“Can you help me? Show me how to touch the living?”
“Y’all are all the same. Always finding me. Trying to hurt me with your questions.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Don’t you?” she say. “Want to hurt someone, though.”
She don’t know me. How can she know that?
“Forgive,” she say. “There’s the answer to your question. If you ever plan to go home, you got to forgive.”
“This is home.”
“For now. But one day it ain’t gon’ be, that’s the truth. You’ll be back here like the others. Asking how to keep away that hellfire you feel when you try to live somebody else’s life. Somebody else’s body. You’re all selfish!”
“You don’t know nothin about me. Answering questions you ain’t been asked. I ain’t here for me.”
“The girl you follow, she’ll die one day, too. Everything that lives do. Then what reason will you have to be here? What you gon’ do then?”
“She’s my daughter! I won’t ever leave her.”
“That’s what you think now. It’s not true. One day you will leave her, by your choice. It’s what you’re supposed to do. At some point, every mother has to let her child go.”
I don’t want to talk to her no more.
“You got to forgive. If you want to help her. If you want to be stronger. Whoever it is, you’ve got to let it go. .”
“You don’t even know what that man did to her! I ain’t giving him shit except what he deserve.”
“Don’t matter. ’Cause don’t nobody deserve forgiveness. Nobody. Not even you.”
“What you know?”
“It’s a gift. Not for him. Forgiveness is a gift for you. For the girl you follow.”
Richard calls from the top of the stairs, “Bessie! Bring a cup of tea to my study. I’ll be there momentarily.”
“Yes’sa,” Bessie say and hurries to get a new cup down from the cupboard. She takes a small pouch, smaller than the inside of her palm, and packs it with fragrant leaves. She drops it into his cup and pours hot water over it.
“Revenge ain’t for you to do,” she say. “What’s done is done. Ain’t no justice. Only grace. You gotta decide if you want to help her.”
“Of course I want to help her.”
“Then leave her be.” Richard’s footsteps come down the stairs and Bessie leaves me standing in the kitchen, alone.
She’s wrong.
She cain’t know. Not about me, not this burning, not what I’m gon’ do to George.
She don’t even know me. She’s probably not even a mother. Probably. Advice as old as time: Don’t never take advice about raising a child from somebody who ain’t got none. They cain’t even fathom the kind of crazy a good parent is able to ascend to while still seeming normal on the outside.
There ain’t even no children here. So she can save her advice for somebody else.
But. .
I don’t know how she see me.
24 / APRIL 1863, Tallassee, Alabama
A WARENESS HAPPENS IN Stages.
Not all at once.
It comes by age.
Experience.
Or ’cause somebody told you something and you believed.
Before then, you didn’t know better. Couldn’t judge the consequence right.
But I cain’t judge this.
I cain’t figure how Bessie could see me. And how she might know something. Maybe what she told me is true. That walking into others to touch the living could bring about my end. I’ve felt the pain. So if it’s true, it could make it so I don’t spend another day with Josey. And I want to believe Josey’d feel the difference if I weren’t here.
I’ve got to count the cost.
RICHARD SITS AT his desk thumbing through his papers. Even from here, as I drift in his hallway looking in, I can feel his body warm, like running a hand over a candle. Being in Annie’s got me weak. And if what Bessie says is true, I’m deciding that I ain’t ready to die.
I pass Annie on the other side of the porch door, making my way home to Josey. But see Annie there, awkward looking, hunched down inside her blanket, staying out of Richard’s sight. She cain’t let him see her. Cain’t have him come out and give her final words that’ll end everything.
The porch door creaks and Bessie’s in the doorway. Got the door only slightly opened and she’s standing square in the middle. Richard’s mistress is standing behind her. Bessie say, “Ma’am, Miss Kathy’s here to see you. It’s all right I bring her out?”
Without waiting for permission, Kathy shoulders Bessie to the left and brushes her pregnant belly against her on the way out. “Good mornin, Miss Annie,” she say, wide-mouthed and loud. Annie’s eyes close directly and she sits up straight. “Mind if I come outside wit’cha?” Kathy don’t wait for an answer to that, either, before she starts lowering herself into the swing next to Annie. Annie say, “Please. .” and holds her hand out to the cushioned chair next to the door. “Better on your hips.”
“Thank you,” Kathy say, smiling. She shuffles across the porch, holding her back with one hand, then thuds back into the white wicker chair.
“Bessie?” Annie say. “I’ll have more tea now.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” Kathy say.
“Yes’m,” Bessie say to both of ’em.
Annie stiffens when she sees Richard staring at her from inside the house. She puts on a smile big enough for him to see.
Kathy waves and smiles at Richard through the window and lies back in her chair. “Ain’t nothing like an Alabama winter,” Kathy say, loud as before. “It can’t decide if it’ll rain or snow. Good thing it don’t do nothing. That’s what I call patience. Don’t nobody got none where I’m from. Miss’ippi. There, if the weather cain’t decide what it want to do, it does something anyway. Slush,” she laugh. “Cain’t hardly do nothing with slush. Cain’t work in slush. Children cain’t play in slush. When they go sliding in slush, water sprays this way and that. Makes grass flat. In Mis’sippi. .”
“Do you mind if we sit quietly for a while?” Annie say, turning her head in such a way that Richard can still see her smiling.
“Oh. . yes ma’am.” Kathy lays her head back, closes her eyes. “Cain’t even have a doggone snowball fight in slush.” She pauses, “Oh. I’ll be quiet now.”
Kathy starts tapping her fingernails on the armrests, clicking and pecking. “What is this, wicker?”
“It is wicker,” Annie say.
“Sure is chilly out here,” Kathy say. “Mind if I share your blanket?”
Annie pulls her blanket tighter under her chin, but keeps her smile on. Bessie comes out the house with two steaming cups of tea and a feather-filled blanket for Kathy. She lays it around the pregnant girl’s shoulders but Kathy don’t thank her.
When Bessie goes, Kathy whispers to Annie, “I woulda spit in my face last night, too.”
Annie’s smile leaves her.
“Maybe we can try again,” Kathy say, with one hand out. “Be friends.”
Annie crowds her fingers around her cup and nods. Grins. Kathy say, “Most people call me Kathy, ’cept your husband. He likes to call me Katherine. But my good friends call me Kat or Kathy or Pooty Kat. I respond to most things, though.”
Annie looks beyond Kathy as she talks and searches inside the window where Richard was, while Kathy takes in the fullness of Annie — her poise, even sitting, the soft lines of her mature beauty, the fall of her auburn hair. . the silver wedding band on her finger.
“In Mis’sippi,” Kathy starts again, “summer got three kinds of hot that time of the year. The kind you can sleep in, the kind you cain’t. And the kind you get pregnant in. That’s when I met your husband.”