"He saw?" Sethe was gripping her elbows as though to keep them from flying away.
"He saw. Must have."
"He saw them boys do that to me and let them keep on breathing air? He saw? He saw? He saw?"
"Hey! Hey! Listen up. Let me tell you something. A man ain't a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can't chop down because they're inside."
Sethe was pacing up and down, up and down in the lamplight.
"The underground agent said, By Sunday. They took my milk and he saw it and didn't come down? Sunday came and he didn't. Monday came and no Halle. I thought he was dead, that's why; then I thought they caught him, that's why. Then I thought, No, he's not dead because if he was I'd know it, and then you come here after all this time and you didn't say he was dead, because you didn't know either, so I thought, Well, he just found him another better way to live.
Because if he was anywhere near here, he'd come to Baby Suggs, if not to me. But I never knew he saw."
"What does that matter now?"
"If he is alive, and saw that, he won't step foot in my door. Not Halle."
"It broke him, Sethe." Paul D looked up at her and sighed. "You may as well know it all. Last time I saw him he was sitting by the chum. He had butter all over his face."
Nothing happened, and she was grateful for that. Usually she could see the picture right away of what she heard. But she could not picture what Paul D said. Nothing came to mind. Carefully, carefully, she passed on to a reasonable question.
"What did he say?"
"Nothing."
"Not a word?"
"Not a word."
"Did you speak to him? Didn't you say anything to him? Something!"
"I couldn't, Sethe. I just.., couldn't."
"Why!"
"I had a bit in my mouth."
Sethe opened the front door and sat down on the porch steps.
The day had gone blue without its sun, but she could still make out the black silhouettes of trees in the meadow beyond. She shook her head from side to side, resigned to her rebellious brain. Why was there nothing it reused? No misery, no regret, no hateful picture too rotten to accept? Like a greedy child it snatched up everything. Just once, could it say, No thank you? I just ate and can't hold another bite? I am full God damn it of two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on my breast the other holding me down, their book-reading teacher watching and writing it up. I am still full of that, God damn it, I can't go back and add more. Add my husband to it, watching, above me in the loft--hiding close by--the one place he thought no one would look for him, looking down on what I couldn't look at at all.
And not stopping them--looking and letting it happen. But my greedy brain says, Oh thanks, I'd love more--so I add more. And no sooner than I do, there is no stopping. There is also my husband squatting by the churn smearing the butter as well as its clabber all over his face because the milk they took is on his mind. And as far as he is concerned, the world may as well know it. And if he was that broken then, then he is also and certainly dead now. And if Paul D saw him and could not save or comfort him because the iron bit was in his mouth, then there is still more that Paul D could tell me and my brain would go right ahead and take it and never say, No thank you. I don't want to know or have to remember that. I have other things to do: worry, for example, about tomorrow, about Denver, about Beloved, about age and sickness not to speak of love.
But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day. Exactly like that afternoon in the wild onions-- when one more step was the most she could see of the future. Other people went crazy, why couldn't she? Other people's brains stopped, turned around and went on to something new, which is what must have happened to Halle. And how sweet that would have been: the two of them back by the milk shed, squatting by the churn, smashing cold, lumpy butter into their faces with not a care in the world.
Feeling it slippery, sticky--rubbing it in their hair, watching it squeeze through their fingers. What a relief to stop it right there. Close. Shut.
Squeeze the butter. But her three children were chewing sugar teat under a blanket on their way to Ohio and no butter play would change that.
Paul D stepped through the door and touched her shoulder.
"I didn't plan on telling you that."
"I didn't plan on hearing it."
"I can't take it back, but I can leave it alone," Paul D said.
He wants to tell me, she thought. He wants me to ask him about what it was like for him--about how offended the tongue is, held down by iron, how the need to spit is so deep you cry for it. She already knew about it, had seen it time after time in the place before Sweet Home. Men, boys, little girls, women. The wildness that shot up into the eye the moment the lips were yanked back. Days after it was taken out, goose fat was rubbed on the corners of the mouth but nothing to soothe the tongue or take the wildness out of the eye.
Sethe looked up into Paul D's eyes to see if there was any trace left in them.
"People I saw as a child," she said, "who'd had the bit always looked wild after that. Whatever they used it on them for, it couldn't have worked, because it put a wildness where before there wasn't any. When I look at you, I don't see it. There ain't no wildness in your eye nowhere."
"There's a way to put it there and there's a way to take it out. I know em both and I haven't figured out yet which is worse." He sat down beside her. Sethe looked at him. In that unlit daylight his face, bronzed and reduced to its bones, smoothed her heart down.
"You want to tell me about it?" she asked him.
"I don't know. I never have talked about it. Not to a soul. Sang it sometimes, but I never told a soul."
"Go ahead. I can hear it."
"Maybe. Maybe you can hear it. I just ain't sure I can say it. Say it right, I mean, because it wasn't the bit--that wasn't it."
"What then?" Sethe asked.
"The roosters," he said. "Walking past the roosters looking at them look at me."
Sethe smiled. "In that pine?"
"Yeah." Paul D smiled with her. "Must have been five of them perched up there, and at least fifty hens."
