“Lizard live that long without food?” asked Reba.
“Girl, ain’t nobody gonna let you starve. You ever had a hungry day?” Pilate asked her granddaughter.
“Course she ain’t,” said her mother.
Hagar tossed a branch to the heap on the floor and rubbed her fingers. The tips were colored a deep red. “Some of my days were hungry ones.”
With the quickness of birds, the heads of Pilate and Reba shot up. They peered at Hagar, then exchanged looks.
“Baby?” Reba’s voice was soft. “You been hungry, baby? Why didn’t you say so?” Reba looked hurt. “We get you anything you want, baby. Anything. You
Pilate spit her twig into the palm of her hand. Her face went still. Without those moving lips her face was like a mask. It seemed to Milkman that somebody had just clicked off a light. He looked at the faces of the women. Reba’s had crumpled. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. Pilate’s face was still as death, but alert as though waiting for some signal. Hagar’s profile was hidden by her hair. She leaned forward, her elbows on her thighs, rubbing fingers that looked bloodstained in the lessening light. Her nails were very very long.
The quiet held. Even Guitar didn’t dare break it.
Then Pilate spoke. “Reba. She don’t mean food.”
Realization swept slowly across Reba’s face, but she didn’t answer. Pilate began to hum as she returned to plucking the berries. After a moment, Reba joined her, and they hummed together in perfect harmony until Pilate took the lead:
When the two women got to the chorus, Hagar raised her head and sang too.
Milkman could hardly breathe. Hagar’s voice scooped up what little pieces of heart he had left to call his own. When he thought he was going to faint from the weight of what he was feeling, he risked a glance at his friend and saw the setting sun gilding Guitar’s eyes, putting into shadow a slow smile of recognition.
Delicious as the day turned out to be for Milkman, it was even more so because it included secrecy and defiance, both of which dissipated within an hour of his father’s return. Freddie had let Macon Dead know that his son had spent the afternoon “drinking in the wine house.”
“He’s lying! We didn’t drink nothing. Nothing. Guitar didn’t even get the glass of water he asked for.”
“Freddie never lies. He misrepresents, but he never lies.”
“He lied to you.”
“About the wine-drinking? Maybe. But not about you being there, huh?”
“No, sir. Not about that.” Milkman softened his tone a bit, but succeeded in keeping the edge of defiance in his voice.
“Now, what were your instructions from me?”
“You told me to stay away from there. To stay away from Pilate.”
“Right.”
“But you never told me why. They’re our cousins. She’s your own sister.”
“And you’re my own son. And you will do what I tell you to do. With or without explanations. As long as your feet are under my table, you’ll do in this house what you are told.”
At fifty-two, Macon Dead was as imposing a man as he had been at forty-two, when Milkman thought he was the biggest thing in the world. Bigger even than the house they lived in. But today he had seen a woman who was just as tall and who had made him feel tall too.
“I know I’m the youngest one in this family, but I ain’t no baby. You treat me like I was a baby. You keep saying you don’t have to explain nothing to me. How do you think that makes me feel? Like a baby, that’s what. Like a twelve-year-old baby!”
“Don’t you raise your voice to me.”
“Is that the way your father treated you when you were twelve?”
“Watch your mouth!” Macon roared. He took his hands out of his pockets but didn’t know what to do with them. He was momentarily confused. His son’s question had shifted the scenery. He was seeing himself at twelve, standing in Milkman’s shoes and feeling what he himself had felt for his own father. The numbness that had settled on him when he saw the man he loved and admired fall off the fence; something wild ran through him when he watched the body twitching in the dirt. His father had sat for five nights on a split-rail fence cradling a shotgun and in the end died protecting his property. Was that what this boy felt for him? Maybe it was time to tell him things.
“Well, did he?”
“I worked right alongside my father. Right alongside him. From the time I was four or five we worked together. Just the two of us. Our mother was dead. Died when Pilate was born. Pilate was just a baby. She stayed over at another farm in the daytime. I carried her over there myself in my arms every morning. Then I’d go back across the fields and meet my father. We’d hitch President Lincoln to the plow and…That’s what we called her: President
