forever—and past Devil's Mountain, where he found himself thinking, "Goodbye Clair,' as though she had gone visiting the house of a friend and was staying overnight, instead of her bones remaining there forever in the high roost.

Robert Bartley, Tumsey Wilton, Viola and Eloise huddled around the car as though the world had been destroyed by the bombardment of night, and only they and the black convertible had survived. Robert had turned the car lights on, and the twin beams seemed to be almost panting through the dark where the four people sprawled between them. Champale bottles lay all around.

David wondered if Eloise would whip him for not coming when she had first called. And with the return of old fears, he felt Robert Bartley depart from him like a black shadow. "I am David, I am seven years old," he said.

"I am Miss Ida, I am ten years old," Dolly said. She crooked her arms defiantly and placed her hands on her two hips as she walked up to the car.

"Where you been, girl?" Viola demanded. "Didn't you hear me calling you? Why didn't you come when I called you?"

But Dolly was lost inside her reverie. "I am Miss Ida," she said. "I am a white woman. ... I am. ..."

Viola cut her off with a sharp slap across the face. "I'll Miss Ida you," Viola said. "You black wench you!"

Dolly burst into tears. David was delighted. "She tried to throw me in the creek," he said.

Robert Bartley laughed and got up from the ground where he had been sprawling with Tumsey and Eloise. "I think these kids might be drunk, too," he said, hitching up his jeans. "You want another Champale, Eloise, honey?"

"Don't mind if I do," Eloise said, and she smothered a hiccup. It was obvious that she was drunker than the rest and tense with a special excitement.

"David, come here, honey. I'm not going to hurt you," she said, stretching out her arms to him where she lay on the ground. "Although you should have come when I called. My throat got dry calling you, that's why I had to drink Champale." Her eyes were wide and glassy. She looked a mess. Even her wig was messed up. Her lipstick was smeared all over her face and half on Robert's.

Uncertainly, David stumbled to her, and she hugged him in the light from the car. When she mashed him against her, he smelt the odor of sardines and Champale fouling her breath as she kissed him all over his face. "David, honey, the most marvelous thing has happened! We're going to New Jersey! You and me, and Viola and Dolly together! We're going there to stay, David! Isn't that marvelous?"

He could see Robert Bartley's great wad of money stuffed down inside her bosom. "New Jersey?" He knew how she had got that money; he could smell it. And he was old enough to know that everything that smelled like sardines didn't have to be sardines.

But he could not deny the excitement that her news brought him, regardless of where she got the money. "New Jersey?" he was almost afraid to believe her; as drunk as she was, it might have been some kind of cruel joke she was playing.

And it was left for Dolly and Viola to convince him. Dolly stopped crying at once, and Viola showed off her part of the booty that she and Eloise had wormed out of Robert and Tumsey. "New Jersey here I come," Viola announced, patting in the general area of her chocolate cake. "Although I think I might try New York first, Dolly and me. I understand there's more action in New York, and more opportunity for Negroes in politics. Look at Adam Clayton Powell."

Eloise was astonished. "Adam Clayton who? Viola, I thought you were coming to New Jersey with me. I thought we were friends again. You never mentioned New York before."

"I just this minute got the idea," Viola said, waving her hand. "But don't you worry, honey. If things don't work out in New York, I'll see you over in Jersey."

Robert and Tumsey had gotten very drunk. "We're going to miss you girls," Tumsey said. "We certainly will," Robert said. And they nodded to each other.

Eloise staggered over to Viola and kissed her. "I'm sure glad you took charge back there, honey. I guess I lost my head for a while." She looked everywhere around, except at Devil's Mountain. She seemed very pleased and, from time to time, she fingered the money down in her dress.

"You were just temporarily insane," Viola said. It was clear that she had assumed a new authority in everybody's eyes. "But I'm sure a good time was had by all."

Tumsey and Robert agreed. "Yeah, we've never given no women as much money as we gave you all," they said. This time they nodded at Eloise and Viola.

"It's for a worthy cause," Viola said, and she herded them all into the car and admonished Robert on his driving until they reached the mule they had left tied on the highway this side of Dillwyn. "Tumsey, you get out and ride the mule down to Eloise's," Viola instructed.

