and calmly and irrevocably declines, because suddenly Louvinia was standing over us, shaking us awake. She didn't even scold us. She followed us up stairs and stood in the door to the bedroom and she didn't even light the lamp; she couldn't have told whether or not we had undressed even if she had been paying enough attention to suspect that we had not. She may have been listening as Ringo and I were, to what we thought we heard, though I knew better, just as I knew that we had slept on the stairs for some time; I was telling myself, 'They have already carried it out, they are in the orchard now, digging.' Because there is that point at which credulity declines; somewhere between waking and sleeping I believed I saw or I dreamed that I did see the lantern in the orchard, under the apple trees. But I don't know whether I saw it or not, because then it was morning and it was raining and Father was gone.
he must have ridden off in the rain, which was still falling at breakfast and then at dinnertime too, so that it looked as if we wouldn't have to leave the house at all, until at last Granny put the sewing away and said, 'Very well. Get the cook book, Marengo.' Ringo got the cook book from the kitchen and he and I lay on our stomachs on the floor while Granny opened the book. 'What shall we read about today?' she said.
'Read about cake,' I said.
'Very well. What kind of cake?' Only she didn't need to say that because Ringo was already answering that before she spoke:
'Cokynut cake, Granny.' He said coconut cake every time because we never had been able to decide whether Ringo had ever tasted coconut cake or not. We had had some that Christmas before it started and Ringo had tried to remember whether they had had any of it in the kitchen or not, but he couldn't remember. Now and then I used to try to help him decide, get him to tell me how it tasted and what it looked like and sometimes he would almost decide to risk it before he would change his mind. Because he said that he would rather
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just maybe have tasted coconut cake without remembering it than to know for certain he had not; that if he were to describe the wrong kind of cake, he would never taste coconut cake as long as he lived.
'I reckon a little more won't hurt us,' Granny said.
The rain stopped in the middle of the afternoon; the sun was shining when I stepped out onto the back gallery, with Ringo already saying, 'Where we going?' behind me and still saying it after we passed the smokehouse where I could see the stable and the cabins: 'Where we going now?' Before we reached the stable Joby and Loosh came into sight beyond the pasture fence, bringing the mules up from the new pen. 'What we ghy do now?' Ringo said.
'Watch him,' I said.
'Watch him? Watch who?' I looked at Ringo. He was staring at me, his eyeballs white and quiet like last night. 'You talking about Loosh. Who tole us to watch him?'
'Nobody. I just know.'
'Bayard, did you dream hit?'
'Yes. Last night. It was Father and Louvinia. Father said to watch Loosh, because he knows.'
'Knows?' Ringo said. 'Knows what?' But he didn't need to ask that either; in the next breath he answered it himself, staring at me with his round quiet eyes, blinking a little: 'Yestiddy. Vicksburg. When he knocked it over. He knowed it then, already. Like when he said Marse John wasn't at no Tennessee and sho enough Marse John wasn't. Go on; what else did the dream tole you?'
'That's all. To watch him. That he would know before we did. Father said that Louvinia would have to watch him too, that even if he was her son, she would have to be white a little while longer. Because if we watched him, we could tell by what he did when it was getting ready to happen.'
'When what was getting ready to happen?'
'1 don't know.' Ringo breathed deep, once.
'Then hit's so,' he said. 'If somebody tole you, hit could be a lie. But if you dremp hit, hit can't be a lie
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case ain't nobody there to tole hit to you. So we got to watch him.'
We followed them when they put the mules to the wagon and went down beyond the pasture to where they had been cutting wood. We watched them for two days, hidden. We realised then what a close watch Louvinia had kept on us all the time. Sometimes while we were hidden watching Loosh and Joby load the wagon, we would hear her yelling at us, and we would have to sneak away and then run to let Louvinia find us coming from the other direction. Sometimes she would even meet us before we had time to circle, and Ringo hiding behind me then while she scolded at us: 'What devilment yawl into now? Yawl up to something. What is it?' But we didn't tell her, and we would follow her back to the kitchen while she scolded at us over her shoulder, and when she was inside the house we would move quietly until we were out of sight again, and then run back to hide and watch Loosh.
So we were outside of his and Philadelphy's cabin that night when he came out. We followed him down to the new pen and heard him catch the mule and ride away. We ran, but when we reached the road, too, we could only hear the mule loping, dying away. But we had come a good piece, because even Louvinia calling us sounded faint and small. We looked up the road in the starlight, after the mule. 'That's where Corinth is,' I said.
He didn't get back until after dark the next day. We stayed close to the house and watched the road by turns, to get Louvinia calmed down in case it would be late before he got back. It was late; she had followed us up to bed and we had slipped out again; we were just passing Joby's cabin when the door opened and Loosh kind of surged up out of the darkness right beside us. He was almost close enough for me to have touched him and he did not see us at all; all of a sudden he was just kind of hanging there against the lighted doorway like he had been cut out of tin in the act of running and was inside the cabin and the door shut black again almost before we knew what we had seen. And when we looked in the window he was standing in front of the
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