Ferny was still only twenty years old, yet the older strangeness that I'd seen in his eyes and the shape of his face since Larkin died had quickened its rate. Even in a peaceful situation like the Slades' dining room, Fern looked on the edge

of total exhaustion. Every cell of his face, on the backs of his worn hands, seemed to be silently calling for care--some detailed affectionate outside attention from another human being that could ease his mind and refill a heart that was draining fast.

To my real sadness I knew I couldn't be Fern's salvation. I had my own needy souls in Palmer and August Slade. But I hoped my brother could find some kind girl and not stay alone which he was doing then. What I didn't know-- didn't know for years--was that Fern had already found the drug that would make him a slave, and a solitary slave, for the rest of his short life.

When he looked up smiling from his empty plate, I asked what turned out to be the wrong question. Remember, I brought the roof down on myself. Ferny hadn't come all this way to harm me. I said "How about I put August down near Miss Olivia, and you and I walk down to the river while the sun's warm?"

Fern nodded. "I was hoping you'd feel strong enough."

I told him "Oh yes," then realized how hard I'd dreaded the river till now. It had to be a reflection of how sad Ferny looked that I'd thought of a walk toward the water again. Anyhow I stood up to settle young August in the midst of a box made of big feather pillows on the wide bra.s.s bed in Major's room that opened off the kitchen. Palmer was nowhere in sight or hearing but the way I felt then, that was no burden.

For all the frost from the previous night, the sun was very nearly too warm. And on the way down, Ferny took off his black coat and left it on a low tree limb.

I said "Some bird may mess on that." Fern laughed. "That would just about put the lid on it!"

"What lid on what?" I said.

Fern said "The tin lid on this day--all that's been wrong with it and is getting worse fast."

I made a quick choice not to press him on that. I forced my brain to concentrate on the ground I was covering, the actual dirt that Larkin and I had walked on--very nearly the last piece of Earth he would ever touch alive. I kept expecting the place itself to draw tears from me. But we got

ourselves, both thoroughly dry-eyed, to the major's long old brick terrace.

Fern even led us to the V-shaped bench where Lark and I had sat, and we settled there to watch the great river go its endless way. For a long time not a word was said. I was thinking I ought to say something for Lark, maybe even tell him my baby's name. But no words came and I didn't hunt them.

It was maybe five minutes before Ferny spoke. He said "I think I'm about to hurt you."

I thought he meant by recalling the past. I said "Don't worry. I made my peace with Lark way back. He was living his fate."

Fern waited again, then finally said "What I know has nothing to do with Lark."

I turned to face him, but he wouldn't face me. I could tell he was watching that spot on the far bank where he and Palmer and Larkin had stood in the stunning light before they swam back.

I said "Is it true?--what you think you know?" Ferny had never harmed any soul but his own poor self. With all the strangeness in the air today, the last thing I expected was meanness from my younger brother.

But at last he turned and said very clearly "You don't know where Palmer is now, do you?"

"This minute, up here? No, he's walking off his temper. You know how he does. He'll be fine by dark."

"But you and August may not be."

I could literally see those seven words come through Fern's lips, and each one hit me like a slug of lead, but I still had no idea what he meant. I knew I shouldn't ask and I didn't.

So Fern said "Is your body in good shape?" I told him "To the best of my knowledge." What on Earth did he mean?

"You're not by any chance pregnant, I hope?" Now he was watching the river again.

"Lord no," I said. "We're in no rush." Fern said "Then before you even think of a new child, get Dr. Rogers to test your blood."

I honestly wondered if Ferny had somehow gone truly crazy in his weeks in Raleigh. These last three years had been hard for him every way. But I held my hands out palm up toward him. "See, my blood's red." My skin was

pink, not purple or bruised.

Fern barely checked me before he finished the wreck he was building. He said "Palmer's s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g a Negro woman two miles from here. Has been for years. Surely hasn't quit now." Then at last he faced me full-blast in the eyes.

