In the evening when he came home and the three of them were all there fixing the supper table, her shine was so pronounced he wondered why Denver and Sethe didn’t see it. Or maybe they did. Certainly women could tell, as men could, when one of their number was aroused. Paul D looked carefully at Beloved to see if she was aware of it but she paid him no attention at all—frequently not even answering a direct question put to her. She would look at him and not open her mouth. Five weeks she had been with them, and they didn’t know any more about her than they did when they found her asleep on the stump.
They were seated at the table Paul D had broken the day he arrived at 124. Its mended legs stronger than before. The cabbage was all gone and the shiny ankle bones of smoked pork were pushed in a heap on their plates. Sethe was dishing up bread pudding, murmuring her hopes for it, apologizing in advance the way veteran cooks always do, when something in Beloved’s face, some petlike adoration that took hold of her as she looked at Sethe, made Paul D speak.
“Ain’t you got no brothers or sisters?”
Beloved diddled her spoon but did not look at him. “I don’t have nobody.”
“What was you looking for when you came here?” he asked her.
“This place. I was looking for this place I could be in.”
“Somebody tell you about this house?”
“She told me. When I was at the bridge, she told me.”
“Must be somebody from the old days,” Sethe said. The days when 124 was a way station where messages came and then their senders. Where bits of news soaked like dried beans in spring water—until they were soft enough to digest.
“How’d you come? Who brought you?”
Now she looked steadily at him, but did not answer.
He could feel both Sethe and Denver pulling in, holding their stomach muscles, sending out sticky spiderwebs to touch one another. He decided to force it anyway.
“I asked you who brought you here?”
“I walked here,” she said. “A long, long, long, long way. Nobody bring me. Nobody help me.”
“You had new shoes. If you walked so long why don’t your shoes show it?”
“Paul D, stop picking on her.”
“I want to know,” he said, holding the knife handle in his fist like a pole.
“I take the shoes! I take the dress! The shoe strings don’t fix!” she shouted and gave him a look so malevolent Denver touched her arm.
“I’ll teach you,” said Denver, “how to tie your shoes,” and got a smile from Beloved as a reward.
Paul D had the feeling a large, silver fish had slipped from his hands the minute he grabbed hold of its tail. That it was streaming back off into dark water now, gone but for the glistening marking its route. But if her shining was not for him, who then? He had never known a woman who lit up for nobody in particular, who just did it as a general announcement. Always, in his experience, the light appeared when there was focus. Like the Thirty-Mile Woman, dulled to smoke while he waited with her in the ditch, and starlight when Sixo got there. He never knew himself to mistake it. It was there the instant he looked at Sethe’s wet legs, otherwise he never would have been bold enough to enclose her in his arms that day and whisper into her back.
This girl Beloved, homeless and without people, beat all, though he couldn’t say exactly why, considering the coloredpeople he had run into during the last twenty years. During, before and after the War he had seen Negroes so stunned, or hungry, or tired or bereft it was a wonder they recalled or said anything. Who, like him, had hidden in caves and fought owls for food; who, like him, stole from pigs; who, like him, slept in trees in the day and walked by night; who, like him, had buried themselves in slop and jumped in wells to avoid regulators, raiders, paterollers, veterans, hill men, posses and merrymakers. Once he met a Negro about fourteen years old who lived by himself in the woods and said he couldn’t remember living anywhere else. He saw a witless coloredwoman jailed and hanged for stealing ducks she believed were her own babies.
Move. Walk. Run. Hide. Steal and move on. Only once had it been possible for him to stay in one spot—with a woman, or a family—for longer than a few months. That once was almost two years with a weaver lady in Delaware, the meanest place for Negroes he had ever seen outside Pulaski County, Kentucky, and of course the prison camp in Georgia.
From all those Negroes, Beloved was different. Her shining, her new shoes. It bothered him. Maybe it was just the fact that he didn’t bother her. Or it could be timing. She had appeared and been taken in on the very day Sethe and he had patched up their quarrel, gone out in public and had a right good time—like a family. Denver had come around, so to speak; Sethe was laughing; he had a promise of steady work, 124 was cleared up from spirits. It had begun to look like a life. And damn! a water-drinking woman fell sick, got took in, healed, and hadn’t moved a peg since.
He wanted her out, but Sethe had let her in and he couldn’t put her out of a house that wasn’t his. It was one thing to beat up a ghost, quite another to throw a helpless coloredgirl out in territory infected by the Klan. Desperately thirsty for black blood, without which it could not live, the dragon swam the Ohio at will.
Sitting at table, chewing on his after-supper broom straw, Paul D decided to place her. Consult with the Negroes in town and find her her own place.
No sooner did he have the thought than Beloved strangled on one of the raisins she had picked out of the bread pudding. She fell backward and off the chair and thrashed around holding her throat. Sethe knocked her on the back while Denver pried her hands away from her neck. Beloved, on her hands and knees, vomited up her food and struggled for breath.
When she was quiet and Denver had wiped up the mess, she said, “Go to sleep now.”
“Come in my room,” said Denver. “I can watch out for you up there.”
No moment could have been better. Denver had worried herself sick trying to think of a way to get Beloved to share her room. It was hard sleeping above her, wondering if she was going to be sick again, fall asleep and not wake, or (God, please don’t) get up and wander out of the yard just the way she wandered in. They could have their talks easier there: at night when Sethe and Paul D were asleep; or in the daytime before either came home. Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.
When the girls left, Sethe began to clear the table. She stacked the plates near a basin of water.
“What is it about her vex you so?”
Paul D frowned, but said nothing.
“We had one good fight about Denver. Do we need one about her too?” asked Sethe.
“I just don’t understand what the hold is. It’s clear why she holds on to you, but I just can’t see why you holding on to her.”
Sethe turned away from the plates toward him. “What you care who’s holding on to who? Feeding her is no trouble. I pick up a little extra from the restaurant is all. And she’s nice girl company for Denver. You know that and I know you know it, so what is it got your teeth on edge?”
“I can’t place it. It’s a feeling in me.”
“Well, feel this, why don’t you? Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don’t get it, feel how it feels to be a coloredwoman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that.”
“I know every bit of that, Sethe. I wasn’t born yesterday and I never mistreated a woman in my life.”
“That makes one in the world,” Sethe answered.
“Not two?”
“No. Not two.”
“What Halle ever do to you? Halle stood by you. He never left you.”
“What’d he leave then if not me?”
“I don’t know, but it wasn’t you. That’s a fact.”
“Then he did worse; he left his children.”
“You don’t know th
at.”
“He wasn’t there. He wasn’t where he said he would be.”
“He was there.”
“Then why didn’t he show himself? Why did I have to pack my babies off and stay behind to look for him?”
“He couldn’t get out the loft.”
“Loft? What loft?”
“The one over your head. In the barn.”
Slowly, slowly, taking all the time allowed, Sethe moved toward the table.
“He saw?”
“He saw.”
“He told you?”
“You told me.”
“What?”
“The day I came in here. You said they stole your milk. I never knew what it was that messed him up. That was it, I guess. All I knew was that something broke him. Not a one of them years of Saturdays, Sundays and nighttime extra never touched him. But whatever he saw go on in that barn that day broke him like a twig.”
“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 churn. 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 refused? 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 t
oo, 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.