But Tumsey was reluctant to leave Robert. "You know we're friends. We do everything together. We could tie the mule to the rear bumper. Robert wouldn't drive that fast."

"It'd be the first time," Viola said. "Furthermore, it wouldn't be human, treating a mule like that. You just go along and ride him. I'll look after Robert, somebody sure Lord ought to."

"I'm so glad you took charge!" Eloise said, clapping her hands.

Viola had ordered Dolly and David to go to sleep; and Dolly had complied almost at once. But David was too excited to sleep. He rode wide awake until they reached the farm. The moon had not yet risen, and Eloise went and got two lighted lanterns so that Robert could save his battery. They settled down in the yard to wait for Tumsey on the mule.

Eloise and Robert fell asleep. Although David was very tired, he could not sleep. Viola and Dolly were running their mouths about the trip to New Jersey; and he was glad when Viola cocked her ear a little while later and said, in the middle of something else she was saying about Jersey, "Here come that Tumsey Wilton, I hear his mule crunching on the gravel." She woke Robert up. "Here come Tumsey," she said. "But I'm going to take him down to my place for a while, ain't no sense in you waiting for him with the car, Robert." She took Dolly by the hand, and went up the road to meet Tumsey.

Now it was Robert's turn to wake up Eloise. "I guess I'll be on my way," Robert said. "Good night, Eloise, David." He cupped Eloise's chin, and peered into her eyes before he got into his car. "You all right now?" he said. "No more tears?"

"No more tears," Eloise said.

She started crying as soon as Robert drove away. Deep, agonizing sobs that ripped from her throat like somebody with a summer cold. She tore the money from her dress and threw it on the ground and stomped it. Then she ran into the house and David heard her ladling water rapidly into the wash pan.

When she came back, he saw that her face was clean; she had changed her dress and taken off the wig. Her own hair shone with a soft black sheen in the lantern light.

She picked the money up and gave it to David. "You go to bed," she said. "And put this money in the top dresser drawer. I guess I might as well spend it, I earned it sure enough." She started crying even before he could get inside the house.

He undressed slowly in the dark room. He knew that Eloise was crying for Clair. "I wish Viola would come back," he thought. He certainly did like Viola, the way she handled things. He bet she'd never throw any money on the ground and stomp it. Or sit out there on the swing, crying in the dark.

He found himself thinking about all that had happened during the day. It seemed impossible to him that next year had not already come, the day had seemed that long. Clair had been here this morning. She would never be here again.

He crawled between the cool sheets. They smelled of pee where Clair had done the Number One. He heard—or rather, sensed—a quiet rustling at the window, and he sat up quickly in bed just as the full moon exploded like a firecracker through the curtains. He blinked and shook his head, that's how bright the moon was. He could hear Eloise crying softly and rocking on the swing. He pulled the sheets up over his head and closed his eyes.

But he could not sleep. He felt a gnawing guilt like the teeth of weasels in his belly. It had been there all day, since the dreadful afternoon—he pushed the eagle's whirring wings to the back of his brain—but it only now crept out to haunt him.

He felt lost and utterly alone. Clair was gone. Only her smell remained, that acrid ripe odor of pee intoxicating him underneath the sheets. He breathed deeply, swelling his chest and filling his lungs with this remnant of Clair, as though he could revive her thin body here in the bed beside him by mixing her stale smell with his own breath. He half expected to find her there. Reaching out, he encountered only himself, his knees where they were doubled up over the spot where she should have lain. "Clair?" His own voice spoke to him inside his head. "Clair, I'm sorry you're gone,' he said. And he explained to her inside his head how he had been at Devil's Mountain and at the creek with the ghost of Miss Ida. He almost laughed when he realized that Clair didn't know what a ghost was yet. She was too little. . . . And too dead.

Suddenly, he left very frightened. He jumped up and ran outdoors in his underwear, almost diving into Eloise's arms on the swing.

"David, what is the matter with you?" she cried. He had caught her half in the middle of a sob. But when he could say nothing, only lie in her arms trembling, she reached out and wrapped her strong arms around him, as though she understood even without his saying. She lowered her head and wiped the tears from both eyes onto his cheeks, that kind of kiss; and her breasts hardened with determination under his head as he squirmed and scrambled against her.

"I know, I know," she crooned, hugging him. "Viola was right after all, as much as I may have hated doing that kind of thing. But I've got to look after you, David. You're all I've got left now."