I'd never heard a man use any such verb in a woman's presence, and I felt my skull all but literally split in two. No maul or ax could have split it faster. I couldn't speak.

I must have looked so badly crushed that Fern tried to backtrack and help me a little. He said "I've known that was true as recently as when August was born. Palmer may be doing better. But if he's not, you're in deep trouble more ways than one." In those days twenty years before penicillin, white people were terrified of syphilis --not terrified enough though to make it disappear.

I'd already known that Fern's claim was true, known it the moment he made his first thrust. This try at throwing me a wet sugar-t.i.t--that Palmer might be doing better now--was almost worse than the news itself. I got to my feet and said "Who else in the world knows this?"

Fern said "Miss Olivia. And maybe Coy."

"Is the woman kin to Coy?"

Fern could actually smile. He said "Everybody between here and Spain is kin to Coy." When I didn't laugh he said "Her daughter-- one of them anyhow. Or so Coy claims; she claims six or eight."

"Not Castille please?"

Fern smiled. "Castille wouldn't trip Palmer's eye, would she--wall-eyed as she is?"

I knew at once that it had to be true, and I took eight or ten strides uphill toward the house. When Fern didn't follow I turned back and begged one final kindness. "Don't tell this to another soul please."

As Fern faced me then, he looked like the last angel Eve ever saw as she left Eden. He nodded Yes and raised his right hand swearing silence. And he kept that silence the rest of his short life.

All the way to the house, I thought--not just that my world had collapsed around a dirty lie--but that my

favorite brother, a boy I'd loved since the time he was born when I was three, had forced the pain on me in the midst of a sad day and for no purpose but meanness, for anger at Palmer and somehow at me for being the innocent occasion of his friend Larkin's death. As the later years pa.s.sed, I slowly came to realize that Ferny thought he was telling me urgent news for my good--not to end my marriage and leave me helpless but to make me deal with a tangled truth and thereby strengthen myself for the far worse trials I'd have to face later.

When I reentered the house through the back door, the whole place was hung in the thickest silence I'd ever heard. Not even the usual creak of old boards. I glanced through the kitchen door as I pa.s.sed.

Coy was taking her usual nap at the scrubbed work table. She'd pull up her chair, lay her head on her hands and sit there upright but dead to the world for exactly however long she could spare till the time came to walk out back with her ancient ax and kill however many chickens she'd need to dress and cook for supper.

No sign of Palmer in the dim front parlor, no trace of life in the separate Office when I looked out the window and strained to see light or any movement. The need to hear some word about Palmer, good or bad, was rising in me.

So I managed to climb the narrow stairs without a sound and to pause in Miss Olivia's open door. She'd taken off her shoes and was lying, otherwise fully dressed, on her own broad bed with August loosely held in her right arm. They were both asleep. I stood there long enough to be sure of that. Then it struck me as curious that, so far into my life with the Slades, this was the first time I'd seen Miss Olivia so much as shut an eye on daylight. I'd have never disturbed her if I hadn't felt this pressing a need. So once I'd waited a long time, I said her name quietly, hoping not to wake August.

At once she looked toward me, but so did the boy. All three of us waited to know What next? Then August decided not to wail but to turn his attention to his own wondrous hands of which he seldom tired. So Miss Olivia rose with a minimum of effort, stacked pillows to either side of August and told him firmly not to move. Then she went to her mirror, stroked her

hair back, cleared her eyes and turned to me. I don't know how I must have looked by then. But at the sight of me, Miss Olivia pointed behind me across the landing to the opposite room, and we both went there.

It was the small room that had been Major's before his first stroke. And it was still as bare as a tent --just a low single bed, a black leather trunk and one straight chair. Miss Olivia sat on the edge of the bed and motioned for me to take the chair.

I walked round behind it but stood with both my hands on the chair back. When all she did was watch me in silence, I finally said "Where is my husband please?"

With no visible sign of malice on her face, Miss Olivia first said "Who would that be?" It seemed like a genuine question to herself. But then she studied my meaning in her mind till she finally said "I can't guarantee it but I think you know."

