“Uh-huh,” B. J. said and turned back to help Barney Lee who had climbed halfway up but had gotten stuck with one knee bent and the other leg fully extended.
“Why,” Barney Lee addressed the man in the long coat, “Why you standing that way with your arm sticking way up like that?”
“Well sir,” said Sully and turned his head to look up along his sleeve. “It seem like it help me to stand like this.” The shine made a ripple in a new little path in his head, and he had to lift his hand higher to keep things whole and steady.
“I just wish you’d listen to that, Barney Lee,” B. J. said in a tight voice.
“What? I don’t hear nothing.”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Here’s this old nig—colored gentleman—come walking up in the dead of night, and what do you hear from them dogs? Not a thing.”
Everybody stopped to listen and had to agree that the dog pen was showing no sign of alert.
“And I thought the training was going along so good the last few days. I’m getting real discouraged about Christian Guard Dogs.” B. J. sighed deeply, kicked at the ground, and coughed at the dust hanging in the air. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“However,” said Sully, “what it is I come up here and bother you white folks about it be up yonder in the pasture.” He swung a hand back in the direction he had come, almost lost the hold he was maintaining against the steady pull of the earth, and staggered a step or two before he found it again.
“Say it helps you to stand like that?” asked Barney Lee and shyly stuck one arm above his head until it pointed in the direction of the Little Dipper. “Reckon it helps circulation or something?”
“Didn’t make one peep,” said B. J. “I didn’t hear bark one, much less a growl.”
“Yessir, white folks, it up yonder in the pasture. What I come here to your pulp tent for.” Sully’s arm was getting heavy so he ventured to lean against the pole supporting the clothesline and found that helped him some. Things were tilted, but not moving.
“A few minute ago, I was outside my house walking to that patch of cane. You know, tending to my business and that’s when I heard her yonder.”
“Who?” said B. J., making conversation as he looked over at the dark outline of the Christian Guard Dog pen as though he could see each individual Doberman and shepherd.
“Miz MayBelle.”
“MayBelle? Aunt MayBelle Holt?” B. J. turned back to look at the little black man leaned up against the pole. “You say you heard her up in the nigger quarters?”
“Naw sir, white folks, not rightly in the quarters. She in that back pasture lying down in that fire ant bed.”
“The fire ant bed?”
“Yessir, old Sully was in the quarters and she in the bed of fire ants.”
“What’s Aunt MayBelle doing in the fire ant bed? Did she fall into there?”
“I don’t know about that,” said Sully and adjusted his pointing arm more precisely with relation to the night sky. “I only just seed her in there a talking to them boosters.”
“Come on, Brother B. Lee,” B. J. said and broke into a trot toward the back fence. “We got to see what’s going on. Them things will eat her up.”
“Thata’s just the very thing I thought,” said Sully, lurching away from the clothesline pole, and stumbling into a run after B. J., his gesturing right arm the only thing keeping him away from another solid lick from the ground. “I thought it sure wasn’t no good idea for a white lady to lie down in amongst all them biting things.”
“I’m coming, B. J.,” called Barney Lee, a few steps behind Sully but close enough that the old man’s flapping coat-tail sent puffs of dust up into his face. As he ran through the fence at the bottom of the hill, he raised an arm above his head and immediately felt his wind get better and his speed increase a step or two.
“I believe,” Barney Lee said between breaths to the tilted sidling figure moving ahead of him, “that it’s doing me good, too. Pointing my arm up at the sky like this.”
“Yessir, white folks,” Sully said to the words coming from behind him, fighting as best he could against the yearn of the earth beneath his feet. It was going to get him at the stile again, he knew, but he had to live with that fact. I just get them fat white folks to the ant bed, I quit, he said to the clouds of dust floating up before him. You can have all of it then. I give it on up. He ran on, changing to a new tack every few feet, the pointing arm dead in the air above him, and listened to the shine rumble and slide through all the crannies of his head.
“It’s gonna be hard times in the morning,” he said out loud and aimed at the fence stile coming up. It most always is.
You’ve got to say something to me, she said. You don’t talk to me right. Now you got to say something to me.
I’m talking to you, he said. I’m talking right now to you. What you want me to say? This?
And he did a thing that made her eyes close and the itching start in her feet and begin to move up the back of her legs and across her belly and along her sides down each rib. Oh, she said, it’s all in my shoulders and the back of my neck.
She let him push her further back until her head touched the green and gold bedspread, and one of her hands slipped off his shoulder and fell beside her as though she had lost all the strength in that part of her body. The arm was numb, but tingling like it did in the morning sometimes when she had slept wrong on it and cut off the circulation of blood. She tried to lift it and something like warm air ran up and down the inside of her upper arm and settled in her armpit under the bunched-up sleeve of the dress.
No, she said, it’s hot and I’m sweating. It’s going to get all over her bed. It’ll make a wet mark, and it won’t dry and she’ll see it.
He said no and mumbled something else into the side of her throat that she couldn’t hear. Something was happening to the bottoms of her feet and the palms of her hands. It was crawling and picking lightly at the skin. Just pulling it up a little at a time and letting it fall back and doing it over again until it felt like little hairs were raising up in their places and settling back over and over.
Talk to me, she said into his mouth. Say some things to me. You never have said a thing yet to me.
I’ll say something to you, he said, and moved against her in a way that caused her to want to try to touch each corner of the bed.
If I put one foot at the edge down there and the other one at the other corner and then my hands way out until I can touch where the mattress comes to a point, then if somebody was way up above us and could look down just at me and the way I’m laying here, it would look like two straight lines crossing in the middle. That makes an X when two lines cross. And in the middle where they cross is where I am.
Please, she said to the little burning spots that were beginning to start at each end of the leg of the X and to move slowly towards the intersection, come reach each other. Meet in the middle where I am.
But the little points of fire, like sparks that popped out of the fireplace and made burn marks on the floor, were taking their own time, stopping at one place for a while and settling there as if they were going to stay and not go any further and then when something finally burned through and broke apart, moving up a little further to settle a space closer to the middle of the X.
Just a word or two, she said to him, that’s all I want you to say.
He said something back to her, something deep in his throat, but her ears were listening to a dim buzz that had started up deep inside her head, and she couldn’t