Читать книгу The Last Queen of the Gypsies - William Cobb - Страница 7

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Central Florida

November 1932

They put her out along a deserted road, put her out the way you would an unwanted puppy or a croker sack full of kittens that you couldn’t quite get up your nerve to throw in a creek and drown. Just drove off and left her. For one thing, she had one green eye and one blue one, which her mother knew from the ancient times was bad luck. And the old gajo preacher at the migrants’ camp where they had been living for the last six months said it was a mark of the devil to have mismatched eyes. And she was another mouth to feed, which, in that passel of children, stair-stepped from three years old up to sixteen, didn’t make that much difference, as far as she could see. But her mother obviously didn’t feel that way. “She’s the one too many mouths to feed, I’ve done told you,” her mother had said. “Then put me out, too,” her big sister, Evalene, had screamed. “It ain’t right, Mama!”

Minnie could still hear her sister’s protesting as they went on down the road, the old Ford roadster shaking and trembling over the ruts in the dirt road, half-heartedly paved with crushed oyster shells. The other children were crying, too, trying to jump out of the car, and Minnie could hear her mother wrestling with them, yelling at them, biting off her words like she was chomping at an apple, and Minnie could see in her mind’s eye her father, his stained old black felt hat jammed down low on his head, nearly covering his intense black eyes, just staring straight ahead down the road between the tall saw grass and twisted live oaks to where the road went on toward Tallahassee, where they were headed, her father looking for work, any kind of work, not just fruit picking because there was too much competition now he said. Or at least find some bread lines. But you could get killed in a bread line if you were a Gypsy. Hungry gaje folks were dangerous. Minnie stood there thinking about her father getting killed in a bread line. “Good riddance,” she said out loud, to the live oaks alongside the road. It was not clear even to her whether she meant the eventuality of her father getting killed in a bread line or her family going on down the road, leaving her there.

“Somebody’ll take her in,” her mother had said, “feed her. Folks do feed a stray dog that comes up in the yard.”

“Not if they a Gypsy and they got one green eye and one blue one,” her father had grunted, never once taking his eyes off the road in front of them; you could barely hear him over the rattling of the falling down car going so slowly over the ruts the dust could wind up and around and catch up with them, engulfing them in their own leavings.

It took her family a long time to disappear, the road flat and off toward the horizon, straight as the edge of a well-honed axe, like something scratched in a sand dune with a stick, and when they dropped from view, almost like the sun going down, their noise went with them, until there was nothing left but a final little puff of dust. Soon that, too, settled back to the earth and left the air, the space, around Minnie silent, so quiet she wasn’t sure there was any air about her at all, thought that maybe she had died and this was the hush of hell, the place that old crazy preacher talked about, scaring her and her brothers and sisters. Her father didn’t believe in the white folks’ hell, nor their heaven either; he was mad at God and everybody else. Her mother was scared of their God and everybody else. She made them pray to the Gypsy God. She whipped them often, and screamed at them. She wasn’t somebody you could like very much.

Minnie stood very still. There was a chill in the air and she could feel it through the thin cotton dress she wore, a hand-me-down from her older sisters, washed so threadbare the pattern of interlocking flowers was barely visible. She didn’t have on anything else but her underpants. She had no coat. She was so skinny and bony she looked like a featherless little bird that had fallen from the nest. Nothing was moving, anywhere. She was eleven years old and she had never had a lick of schooling and had never felt the lack of it; her Gypsy familia were migrant fruit pickers, and all she remembered was moving from place to place in one old beat-up truck or car after another. There were too many fruit pickers now, and there wasn’t enough work to keep grits on the table, so they had split off from their band in the hopes of finding something, anything. When they could find a shack to live in they were lucky, and they might stay in one place for more than a day or two. But mostly they just camped and moved. “A Gypsy’s life is moving, always moving,” her father said, “to stay in one place is to die.” There would have been something strange going on if her family had known beforehand what they were having for their next meal: fatback or plain biscuits, dried beans or canned sourdeens and soda crackers, a loaf of white bread dipped in somebody else’s leftover bacon grease, whatever the few pennies of the day’s labor would buy in whatever unpainted country store was nearby to where they were camping for the night. She would look with thirsty longing at the tin advertisements for RC Cola and Nehi orange drink tacked up all over the rough outside walls of the store, knowing that one day she would walk in there and buy all she wanted. As it was, her brother and her sisters would just take what they wanted—and extra food for the table, too—while their father distracted the store owner by bargaining about the price of a can of lard or a pound of bacon.