For some reason, he still was not comforted. Was it because he mistrusted her strength? Despite those steel tendons she had wrapped around him, the heat from her nostrils as her breasts collapsed ever so slightly and the fiery air came pouring out on his forehead?

No, Viola would protect him. She had already promised to do so. He required something different from Eloise, something to do with the perfect way his head fit between her breasts, his arms twining just so around her waist. He felt an incredible hunger gnawing at his whole body; with the weight of his head, he forced her backward on the swing until she was lying prone and he was secure on top of her. "Ah. . . . David . . ." she said, and she reached up and almost squeezed the life out of him. "I love you, baby. My darling David, Mama loves you very much."

So complete was his feeling of satisfaction that he burst into tears. "I saw Miss Ida's ghost today," he said. It was of course a lie—Dolly had been just pretending to be Miss Ida. But there had been something so real and life-like about the scene at the creek. And something which needed explaining that nagged at his mind.

He expected Eloise to disbelieve him. "Miss Ida's ghost?" He could tell from the way her voice sounded that she was frowning and nodding at the same time. "I saw a ghost once," she said. "It was a white man with a knife and fork in his hand. He was looking at me from the preacher's cellar window. . . ." He felt her tense, and then she smacked one hand to her forehead, hard enough to knock a mule out. "I didn't see no such thing!" she cried. "That was just a lie I made up to tell Henry Hunter! I will not keep on lying about it! I didn't really want to marry Henry, and knowing how superstitious he was, I made up that lie about the ghost. He believed it too, he believed it was a sign we shouldn't get married." She sat up and transferred David to the swing beside her.

He did not understand. "You didn't see that white man ghost, Mama?" He remembered clearly hearing her tell that story to Viola at least a hundred times.

Eloise shook her head. "It was just a lie," she said. "Now is the time for truth, it seems to me. I never saw a ghost in my life, David, and that's the gospel truth. I just didn't want to marry Henry Hunter . . . there was something weak about him that I couldn't stand. I told him that story to justify not going to the preacher's to get the license. After that, he used to bring up marrying me sometimes. But I'd always remind him of that hant, and tell him it was a sign we shouldn't get married. And then he got himself killed, fighting over that wine in New Jersey. I told that story about the white hant so many times that I came to believe it myself. The mind is sure a funny thing! But I didn't see no white hant in the preacher's window, and that's the gospel truth."

David felt a great sense of loss. He had come to believe in the white hant, the way Eloise's voice got deep and scary whenever she told about it. Still, he had seen Miss Ida's ghost at the creek. Dolly played Miss Ida's part, and Miss Ida was dead. Didn't that mean that Dolly had been Miss Ida's ghost?

But what did it all really mean? He could not forget that Henry Hunter had died after Eloise had seen—had said she had seen—the white hant. Yes, he had seen Miss Ida in the same way. The hant that wasn't there. Who would die? What did it mean? Nuzzled against Eloise, he felt secure, and terribly brave, the fact that he could think about death and not get scared.

Thinking about Henry Hunter, it occurred to him then that Eloise did know who his father was. His heart thundered, and he felt her own heart give a mighty lurch as though she read the thought in his mind. And the portion of her body that was glued to his seemed to burn with a special warmth that spoke to him through the skin. Ask me now who your daddy was and I'll tell you the truth. That's what it seemed to say. ''Mama, who was my father?" he said. He held his breath.

