The Rathmans were the only ones near us on the north, but down to the south the Ramseys lived on a thin and brush-filled farm. The Ramseys were Negroes and the place had a starved and rocky look. All of the animals were gaunt and bony, and even the pigs looked empty like a balloon gone slack;—even the little shoats were black and small with huge, fox-pointed ears. Christian Ramsey was tall and thin with a soiled color, and his wife was named Lucia. They owned a pack of spotted and ghostly hounds, and they had five children—three of their own, and two adopted—one that was almost white but with great lips, and they had not wanted it but nobody else did either, so they kept the child and, Father said, treated it better than the rest, either from fear or pity, he never could quite decide. But we could not ask the Ramseys, nor would they have wanted to come if we had. And the farmers beyond were only names.
We planned the party ourselves, how it was to be and what was to be made, and I taught Merle a long poem to say, and kept her in the chicken house for an hour a day sitting on the bran bin to recite it off by heart. We called it a ballad and it was an awful thing, but the words sounded rhyming at the end and there was a story in it, so it may have been one after all. Kerrin and I made it up and it ended with a death, but since Father wanted to put away all thought of death and never would let us speak of it, I left out the end in teaching it to her. Kerrin did not know this, though, because Merle would not learn it from her or be alone with her since the time she was locked in the potato cellar and left in the dark for hours. But she trusted me so much that sometimes it felt like a heavy weight on the shoulders, although wonderful and something like being God. She did not mind having to learn it, and sat there with her black-ribbed legs dangling over the barrel brim, her fat cheeks red with cold, and a piece of damp hair stuck out from under the cap with the big knob on its peak. She’d say it over nine times or ten with gusto, and then the rest of the times with patience and precision. It was about a farmer, and we hoped that Father would laugh because it was supposed to be funny in some places, but we knew that Mother would anyway. Merle was excited about it and kept counting off the days, and would look at me in a full and secret way.
Kerrin wouldn’t tell us what it was she was going to do, but went off each day by herself in the woods. “It’s going to be good,” was all she’d say. “You-all will be shamed.” Between milking and the supper she would be gone off alone and come back sometimes singing. She had a good voice, but it was too loud and shouting and made her reluctant of people hearing it, and she would stop when she came up past the barn. . . . As for me, I thought to make Dad a clay basket like the Indians did and stained with something—I didn’t quite know what, beet-juice or ink perhaps—and give it to him in place of the rusty tin he used for carrying up the eggs. I spent days making it. First half-bushel size, and clay on a wire to make the handle that went shattering into bits as soon as lifted. But I made it over again three times and each time smaller, till finally it was firm and held together but was scarcely big enough to carry even a sparrow egg inside. Still, it looked like a basket anyway, and I wished it was for Mother, knowing that she would like anything we made,—even a pillow that Merle had stuffed with chicken feathers not so clean and musty-smelling. It was nice, though, to think of Dad’s getting it, because it was a good pot and stained with a design of red things that were something like herons, only the juice had spread and blurred their edges around,—and because he was harder to please and so seemed more kindly when he was.
I liked the hour I spent there each day by the bank with the faint clay-cold smell of the water; there were small holes all along the edge, which might have been borings of a woodcock’s bill, but spiders hid in them and caught the cabbage-butterflies that came in thin and yellow clouds to suck the clay. Sometimes I’d come down in the middle of the mornings, and hear the frost dripping off the sycamores and woodpecker’s tap along the bark, because it was so quiet; and twice a red fox sneaked across the road.
But one time I heard Kerrin go by singing to herself. She couldn’t see me underneath the bank, and when the singing had gotten farther off—it was about Rizpah and her son hung up in chains—I took off my cap so that the knob wouldn’t come up first, and stuck my head over the bank and saw her running and singing. Her red hair was wild and not covered up as it should have been because spring is the dangerous weather, Father said. (He never went without a hat on top of his head, although what good a man’s hat did I couldn’t see,—leaving his ears to blow about exposed.) I almost called out and told her she should have put something on her head, but the words stayed in my mouth, and she went off around the hill. I felt queer, seeing her alone that way. Something about the way she ran and sang, as though not a person like us any more. Kerrin had never been like us much, even before, in other ways. She did things sudden and wildly, or not at all, and ate sometimes like a dog starved out and savage, chewing and mumbling, and at other times would only pick at her food and stare out the window while Merle and I ate patiently all that was put in front of us. She’d sleep at odd times and hours, stretched out like a lynx in sun, and creep out of the house at night to wander around in the marshes. I knew because I had seen her come sneaking back at dawn, with her feet and legs half-frozen and covered with frosty mud. And this time she seemed more strange than ever, as though not belonging even to herself. I felt queer. I didn’t know what it was then, but it was the beginning of fear. Fear that life wasn’t safe and comfortable, or even just tight and hard, but that there was an edge of darkness which was neither, and was something which no one could ever explain or understand. And that day I left the pot unfinished, and went back to the house where things, if not always good, were plain enough, at least, and not hard to understand.
Dad’s birthday was in April on the ninth, but we were ready a long time before, and the days, though full and overfull, seemed to move no faster than a stone. Merle did not ask Is this the day? each morning, but Mother could see how she was fearful of not recognizing it, and so taught her how to mark the days on the calendar each night. We planned what we should give him for supper, and wished that they could be things we had raised ourselves, but the sweet potatoes and Irish were still unborn and no vegetable more than barely underground as yet. But there were to be corn-pudding piles and a three-layered cake oozed out with icing and as many candles as it would hold, but not fifty-seven as there should have been or the cake would have slumped and fallen flat; though Merle said we ought to stick them around the sides to make it look like a porcupine on fire. Kerrin told her it couldn’t be done and to leave baking to those who knew about it;—by which she didn’t mean me, I guess, since the apple bullets-of-dough I made one night, nor herself either, because though liking to spade and heave earth around, she had no interest in what came out of it, and broke the carrots off instead of pulling them with persuasion or troweling. —But she probably meant that Mother would do the best, which was true enough in more ways than cooking.
THE ninth of April came on a day of corn ploughing. We had battered about all night scarcely asleep, and so heard Dad