Minnie started walking down the side of the road, going in the direction her family’s car had gone. She tried to pick out the ruts of their car, but she couldn’t tell one rut from another. She just put one foot before the other, gliding along like she was walking in some dream she was having, not even a nightmare because there were no scary animals or ghosts or tsinivari, or anything that she could see. There was just nothing. She did not register the tangled live oaks beside the road, nor the palmettos, nor the sawgrass, because they were so much a part of her young environment she would have noticed them only if they had not been there.

She walked for a long time, aware only of the padding of her bare feet in the sandy soil. The sun was moving down the sky to her left. She figured when night came she would just curl up in a nest of grass and pray that a snake or an alligator didn’t find her there, and the next day she would go on, because there was nothing else to do. As long as she kept moving, like her father said, she was all right. That was the extent of her plans.

Presently the woods to her right began to thin, and she came to a clearing with an old house set back from the road, a narrow sagging front porch, the house a kind of faded patchy pink from the red it had once been painted. She stopped and looked at the house, at the two black, blank windows on either side of the front door that was standing open, windows that—if the door were a mouth—would be two blind, empty eyes. She could smell the ashes of last night’s fire, rank and sour, so the house was lived in, occupied, and she remembered what her mother had said, that they would feed her like they would a stray dog. She would approach the house and ask for food. They couldn’t do more than turn her away, could they? She started across the sandy yard and a mangy hound came out from under the porch and growled at her. The hound was splotched light and dark gray and its ribs stuck out on both sides. She was not normally afraid of dogs, but she was afraid of this one. He looked like he was nigh on to starved to death. And he didn’t yap, but growled from way down inside him, like the growl was coming from his whole wasted body and not just from his lips and throat and his yellow teeth showing on both sides.

“Nora Lee, hush up,” she heard a voice say, “git your scrawny ass back under that porch.” She had not seen the old man come out onto the porch, because she wouldn’t take her eyes off the dog. He had on what looked like a long john top and overalls and a grizzly gray beard. He grinned at her and his snaggled teeth were stained with tobacco, snuff she figured. His thinning gray hair was wild and sleep-mussed, as though he’d been napping. The old hound whined and went back under the porch, where Minnie could see his eyes, still watching her. She came on into the yard.

“You got any spare leftovers?” she said.

“Say what?” he said, cupping his hand behind his ear like he was going deaf.

“Somethin to give a person to eat,” she said, louder.

The old man scratched inside his whiskers with one finger. He peered at her as though she were standing in fog. “I ain’t never had a pretty little girl hobo come by here lookin for a handout,” he said. “What you doin way off out here?”

“I’m headed to Tallahassee,” she said.

He looked out at the road, all around the yard. “Walkin?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“Well, you got a hell of a long way to go,” he said. He was looking her over. “You ain’t colored, are you?” he asked.

“No, sir,” she said.

He seemed to chew the inside of his lip. “You just a little darker than the average little white girl,” he said, “is why I asked.”

Minnie heard a low growl from the dog under the porch. “Ain’t I told you, Nora Lee?” the old man said harshly. He stomped his foot on the floor. “Goddam old dog,” he said, “ought to shoot her, is what.” He kept looking at Minnie, his jaw working slightly like he had a small chaw of tobacco in there.

“Well?” she said impatiently. “You gonna give me somethin to eat, or what?”

“You feisty, ain’t you?” he said. “What’s your name, girl?”

“Minnie Francis,” she said. She knew better than to tell him her Gypsy name. She hardly ever used it, anyway, except in the familia.

