“I thought you were him. I thought you came back to see me. Where is he?
“Back home. He’s alive. He told me about you….”
“And Pilate. Where is she?”
“There too. She’s fine.”
“Well, you look like him. You really do.” But she didn’t sound convinced.
“He’s seventy-two years old now,” said Milkman. He thought that would clear things up, make her know he couldn’t be the Macon she knew, who was sixteen when she last saw him. But all she said was “Uhn,” as though seventy-two, thirty-two, any age at all, meant nothing whatsoever to her. Milkman wondered how old she really was.
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
“No. Thank you. I ate breakfast.”
“So you’ve been staying with that little Cooper boy?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“A runt. I told him not to smoke, but children don’t listen.”
“Do you mind if I do?” Milkman was relaxing a little and he hoped the cigarette would relax him more.
She shrugged. “Do what you like. Everybody does what he likes nowadays anyway.”
Milkman lit the cigarette and the dogs hummed at the sound of the match, their eyes glittering toward the flame.
“Ssh!” whispered Circe.
“Beautiful,” said Milkman.
“What’s beautiful?”
“The dogs.”
“They’re not beautiful, they’re strange, but they keep things away. I’m completely worn out taking care of ’em. They belonged to Miss Butler. She bred them, crossbred them. Tried for years to get them in the AKC. They wouldn’t permit it.”
“What did you call them?”
“Weimaraners. German.”
“What do you do with them?”
“Oh, I keep some. Sell some. Till we all die in here together.” She smiled.
She had dainty habits which matched her torn and filthy clothes in precisely the way her strong young cultivated voice matched her wizened face. Her white hair—braided, perhaps; perhaps not—she touched as though replacing a wayward strand from an elegant coiffure. And her smile—an opening of flesh like celluloid dissolving under a drop of acid—was accompanied by a press of fingers on her chin. It was this combination of daintiness and cultivated speech that misled Macon and invited him to regard her as merely foolish.
“You should get out once in a while.”
She looked at him.
“Is this your house now? Did they will you this? Is that why you have to stay here?”
She pressed her lips over her gums. “The only reason I’m here alone is because she died. She killed herself. All the money was gone, so she killed herself. Stood right there on the landing where you were a minute ago and threw herself off the banister. She didn’t die right away, though; she lay in the bed a week or two and there was nobody here but us. The dogs were in the kennel then. I brought her in the world, just like I did her mother and her grandmother before that. Birthed just about everybody in the county, I did. Never lost one either. Never lost nobody but your mother. Well, grandmother, I guess she was. Now I birth dogs.”
“Some friend of Reverend Cooper said she looked white. My grandmother. Was she?”
“No. Mixed. Indian mostly. A good-looking woman, but fierce, for the young woman I knew her as. Crazy about her husband too, overcrazy. You know what I mean? Some women love too hard. She watched over him like a pheasant hen. Nervous. Nervous love.”
Milkman thought about this mixed woman’s great-granddaughter, Hagar, and said, “Yes. I know what you mean.”
“But a good woman. I cried like a baby when I lost her. Like a baby. Poor Sing.”
“What?” He wondered if she lisped.
“I cried like a baby when I—”
“No. I mean what did you call her?”
“Sing. Her name was Sing.”
“Sing? Sing Dead. Where’d she get a name like that?”
“Where’d you get a name like yours? White people name Negroes like race horses.”
“I suppose so. Daddy told me how they got their name.”
“What’d he tell you?”
