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