“Well,” he said, “come on into the house then.”

“She’s slow, is why,” her mother had said to her father. “She ain’t like the other girls.”

“Ain’t a thing wrong with her except them eyes,” her father had said.

“She’ll poison whoever’s around her. She’s the handmaiden of Beng, is what I’m tellin you. And anyway we can’t afford to feed her.”

“Gypsies don’t do that to their own,” he said.

“They do if they starvin to death. People are so poor they ain’t even got any chickens or pigs to pick up. We can’t find work.”

“We’ll take her on to Tallahassee,” her father said.

“Ain’t nobody in Tallahassee gonna want her, not long as she’s got the smell of hell on her.”

Minnie had known that her mother hated her, for some time, ever since she was old enough to notice. She would catch her mother watching her, the look on her face like she smelled something bad. Minnie didn’t know exactly why, other than what her mother said about the Devil, or Beng as the Gypsies called him, which she doubted was so, since she’d never seen the Devil in her life. She could not know, except somewhere in her soul’s silent memory, that she had almost killed her mother when she’d been born. She had been a breech and all the long night when her mother had screamed in pain and begged God to go on and take her, she had lingered there inside her mother’s body as though she refused to be born. As though it were a willful thing on her part, and her mother had been sure it was. Lying in the cold room, after the intense misery of a living hell, the old worn sheets stained with blood, her mother had looked at the baby, another girl, not even another boy like they’d wanted, needed, but another girl. The baby looked like a dressed squirrel, ugly and deformed in the face, eyes and nose and mouth all scrooched up like one of those little devils you see in pictures, squatting and looking at you like they know some secret, like they know when you’re going to die. She wanted the baby taken from her, but she had to feed her. Better the baby starve to death. But she couldn’t do it. Not then, anyway. She wanted Big Ralph—as opposed to Ralph-Son, her third oldest—to take the baby outside and smash its brains out upside a hickory nut tree, so she would never have to look at her. But she couldn’t ask him to do that, and she couldn’t bring herself to do it. So she had watched the girl grow, skulking around, not able to pick even half the fruit—strawberries, peaches, apples or oranges, depending on the season and whatever state they were in, and sometimes cotton, too—couldn’t pick half the fruit her four sisters did, two of them younger than her, too, not able to keep her mind on anything for more than a minute, not even when she sat the girls down and read to them out of the ancient stories, like the devil had already taken half her brain, maybe while she was still in the womb.

“She ain’t right,” she said to Big Ralph. Minnie could hear her from where she lay in the bed, under the thin quilt, her four sisters breathing raggedly and not at all in unison on both sides of her, her eyes almost closed so that she could see only the glow of the fire, sense more than see the orb of the coal oil lamp through her almost closed lashes.

“Hush up about that,” her father said. “She can hear you.”

“Don’t nothin register with her, Big Ralph,” her mother said. Minnie was a freak, and she knew it. And maybe even the part about the devil was true, too. But there was nothing she could do about it. When she looked at herself in the shard of a mirror that one of the girls had found in a junk heap, she saw a slight girl with a narrow face, pitch black thick hair, the only thing odd about her those mismatched eyes, one the color of a dandelion leaf, the other the color of a Milk of Magnesia bottle. Her sisters were pretty, the oldest one already getting her titties, but Minnie’s body was like a stick figure, gaunt with lack of flesh, arms like twigs. Her hands were too big; half the time she didn’t know what to do with them, so they fluttered around her like startled butterflies.

One day it came to her like a splash of cold water in the face that she looked exactly like her mother. Her mother was skinny, too, but with black hair streaked with gray, pulled back in a loose bun at the back of her neck, wearing the same shapeless dresses as her daughters. But it was the same face, lean and constricted, narrow mouth, sharp cheekbones. Her mother’s eyes were both black, and she had dark circles under her eyes, where Minnie didn’t, and she was always tired and complaining that the girls didn’t help her enough, especially Minnie. Minnie saw her in the washtub, her titties flat and sagging like empty tobacco sacks. Big old black bushy hair between her slender legs. Minnie knew she would grow up to look just like that, except for the eyes. But because of her eyes, she would be a monster that nobody would ever love. Somebody hard and flinty as stone.