"Mister, too?"
"Not right off. But I hadn't took twenty steps before I seen him.
He come down off the fence post there and sat on the tub."
"He loved that tub," said Sethe, thinking, No, there is no stopping now.
"Didn't he? Like a throne. Was me took him out the shell, you know. He'd a died if it hadn't been for me. The hen had walked on off with all the hatched peeps trailing behind her. There was this one egg left. Looked like a blank, but then I saw it move so I tapped it open and here come Mister, bad feet and all. I watched that son a bitch grow up and whup everything in the yard."
"He always was hateful," Sethe said.
"Yeah, he was hateful all right. Bloody too, and evil. Crooked feet flapping. Comb as big as my hand and some kind of red. He sat right there on the tub looking at me. I swear he smiled. My head was full of what I'd seen of Halle a while back. I wasn't even thinking about the bit. Just Halle and before him Sixo, but when I saw Mister I knew it was me too. Not just them, me too. One crazy, one sold, one missing, one burnt and me licking iron with my hands crossed behind me. The last of the Sweet Home men.
"Mister, he looked so... free. Better than me. Stronger, tougher.
Son a bitch couldn't even get out the shell by hisself but he was still king and I was..." Paul D stopped and squeezed his left hand with his right. He held it that way long enough for it and the world to quiet down and let him go on.
"Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn't allowed to be and stay what I was. Even if you cooked him you'd be cooking a rooster named Mister. But wasn't no way I'd ever be Paul D again, living or dead. Schoolteacher changed me. I was something else and that something was less than a chicken sitting
in the sun on a tub."
Sethe put her hand on his knee and rubbed.
Paul D had only begun, what he was telling her was only the beginning when her fingers on his knee, soft and reassuring, stopped him. Just as well. Just as well. Saying more might push them both to a place they couldn't get back from. He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut. He would not pry it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she got a whiff of the contents it would shame him. And it would hurt her to know that there was no red heart bright as Mister's comb beating in him.
Sethe rubbed and rubbed, pressing the work cloth and the stony curves that made up his knee. She hoped it calmed him as it did her.
Like kneading bread in the half-light of the restaurant kitchen. Before the cook arrived when she stood in a space no wider than a bench is long, back behind and to the left of the milk cans. Working dough.
Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to start the day's serious work of beating back the past. make-a-new-step, slide, slide and strut on down.
Denver sat on the bed smiling and providing the music.
She had never seen Beloved this happy. She had seen her pouty lips open wide with the pleasure of sugar or some piece of news Denver gave her. She had felt warm satisfaction radiating from Beloved's skin when she listened to her mother talk about the old days.
But gaiety she had never seen. Not ten minutes had passed since Beloved had fallen backward to the floor, pop-eyed, thrashing and holding her throat. Now, after a few seconds lying in Denver's bed, she was up and dancing.
"Where'd you learn to dance?" Denver asked her.
"Nowhere. Look at me do this." Beloved put her fists on her hips and commenced to skip on bare feet. Denver laughed.
"Now you. Come on," said Beloved. "You may as well just come on." Her black skirt swayed from side to side.
Denver grew ice-cold as she rose from the bed. She knew she was twice Beloved's size but she floated up, cold and light as a snowflake.
Beloved took Denver's hand and placed another on Denver's shoulder. They danced then. Round and round the tiny room and it may have been dizziness, or feeling light and icy at once, that made Denver laugh so hard. A catching laugh that Beloved caught. The two of them, merry as kittens, swung to and fro, to and fro, until exhausted they sat on the floor. Beloved let her head fall back on the edge of the bed while she found her breath and Denver saw the tip of the thing she always saw in its entirety when Beloved undressed to sleep. Looking straight at it she whispered, "Why you call yourself Beloved?"
Beloved closed her eyes. "In the dark my name is Beloved."
Denver scooted a little closer. "What's it like over there, where you were before? Can you tell me?"
"Dark," said Beloved. "I'm small in that place. I'm like this here."
She raised her head off the bed, lay down on her side and curled up.
Denver covered her lips with her fingers. "Were you cold?"
Beloved curled tighter and shook her head. "Hot. Nothing to breathe down there and no room to move in."
"You see anybody?"
"Heaps. A lot of people is down there. Some is dead."
"You see Jesus? Baby Suggs?"
"I don't know. I don't know the names." She sat up.
"Tell me, how did you get here?"
"I wait; then I got on the bridge. I stay there in the dark, in the daytime, in the dark, in the daytime. It was a long time."
"All this time you were on a bridge?"
"No. After. When I got out."
"What did you come back for?"
Beloved smiled. "To see her face."
"Ma'am's? Sethe?"
"Yes, Sethe."
Denver felt a little hurt, slighted that she was not the main reason for Beloved's return. "Don't you remember we played together by the stream?"
"I was on the bridge," said Beloved. "You see me on the bridge?"
"No, by the stream. The water back in the woods."
"Oh, I was in the water. I saw her diamonds down there. I could touch them."
"What stopped you?"
