up out of the grave you all dug for him. One month later it floated up. The Butlers, somebody, put his body in the cave. Wolves didn’t drag the white man to the front of the cave and prop him on a rock. That was your father you found. You’ve been carrying your father’s bones—all this time.”
“Papa?” she whispered.
“Yes. And, Pilate, you have to bury him. He wants you to bury him. Back where he belongs. On Solomon’s Leap.”
“Papa?” she asked again.
Milkman did not speak; he watched her long fingers travel up her dress, to rest like the wing of a starling on her face. “I’ve been carryin Papa?” Pilate moved toward Milkman, stopped and looked at him for a while. Then her eyes turned to a rickety wooden table that stood against the stone wall of the cellar. It was in a part of the room so dark he had not even seen it. She walked over to the table and lifted from it a green-and-white shoe box, its cover held down with a rubber band. “Joyce,” it said on the box. “Thank heaven for little Joyce heels.”
“If I bury Papa, I guess I ought to bury this too—somewhere.” She looked back at Milkman.
“No,” he said. “No. Give it here.”
When he went home that evening, he walked into the house on Not Doctor Street with almost none of the things he’d taken with him. But he returned with a box of Hagar’s hair.
She wouldn’t set foot on an airplane, so he drove. She seemed happy now. Her lips mobile again, she sat next to him in Macon’s Buick, a mink stole Reba had won wrapped around her shoulders over her old black dress. The knit cap was pulled down on her forehead and her shoes still had no laces. Every now and then she glanced at the back seat to check on the sack. Peace circled her.
Milkman felt it too. His return to Not Doctor Street was not the triumph he’d hoped it would be, but there was relief in his mother’s crooked smile. And Lena, though unforgiving as ever, was civil to him, since Corinthians had moved to a small house in Southside, which she shared with Porter. The Seven Days, Milkman guessed, would be looking for a new recruit, as they had to when Robert Smith jumped off the roof of Mercy. But there were long rambling talks with his father, who could not hear it enough—the “boys” who remembered him in Danville; his mother’s running off with his father; the story about his father and his grandfather. He wasn’t a bit interested in the flying part, but he liked the story and the fact that places were named for his people. Milkman softened his description of Circe, saying simply that she was alive, and taking care of the dogs.
“I ought maybe to take me a trip down there,” said Macon.
“Virginia?” Milkman asked him.
“Danville. I ought to go by and see some of those boys before these legs stop moving. Let Freddie pick up the rents, maybe.”
It was nice. No reconciliation took place between Pilate and Macon (although he seemed pleased to know that they were going to bury their father in Virginia), and relations between Ruth and Macon were the same and would always be. Just as the consequences of Milkman’s own stupidity would remain, and regret would always outweigh the things he was proud of having done. Hagar was dead and he had not loved her one bit. And Guitar was … somewhere.
In Shalimar there was general merriment at his quick return, and Pilate blended into the population like a stick of butter in a churn. They stayed with Omar’s family, and on the second and last evening, Milkman and Pilate walked up the road to the path that led to Solomon’s Leap. It was the higher of two outcroppings of rock. Both flat-headed, both looking over a deep valley. Pilate carried the sack, Milkman a small shovel. It was a long way to the top, but neither stopped for breath. At the very top, on the plateau, the trees that could stand the wind at that height were few. They looked a long time for an area of earth among the rock faces large enough for the interment. When they found one, Pilate squatted down and opened the sack while Milkman dug. A deep sigh escaped from the sack and the wind turned chill. Ginger, a spicy sugared ginger smell, enveloped them. Pilate laid the bones carefully into the small grave. Milkman heaped dirt over them and packed it down with the back of his shovel.
“Should we put a rock or a cross on it?” Milkman asked.
Pilate shook her head. She reached up and yanked her earring from her ear, splitting the lobe. Then she made a little hole with her fingers and placed in it Sing’s snuffbox with the single word Jake ever wrote. She stood up then, and it seemed to Milkman that he heard the shot after she fell. He dropped to his knees and cradled her lolling head in the crook of his arm, barking at her, “You hurt? You hurt, Pilate?”
She laughed softly and he knew right away that she was reminded of the day he first met her and said the most stupid thing there was to say.
The twilight had thickened and all around them it was getting dark. Milkman moved his hand over her chest and stomach, trying to find the place where she might be hit. “Pilate? You okay?” He couldn’t make out her eyes. His hand under her head was sweating like a fountain. “Pilate?”
She sighed. “Watch Reba for me.” And then, “I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ’em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more.”
Milkman bent low to see her face and saw darkness staining his hand. Not sweat, but blood oozing from her neck down into his cupped hand. He pressed his fingers against the skin as if to force the life back in her, back into the place it was escaping from. But that only made it flow faster. Frantically he thought of tourniquets and could even hear the rip of cloth he should have been tearing. He shifted his weight and was about to lay her down, the better to wrap her wound, when she spoke again.
“Sing,” she said. “Sing a little somethin for me.”
Milkman knew no songs, and had no singing voice that anybody would want to hear, but he couldn’t ignore the urgency in her voice. Speaking the words without the least bit of a tune, he sang for the lady. “Sugargirl don’t leave me here/ Cotton balls to choke me/Sugargirl don’t leave me here/ Buckra’s arms to yoke me.” The blood was not pulsing out any longer and there was something black and bubbly in her mouth. Yet when she moved her head a little to gaze at something behind his shoulder, it took a while for him to realize that she was dead. And when he did, he could not stop the worn old words from coming, louder and louder as though sheer volume would wake her. He woke only the birds, who shuddered off into the air. Milkman laid her head down on the rock. Two of the birds circled round them. One dived into the new grave and scooped something shiny in its beak before it flew away.
Now he knew why he loved her so. Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly. “There must be another one like you,” he whispered to her. “There’s got to be at least one more woman like you.”
Even as he knelt over her, he knew there wouldn’t be another mistake; that the minute he stood up Guitar