The old man’s cabin—one room, sparsely furnished—reeked of coal oil, sour ashes and his unwashed body. And old bacon grease that smelled rancid, and the fecal smell of boiling greens. And another slightly sweet smell that she knew was liquor, though her parents did not drink alcohol. She knew instinctively what it was; it was the devil’s brew that the old preacher talked about. She sat down at a three-legged table, one corner propped on a chair whose back was just the right height. The table was covered with crumbs and bits of food, several dirty dishes. The old man rummaged around over at the wood stove. It was hot in the closed house, oppressive with all its old-man odors and the dim, fading sunlight that seeped between the boards that now covered the windows. He had closed them when they came in, along with the door that creaked on old rusty hinges.

He came over to the table with a tin plate and fork. On the plate were a serving of turnip greens and a wedge of cornbread.

“Let us pray,” he said, “dear Jesus, this girl thanks you for her food. She’s lost on your earth, dear Jesus. Help her find her way. Amen. Eat,” he said. He set a glass of water next to it. “Sorry I ain’t got no sweet milk,” he said. She bit into the crumbling cornbread and chewed. The greens were only lukewarm but good, swimming in fatback grease. She could see his eyes watching her in the duskiness.

“You cook this?” she asked after she swallowed. The cornbread was dry and she drank some of the water, fresh well water that was cool and sweet.

“Who you think cooked it?” he said. “You don’t see nobody else around here, do you?”

“No,” she said.

“Well then, you know who cooked it then. Alexander Mossback Frill cooked it. At your service, ma’am.”

She heard the chair squeak under his weight as he sat down at the table. He just watched her as she chewed the greens. The only sounds were the scraping of her fork on the plate and the old man’s breathing, that seemed labored, like he’d just run around the yard.

“Did you know your eyes don’t go together?” he asked suddenly.

“No, I didn’t know that,” she said.

“You ought to get a job in a circus,” he said. “Folks would pay good money to see a girl with one blue eye and one green un.”

“I doubt it,” she said.

“Take my word for it,” Alexander Mossback Frill said. “I could take you down to Sarasota and sell you for a hunnert dollars.”

“Nobody’s sellin me, mister,” she said. She was gripping the fork tightly in her fist.

“Whoa, now,” Alexander Mossback Frill said. “I’s justa woofin you.”

She settled back and continued eating, aware of his eyes watching her, never leaving her. “Ain’t you gonna eat?” she asked.

“I done eat my supper,” he said.

She finished the food and pushed the plate away. “I reckon you want me to wash that up,” she said.

“Naw,” he said. She heard a scratch and a match spurted into flame; he lit a lamp on the table as the sulphur scent of the match drifted by her nose. He had a broad, flat face. The growth on his face was more whiskers than beard. The buttons were missing from the top of his undershirt. He was fishing around in a top pocket of his overalls and he came out with a wilted-looking cigarette. “You want to share this here funny cigarette with me?” he asked.

“No,” she said. She had no idea what he was talking about. She didn’t know why he called it a “funny” cigarette; it didn’t look funny to her, but sad and drooping. She just knew she didn’t want to share much of anything with him. His breath smelled like old hay that had been rained on and then left out in the sun.

“I’m sorry I ain’t got no pie nor nothin,” he said. He grinned. His eyes were watery and gray.

“That’s all right,” she said. She pushed her chair back and stood up.

“Where you goin?” he said quickly.

“I best be on my way,” she said. “I thank you for the food.”

“Hold on, now. It’s almost dark. You can’t be settin off through that swamp in the dark.”

“Swamp? I aim to stay on the road.”

“Well, the road runs right through the swamp. There’s quicksand and alligators out there, water moccasins and no tellin what all.”

Minnie knew what he was up to. She knew about it. She had seen most everything in the migrant camps. She had even seen her oldest sister doing it in the bushes with a boy. She knew he wanted to put his thing in her. She wasn’t going to let him.

