What you want the baby called? the midwife asked.
But Elrica Wright was already dead.
Now that midwife, Ike said, she had always been barren. And always wanted a youngun. And now here was a baby. Like a gift from God. Saved from death. Her and her husband decided they ’d take that child and move to the next county and get a house and raise him. He had dark enough skin, and cutting cane the way they did for a living, well, they knew he’d grow darker still from the sun. Soon he’d pass for colored and they would have they child.
All this time Evavangeline had been watching the old man’s face. The orange pulse from his pipe gleaming twins of itself across his cheekbones. His eyes such bowls of black it seemed as if he could see past tonight and into her life before.
What happened? she asked.
Wasn’t to be, he said. Those eyes of his looking down. Wasn’t long fore the midwife figured out she had the ray bees. Cause he’d bit her. That baby had. Teeth already in. When the shivers come on her some days later her husband snuck to town. He seen with his own two eyes what was going on. Seen a boy mad in a cage and the ladies praying round him. Which was how his wife was fixing to die, too, he knew. Mad. Drooling like a dog. But she was a good, good woman. Name Inetta. And she knew what them ladies didn’t know. Knew the redeemed boy they was looking for was already here, born with ray bees.
What happened to the midwife?
Her husband. He shot her in the head when she starting getting mean. He shot her in the head and burned her in a fire along with they house, and he knew he ought to thow in that squalling baby too. Baby born out of a sinful union and carrying the ray bees that killed his wife. Be better for ever body he was to jest go on thow it in the fire. Jest thow it on in. But he didn’t. He couldn’t. It warn’t that baby’s fault things were how things were. He didn’t evil his self into the world. He was jest a baby. And then that poor heart-broke man smelled the baby’s head and got drunk on it. He didn’t thow him in. That night he left, rode a mule and led a goat on a rope and fed the baby on goatmilk from a bottle and raised him up his own self and loved him even though he was a evil little—
Wait, said Evavangeline. It was you.
Meanwhile, William R. McKissick Junior crept toward the south end of town, approaching the single-room church building which also served as the schoolhouse, and crept up the wide plank steps and stood on the porch looking in the window. The ladies had tried to get him inside this place before. Saying he needed God and learning. That was two things could never be took from ye, they told him. God and learning. William R. McKissick Junior didn’t give a good dern for neither God ner learning. Heck. If air one of them ladies had jest flashed him a titty he would of gone.
Behind him somebody was coming so he jumped off the porch and ran east alongside the building and paused in the shadow of a cord of stacked firewood, looking behind him, waiting, listening. The rat-bite on his leg stinging. He crept to the church window and took the sill in his fingers and scrabbled up the clapboards and peered in. In the pews in the shadows he saw them. Dozens of them, very still. Praying maybe. Or maybe being punished. Grown folk did that sometimes if you misbehaved. Back in Oklahoma William R. McKissick Junior had gone to school for two days while his daddy stalked and killed a ranch hand. That teacher-lady had made him stay late and bang chalk erasers both days because he’d beat up several other boys. He learned to crawl under the school during play time and peep through the cracks in the floorboards and see up her dress. Then his daddy said it was time to move on and they’d moved on.
William R. McKissick Junior looked through the glass, smeared with his own breath, and imagined his head among theirs, bowing, praying, learning to write and read and add numbers. He pushed the top of the window but it was locked. He dropped to the ground and crept alongside the building. Back door locked too. The other windows. Then—heck—it was somebody coming. He slipped under the church and rolled through spiderwebs to the dark center and watched the guard-widow’s black skirt-tails trundling the dust.
Smonk could feel the morphine working. To test himself he hovered his heavy, flat hand over the detonator handle.
How do you know these lies? Mrs. Tate asked.
Smonk moved his hand. Tell ye what else I know, too, he said. War ’d been done almost a year when four, five of ye men begun to trickle home. Didn’t they? Fellows with they eyes empty and they beliefs all sacked. They was skeletons, warn’t they? Had arms off, legs gone.
How do you know this?
They wanted to know where the younguns was, didn’t they. And how come all the unmarried daughters was knocked up?
She lowered her chin. Yes, she said. Some came back. Yes, they wanted answers. We told them what happened in a simple version. Told them about Daddy’s vision and even as we told it, it began to sound false. But the simple men believed it. If they hadn’t been so eaten up by the War they might have done something else. Might have called it all madness. Might have said that Daddy ’d gone crazy with the ray bees and made us all crazy, too. How had we listened to him? How many little boys had we given to our struck dog?
But them men, they didn’t say none of that, did they?
No. Because of what they’d seen in that War. That Goddamned War. Because of what they’d done there. One man—boy!—who I’d known from girlhood and once had held hands with—in this very parlor—he returned home with that selfsame hand blown off. The other women sent him to visit me and he saw in my eyes I had a secret. He took hold of my hand with the hand he had left and twisted until I told him that Elrica had gone to the darkies to have her baby.
So the men collected they guns and rode out to Niggertown, Smonk said, and the niggers said the girl never had been there and said the midwife died of natural causes.
I suppose.
But when they dug the midwife up out the ground, it was a bullet hole in her head and it warn’t nothing natural about that, was it.
I suppose not.
They found another fresh grave, too, didn’t they?
I suppose they did. Without a marker I suppose. And when they dug it up they found Elrica wrapped in bloody sheets. But no baby. The Old Texas men tortured the darkies and burned their houses and barns until they found out that the midwife’s husband had stolen the child and run off.
Out west.
We didn’t know where. But before our men entered pursuit, they came here first. All covered in blood. They had Elrica in a wagon. My baby sister. Under a sheet. Said it was my job to clean her up. Put her best dress on. Bury her like white people. The worms had already been at her but I didn’t care. Here was my ’Rica returned to me, and men with arms and legs off were already departing on their horses to find our stolen child.
She was weeping.
Them fellows never found the nigger, did they. Or the youngun.
We don’t know, she sobbed. They never came back.
Wait, Smonk said. If them fellers never come back, then who the hell was all those sons-of-bitches got killed yesterday?
Mrs. Tate’s breath hitched. Strays, she said. Men who showed up over the years. Drummers, some. Some thrown off riverboats. Others lost in the woods. Running from the law. We needed them to work the fields. We took them as our husbands and as the husbands of our daughters. We let them have any job they wanted to make them stay. We let them have their way with us when they wanted, with our daughters, hoping for boy children so we might find our promised child.
What if a fellow didn’t want his youngun bit by a mad-dog?
Any man who objected was given to Lazarus the Redeemer.
Boards creaking, Smonk moved around front so she could see him. He lowered his good eye to within a foot of her face and she turned away. Loose strands of her white hair stirring in gusts of his breath.
Please, she said. Go ahead and kill me.
Shhhhh. He raised his swordblade to her cheek and turned her to face him. When she wouldn’t open her eyes, he prized them apart with his fingernails.
Don’t ye recognize ye sister’s son? he said.
Meanwhile, a riveted Walton watched the old Negro and the unidentified white woman—age hard to judge