"She left me behind. By myself," said Beloved. She lifted her eyes to meet Denver's and frowned, perhaps. Perhaps not. The tiny scratches on her forehead may have made it seem so.
Denver swallowed. "Don't," she said. "Don't. You won't leave us, will you?"
"No. Never. This is where I am."
Suddenly Denver, who was sitting cross-legged, lurched forward and grabbed Beloved's wrist. "Don't tell her. Don't let Ma'am know who you are. Please, you hear?"
"Don't tell me what to do. Don't you never never tell me what to do."
"But I'm on your side, Beloved."
"She is the one. She is the one I need. You can go but she is the one I have to have." Her eyes stretched to the limit, black as the all night sky.
"I didn't do anything to you. I never hurt you. I never hurt anybody," said Denver.
"Me either. Me either."
"What you gonna do?"
"Stay here. I belong here."
"I belong here too."
"Then stay, but don't never tell me what to do. Don't never do that."
"We were dancing. Just a minute ago we were dancing together.
Let's."
"I don't want to." Beloved got up and lay down on the bed. Their quietness boomed about on the walls like birds in panic. Finally Denver's breath steadied against the threat of an unbearable loss.
"Tell me," Beloved said. "Tell me how Sethe made you in the boat."
"She never told me all of it," said Denver.
"Tell me."
Denver climbed up on the bed and folded her arms under her apron. She had not been in the tree room once since Beloved sat on their stump after the carnival, and had not remembered that she hadn't gone there until this very desperate moment. Nothing was out there that this sister-girl did not provide in abundance: a racing heart, dreaminess, society, danger, beauty. She swallowed twice to prepare for the telling, to construct out of the strings she had heard all her life a net to hold Beloved.
"She had good hands, she said. The whitegirl, she said, had thin little arms but good hands. She saw that right away, she said. Hair enough for five heads and good hands, she said. I guess the hands made her think she could do it: get us both across the river. But the mouth was what kept her from being scared. She said there ain't nothing to go by with whitepeople. You don't know how they'll jump. Say one thing, do another. But if you looked at the mouth sometimes you could tell by that. She said this girl talked a storm, but there wasn't no meanness around her mouth. She took Ma'am to that lean-to and rubbed her feet for her, so that was one thing.
And Ma'am believed she wasn't going to turn her over. You could get money if you turned a runaway over, and she wasn't sure this girl Amy didn't need money more than anything, especially since all she talked about was getting hold of some velvet."
"What's velvet?"
"It's a cloth, kind of deep and soft."
"Go ahead."
"Anyway, she rubbed Ma'am's feet back to life, and she cried, she said, from how it hurt. But it made her think she could make it on over to where Grandma Baby Suggs was and..."
"Who is that?"
"I just said it. My grandmother."
"Is that Sethe's mother?"
"No. My father's mother."
"Go ahead."
"That's where the others was. My brothers and.., the baby girl.
She sent them on before to wait for her at Grandma Baby's. So she had to put up with everything to get there. And this here girl Amy helped."
Denver stopped and sighed. This was the part of the story she loved. She was coming to it now, and she loved it because it was all about herself; but she hated it too because it made her feel like a bill was owing somewhere and she, Denver, had to pay it. But who she owed or what to pay it with eluded her. Now, watching Beloved's alert and hungry face, ho
w she took in every word, asking questions about the color of things and their size, her downright craving to know, Denver began to see what she was saying and not just to hear it: there is this nineteen-year-old slave girl--a year older than her self--walking through the dark woods to get to her children who are far away. She is tired, scared maybe, and maybe even lost. Most of all she is by herself and inside her is another baby she has to think about too. Behind her dogs, perhaps; guns probably; and certainly mossy teeth. She is not so afraid at night because she is the color of it, but in the day every sound is a shot or a tracker's quiet step.
Denver was seeing it now and feeling it--through Beloved. Feeling how it must have felt to her mother. Seeing how it must have looked.
And the more fine points she made, the more detail she provided, the more Beloved liked it. So she anticipated the questions by giving blood to the scraps her mother and grandmother had told herwand a heartbeat. The monologue became, iri fact, a duet as they lay down together, Denver nursing Beloved's interest like a lover whose pleasure was to overfeed the loved. The dark quilt with two orange patches was there with them because Beloved wanted it near her when she slept. It was smelling like grass and feeling like hands-- the unrested hands of busy women: dry, warm, prickly. Denver spoke, Beloved listened, and the two did the best they could to create what really happened, how it really was, something only Sethe knew because she alone had the mind for it and the time afterward to shape it: the quality of Amy's voice, her breath like burning wood. The quick-change weather up in those hills---cool at night, hot in the day, sudden fog. How recklessly she behaved with this whitegirlNa recklessness born of desperation and encouraged by Amy's fugitive eyes and her tenderhearted mouth.
"You ain't got no business walking round these hills, miss."
"Looka here who's talking. I got more business here 'n you got.
They catch you they cut your head off. Ain't nobody after me but I know somebody after you." Amy pressed her fingers into the soles of the slavewoman's feet. "Whose baby that?"
Sethe did not answer.
"You don't even know. Come here, Jesus," Amy sighed and shook her head. "Hurt?"
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