“I ain’t gone hurt you, girl,” he said. “Set back down there. Talk to a old man. Talk to Alexander Mossback Frill. I ain’t doin nothin out here but just settin around waitin on Jesus.”

She sat back down but she said nothing. He peered at her. “You think I want to fuck you, don’t you?” he asked. “Dried up little pussy cat like you.”

“You better leave me alone,” she said.

“I ain’t studyin you, girl,” he said. It had hit her all at once what danger she was in. He was a big man, even if he was old. And she didn’t have any idea how far down that road was another house or a town. She guessed that she could outrun him. But it wouldn’t do much good to just run, not knowing where you were running to. “And here I was gonna offer you my own bed for the night. I was gonna sleep over yonder in that chair by the fire.”

“You can’t get in the bed with me,” she said, and he grinned. “I’ll kill you if you do,” she said. The grin faded from his face.

“You a mean little ol scrawny thing, ain’t you?” he said. “How you aim to kill me?”

“I don’t know, but I will.” She had no doubt of it. Somehow, she would. He just sat looking at her, shaking his head like he was seeing something he could hardly believe.

“Huh,” he said. “All right, then, go on out there and get et by a alligator, then.”

“I’ll sleep in the chair by the fire,” she said.

“Naw, you’ll sleep in the bed or in the swamp. Take your pick.”

“You ain’t somebody that can tell me what to do,” she said. They stared at each other. Suddenly she spit on the floor. His face was a mixture of puzzlement and anger, mystification and indignation. He looked at her, wide-eyed.

“Who the hell you think you are, Missy Cross-eyed?” he said, almost a whisper.

“I ain’t cross-eyed,” she said.

“Worse,” he said. “Cross-eyes can pop back right. You marked for life.” He sat back in the chair with a sigh of satisfaction at his own pronouncement. He put the wilted cigarette between his lips and lit it with another of the wooden matches. He inhaled deeply, held his breath. Then the smoke came out in a whoosh. “You know what this here is? This here is what the colored folks call reefer. Makes you feel good. Here,” he held out the cigarette to her.

“No, thank you,” she said.

“I reckon you’d prefer a drink of corn likker, huh? A cocktail?” He held the cigarette with his pinky finger cocked outward, a parody of someone with manners.

“No,” she said. She stood up again. “I better be goin.”

“You ain’t goin nowhere,” he said. He had a sly, crooked grin on his face. His missing teeth were like holes in a picket fence that needed painting. His gray eyes, milky and oyster-like, were fixed on her. “I got that door locked, and them windows, too,” he said, “and I got the only keys.” He patted the side of his loosely fitted overalls. She looked around. She could see the shiny new padlocks on the two windows and the door, glistening in the flickering light of the lamp. He must have done that when she was gobbling down the food. She was trapped. A gnaw of panic ate at her stomach.

“I . . . I got to pee,” she said.

“Over yonder. They’s a thunder mug by the bed.”

“Ain’t you got a privy?” she asked. She tried to keep her voice from shaking.

“Fergit it,” he said. “You ain’t goin outside.”

She could see the white chamber pot sitting on the floor across the room. She imagined that there was some of his leavings in there. Maybe what she’d been smelling was not just the turnip greens cooking. She felt her stomach shiver. Bile rose in her throat and burned the back of her mouth. She thought she was going to vomit. She stood very still, willing the nausea to go away. Finally, it did. At least for a while, she thought.

“I ain’t squattin on that chamber pot with you lookin,” she said.

“Why not? Don’t you want me to look at your little coozie?”

She ignored his question. He was still sitting at the table. She took a step or two toward the chamber pot. He was now sitting with his back toward her, looking at her over his shoulder. He was grinning. Her bladder was about to burst. She knew if she didn’t pee soon she’d wet herself. “Turn your back,” she said, “and don’t peek.”

