And so I took Anse. I saw him pass the schoolhouse three or four times before I learned that he was driving four miles out of his way to do it. I noticed then how he was beginning to hump—a tall man and young—so that he looked already like a tall bird hunched in the cold weather, on the wagon-seat. He would pass the schoolhouse, the wagon creaking slow, his head turning slow to watch the door of the schoolhouse as the wagon passed, until he went on around the curve and out of sight. One day I went to the door and stood there when he passed. When he saw me he looked quickly away and did not look back again.
In the early spring it was worst. Sometimes I thought that I could not bear it, lying in bed at night, with the wild geese going north and their honking coming faint and high and wild out of the wild darkness, and during the day it would seem as though I couldn’t wait for the last one to go so I could go down to the spring. And so when I looked up that day and saw Anse standing there in his Sunday clothes, turning his hat round and round in his hands, I said:
“If you’ve got any womenfolks, why in the world don’t they make you get your hair cut?”
“I ain’t got none,” he said. Then he said suddenly, driving his eyes at me like two hounds in a strange yard: “That’s what I come to see you about.”
“And make you hold your shoulders up,” I said. “You haven’t got any? But you’ve got a house. They tell me you’ve got a house and a good farm. And you live there alone, doing for yourself, do you?” He just looked at me, turning the hat in his hands. “A new house,” I said. “Are you going to get married?”
And he said again, holding his eyes to mine: “That’s what I come to see you about.”
Later he told me, “I ain’t got no people. So that won’t be no worry to you. I don’t reckon you can say the same.”
“No. I have people. In Jefferson.”
His face fell a little. “Well, I got a little property. I’m forehanded; I got a good honest name. I know how town folks are, but maybe when they talk to me …”
“They might listen,” I said. “But they’ll be hard to talk to.” He was watching my face. “They’re in the cemetery.”
“But your living kin,” he said. “They’ll be different.”
“Will they?” I said. “I don’t know. I never had any other kind.”
So I took Anse. And when I knew that I had Cash, I knew that living was terrible and that this was the answer to it. That was when I learned that words are no good; that words don’t ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn’t care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride. I knew that it had been, not that they had dirty noses, but that we had had to use one another by words like spiders dangling by their mouths from a beam, swinging and twisting and never touching, and that only through the blows of the switch could my blood and their blood flow as one stream. I knew that it had been, not that my aloneness had to be violated over and over each day, but that it had never been violated until Cash came. Not even by Anse in the nights.
He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that any more than for pride or fear. Cash did not need to say it to me nor I to him, and I would say, Let Anse use it, if he wants to. So that it was Anse or love; love or Anse: it didn’t matter.
I would think that even while I lay with him in the dark and Cash asleep in the cradle within the swing of my hand. I would think that if he were to wake and cry, I would suckle him, too. Anse or love: it didn’t matter. My aloneness had been violated and then made whole again by the violation: time, Anse, love, what you will, outside the circle.
Then I found that I had Darl. At first I would not believe it. Then I believed that I would kill Anse. It was as though he had tricked me, hidden within a word like within a paper screen and struck me in the back through it. But then I realized that I had been tricked by words older than Anse or love, and that the same word had tricked Anse too, and that my revenge would be that he would never know I was taking revenge. And when Darl was born I asked Anse to promise to take me back to Jefferson when I died, because I knew that father had been right, even when he couldn’t have known he was right any more than I could have known I was wrong.
“Nonsense,” Anse said; “you and me ain’t nigh done chapping yet, with