It was apparent that she had been holding her own breath, for now she let it out in a long sigh. "The preacher," she said, without more hesitation. "Reverend Winston Cobb was your Daddy, you might as well know it now as later. After what happened today, this is certainly a time for the complete truth." She drew him to her, and he felt a terrible trembling in her body that matched his own. "Oh, I know I was always saying I didn't know who your Daddy was. But I just said that to protect you, David. I thought it might hurt you to know. And I wanted to protect the preacher too, I guess. His reputation, I mean. But he was a wild man, Mr. Cobb was. It ... it was just one of those things that happen, I guess. Neither one of us planned for it to happen that way. It just did. One day we bumped into each other walking on the road. It was cold, there was a terrible lot of snow on the ground. We went down there in his cellar through the back door . . . maybe that's why I made up that story later about seeing the white hant in his cellar window." She twisted her mouth in distaste. "I remember that his wife called us. Winston, is that you? she said. But she was an invalid, you may remember. That means she couldn't move. And we just let her lay there and call. That's how you were born, David. Just like I'm telling you. It's nothing to be proud of, but it's the truth. That is what's important right now. The truth. I might not be here tomorrow. You might not be either. Death just seems to come swooping down all of a sudden nowadays. It'd be a pity for you to die without knowing who your Daddy was, for me to die without telling you. I know I've made up jokes and lies about it. I even convinced myself that I didn't know who your Daddy was either. But that was to ease my own shame. I made up that story about the white hant because I didn't want Henry and me to be married by Reverend Cobb while I was carrying his baby at the same time." She nodded, paused. "You're the Reverend Winston Cobb's son," she said, almost smacking her lips over his title and his name as though its grandness would somehow ease the sordid truth.

"That preacher ... he killed his wife," David said.

"He burned the house down on her." She said it brutally, not sparing him at all. "It was a bad thing he did, a terrible thing. He shouldn't have done it. But Winston Cobb was that kind of man. He had a lot of feeling, David. And he couldn't stand much. I'm telling you all this so you'll remember who your Daddy was, whenever you find that feeling is taking over your senses."

So, the preacher was his father. He felt numb, finding out after all this time. But he could not help feel a warm little spasm of joyous pride shoot through his chest. The preacher. The most powerful and important black man in all Burnside—until he killed his high-yaller wife. That meant something. And they said the sheriff was still looking for Reverend Cobb. That meant something, too. He was sorry that school wasn't open so that he could brag about it there.

"Will the sheriff ever catch Reverend Cobb, Mama?"

"They'll catch him. I hope they do catch him. He's got a lot to answer for. There're certain things a man shouldn't be allowed to get away with, no matter how much feeling he had."

David yawned. He was very tired now, the day had been so long and so exciting. He wished that Clair was here, so that he could brag about who his father was—a real preacher, not some old Jew.

And Dolly. He would tell Dolly tomorrow. He felt himself dropping off to sleep, with Eloise's voice a strong and insistent drone in his ears.

". . . I'm certainly glad I told you the truth, my soul is easy now. And I've done enough crying, I cried my eyes out for Henry, and the preacher, and Clair. Sometimes I think I might have loved Clair more than I did you. But that's natural in a mother, to love the weakest the most. You feel kind of guilty that you mothered something not quite strong. But I always had a funny feeling around Clair, you understand? Something about her color just wasn't right. Everybody was jealous of her color. I was myself, did you know that? Other times, I felt like she was a white stranger in the house, some white woman's child I was just minding for a while. Then I'd start feeling guilty—after all, she was my child—and I'd try to make up for it by loving her all the more. But I never loved you any less, David. You believe that?"

He nodded, although much of what she said did not make sense to him. But he was at peace with his head on her breast. Her arms encircled him like a sweaty steal band. He did not respond further to her question—his eyes seemed weighted down with lead—and Eloise seemed neither to notice nor to care. She went on talking.

"Any way, I'm not going to cry any more. I made my bed, and now I'm going to sleep in it. Aren't you glad we're going to Jersey, honey? To get away from all this confusion? You be sure and thank Mr. Bartley for what he did to help us, he loaned me a hundred-and-fifty dollars so we could go and get ourselves established. David? You sleep, honey? My pretty baby, Mama'll put you to bed now. . . . We'll sleep together, just the two of us, it certainly is a pity about Clair. . . ."

They left Burnside before the end of the week. With the coming of daylight, David decided not to tell Dolly about Reverend Cobb being his father. In daylight, the dark knowledge he had gained last night seemed somehow shameful. Instead of bragging, he threw himself into the excitement of packing to leave Burnside.

Robert Bartley took them to wait for the Greyhound on the highway. Viola and Dolly and Eloise cried. But David waited for the bus in silence. Nor did he thank Robert Bartley. He was thinking about Clair's talking Mama doll. Just that day, he had dug a grave behind the house and buried the doll there. Before he shoved the dirt into her face, he had pulled the string in her neck. It seemed the end of a long and oppressive dream. Mama I love you the very best of all Mama I love you the very bestofallMamalloveyou. ... He had kicked dirt into her face and patted it solid with his foot.