“Awwww, I want to see your little—”

“Turn your back!” she yelled, her voice like an unexpected rifle shot. He jumped like somebody’d poked him with a stick. “I swear, if you don’t turn around and close your eyes, I’m gonna piss all over this house. Wet it down real good.”

“You do that and I’ll whup you good with a belt,” he said.

“That won’t get the piss up off the floor, will it? Nor the smell.”

He paused, as though he were thinking the situation over. “What’d you say your name was?”

“Minnie. Now turn around.”

“All right. But you better not try to run. You can’t get out of this cabin noway.” He turned himself toward the table. She walked lightly and carefully toward the chamber pot, her eyes darting here and there like a hungry hawk’s. She spied a stained and rusty wooden-handled butcher knife on a small work table. It had crumbs of cornbread clinging to it. She quickly picked it up and held it close to her body. She pulled her underpants down and sat on the chamber pot. It was clammy against her buttocks. She knew she had to hurry, because she knew he would turn around, to try to get a look at her. She slipped the knife under the quilt on the bed. He turned so quickly she thought he might have seen her, but he didn’t react if he did. He just stood up and walked two or three steps toward her. “Look at that, would you, little Miss Cross-eyes settin on the thunder mug.” She could hear her pee draining into the pot.

“Don’t come any closer,” she growled.

“Damn,” he said, “you could teach old Nora Lee a thing or two.” He took another step. The overalls fit him like a clown suit. “Do you bite like her, honey?” he asked.

“I’m warnin you,” she said.

“Come on,” he said, “let me see it. I’ll let you see mine.”

“I don’t want to see nothin you’ve got,” she spat at him.

He unbuckled his overalls at the shoulders and let them drop around his ankles. His long johns, once white, looked like mottled cream. He pulled open the flap and let his thing out. It was long and straight and pale white as a lizard’s belly. Her stomach lurched. He was shuffling toward her. She felt it coming, hot and determined, no way to dam it up, and she leaned forward and puked the turnip greens and half-digested lumps of cornbread, spewed it all out onto the rough boards of the floor. She heaved, still sitting on the pot. He jumped back, kicking his overalls away from her vomit.

“Goddam, girl,” he said. “You gonna clean that up. What the hell ails you?”

“I told you,” she said, when she could stop gasping, could get her breath back. “Stay away from me!”

“You done done it now,” he said. “Git up off’n that pot and git that dress off and git on that bed. Do like I’m tellin you now, and I won’t hafta hurt you.”

She sat for a long time, her head down. She could hear him breathing, rasping. She could smell him, rancid and acidulous. Smell the decay of her own vomit, from the floor and her own mouth. She felt dirty, filthy. She needed a dipper of water. To rinse her mouth. To wash the muck and the grime from her mouth. She tried to spit again, but her mouth was dry.

All her sad, sorry life came down to this moment, her sitting in the sallow yellow of the lamp, on a grubby chamber pot, Alexander Mossback Frill standing there pumping his hand up and down on his thing. The old man was someone she had never even seen before an hour ago, never even known of his existence, and now it seemed like he held her life and whatever future she had in his grip. Well, he didn’t. She wouldn’t let him have that. She had the power to deny him that. To deny him everything.

“All right,” she said.

“Say what?”

“I said, ‘all right.’” She pulled her underpants from around her feet and stood up. She pulled the frayed dress over her head and stood there, naked. Then she fell backwards on the bed, spreading her legs like she’d seen her sister Evalene do in the bushes with the boy. The old man’s eyes were wide and heated. He stepped out of the overalls and yanked the bottoms of his long johns down his legs, his thing wobbling, and Minnie let her hand snake beneath the quilt and grip the knife. All right. She was the Devil’s handmaiden, her mother said. She was a freak, a monster, and maybe this old man was the Devil. Maybe that was it. Well, she had an answer to it, whatever it was.

He had one knee on the bed, leaning over her. He was trying to arrange himself, get between her legs, and she couldn’t see his face. She pulled the butcher knife out, at the same time pulling him forward, off balance, and let his own weight impale him on the knife. He grunted, then screamed. He straightened up. The knife was in his chest; it had gone precisely between two of his ribs. He screamed again. He was looking at her with shocked disbelief, with a kind of incredulous disappointment. She reached up and with the heel of her hand hit the butt of the knife hard, pushing it further in. The old man looked down at it and then back up at her. His mouth was open and she saw blood welling up there, and it ran down his chin and his neck, dripping on her, burning her skin. Then his eyes rolled back in his head so that she saw only red-veined gray. He slumped, crumpled, fell heavily backward and lay flat on the floor with the knife protruding from his chest, his old thing flopped to the side, his wrinkled skin ashen and pasty like a plucked turkey. His body was as hairless as an infant’s.

Minnie lay there, very still, afraid to move, watching the old man twitch and gasp for a minute and then grow still. She could see the life going out of him, his soul—if he had one—leaving him. He was the first dead person she’d ever seen. She did not even let herself ponder the fact that she had killed him, had robbed him of whatever desperate, hardscrabble living was left to him. Not much, she thought. Not much at all.

She used the quilt to wipe the blood from her chest and belly, then got up from the bed, being careful not to touch him or step in the blood or her vomit. The old man had landed square in the middle of it, and his bright blood was seeping into it, making little rivulets in the gray-green, thicker ooze. She wrinkled her nose. The whole pile smelled to almighty hell, like the old man had already started to rot. She found her underpants on the bed, stepped into them and pulled them up over her scrawny, little-girl’s butt. She held the too large, loose-fitting dress over her head and let it drape down over her. It struck her mid-calf and turned a skinny child into a bony old woman. She stood looking down at Alexander Mossback Frill; he lay with his mouth open, his head tilted to the side, his eyes wide open and staring fixedly at something high over her head. Maybe he was looking at Jesus. Maybe Jesus had finally come for him.

She looked around the room. There was half a pone of cornbread left in a cast-iron skillet, so she got it and shoved it into an empty flour sack she found on the floor. She had nothing to put the greens in, and, anyway, when she looked into the pot at the congealed grease on the surface of the pot liquor her stomach fluttered mightily and she had to look quickly away. There was a pie safe with nothing in it. A pan with four Irish potatoes and an orange, which she crammed in with the cornbread. She put the sack next to the door.

She had to find the keys. She guessed they were in the bib of his overalls, and they were, three little brass keys on a string. The first one she tried opened the padlock on the door, and she pulled it open, hearing the old boards scrape on the floor. At the sound the hound under the stoop growled. She stepped back inside and found a stick of firewood about two feet long. She put it next to the sack. Then she found a can of kerosene and one of coal oil. She took the quilt off the bed and threw it over the old man. She doused the mattress—ticking about gone, clouds of cotton poking out here and there—and the quilt covering the old man. Then she shook both cans all around the inside of the cabin until they were empty, then flung them one by one against the wall, which set the old hound to barking. The smell of the kerosene and oil made her lightheaded and dizzy. She got the box of wooden matches off the table. She got the stick of firewood and her sack and went out onto the porch.

The night was a great dome of stars overhead. She scratched a match and threw it through the door. Immediately the flames began to lick across the floor, spreading outwardly, toward the old man and the bed. She stepped down off the narrow porch. The hound came out, growling, showing her teeth, and she hit her in the ribs with the firewood as hard as she could; the hound let out a yelp, wheeled and limped off toward the woods, whining like a baby crying.

Minnie stood across the road, watching the old cabin being consumed by the fire. The words “a cleansing fire” came to her from somewhere, maybe from the preacher back at the migrants’ camp, maybe from the collected wisdom of her memory, maybe from the accumulated experience of her own soul. The fire hissed and crackled and roared with a ferocious purpose, the flames devouring the old tinderbox cabin as though it were made of paper. She watched bright red and orange sparks shooting toward the sky, rising and mingling with the silver sparks of the stars already there.

Minnie set out walking down the sandy shoulder of the road. It had turned cold, and she shivered in the thin dress. She would walk all night. She would keep walking for the rest of her life if she had to.