In a hot quiet rush I told her I hadn't known a word about trouble till Ferny just now told me by the river.

She nodded slowly. "I asked Fern to drive up here today for that very reason. You had to know and I knew you wouldn't accept it from me." Her mouth seemed to slip from her iron control for too long an instant, and her lips made a quick smile.

I asked how long she'd known about it. And then she waited a painfully long time, rubbing the flats of her palms on her knees, before she could say "Since two days after we buried Larkin."

"I was here though--"

"I said two days. Lark was buried on Sunday. You were with your family that Sat.u.r.day, remember?" When I agreed she said "Palm vanished that morning and I didn't see him again till maybe an hour before you and your family got back up here for the actual funeral. Since he'd left me in such a terrible lurch, I demanded he tell me where he'd been. He tried to spare me, but I can smell a lie from miles off. I stood my ground, and then Palmer admitted he had a woman."

When Miss Olivia had paused for breath, she looked to her right side and pointed out the window. "She's that Pittman girl who lives up--"

I stopped her. "Don't tell me that. I doubt I can stand to know."

Miss Olivia said "You'd better stand it or else it won't stop. You must root her out by name, with details, this very day. Either that or you and that child are set for long years of the kind of misery I've known by the hour since I took Major's offer and entered this house like a fool even older than you are now and at least as blind."

Naturally that hit me hard. I don't know what I'd have said or done if I hadn't been virtually paralyzed for nearly a minute. My first thought is always to hunch down as low as a body can go and crawl through the hail till somewhere down the road I can stand up again and take my bearings. But we both heard a man's footsteps downstairs, and we stalled in place.

At last Miss Olivia walked to the landing and called down "Son?"

Ferny said "No ma'm."

And August broke into his rare alarming wail.

Before I went to him I faced Miss Olivia a final time and said "It's Coy's daughter, isn't it?"

Miss Olivia said "I've never been sure. Sometimes Coy claims her, sometimes not. See, Negroes don't think of kinship as we do. At times they claim everybody they know. Then they'll cut back to nothing and say they're alone as a hawk in heaven." Then she stood to her own full height. "Would to Christ we'd left every last one of them in their African homes. All we've done is use them to ruin our lives."

August wailed again.

So I went straight toward him. And I'm forced to confess that, at the sight of his wrenched helpless face, I thought very plainly Sweetheart, I wish to Christ you'd never been. Then I could run.

That was near mid-afternoon. Palmer walked through the back door at five o'clock, looking just like the man who'd left in the midst of dinner, only calmer. His clothes were spotless. He smelled like himself. The first thing he said was, since it was near dark we had to head back. So all we had to do was gather up August's things, hug Miss Olivia and climb in the car.

As I ducked my head to enter my seat, Miss Olivia called out to me from the porch "Oh Anna, hold on."

I thought she meant Hold on in this storm. And I tried to let her see that I would, just the strength of my face.

But she turned and actually ran into the house. What she'd meant was Wait.

Palmer told me "Stand there. She forgot to give you something."

So I obeyed him and, when Miss Olivia had trotted back to me, she held out the beautiful tortoise-sh.e.l.l comb and silver hairbrush I'd admired on her dresser so many times. She said "Happy birthday" and then her eyes filled.

Mine stayed bone dry but I took her gifts and truly felt for once in my life that I might yet earn them if, sometime in the next ten seconds or hundred years, my whole head didn't explode and spread in a thousand directions with killing power. We were halfway back before I realized I hadn't told Ferny goodbye as we left. He'd been out of sight, though his car was still there, and I'd flat forgot him. There wouldn't be many more chances for that.

Hours later back at Betsy Magee's, I wasn't altogether sure I hadn't blown up and destroyed everybody anywhere near me. It seemed that we'd made the trip in silence with August sleeping every inch of the way and then that I'd fed him again and laid him down while I put together a cold chicken supper for Palmer and me. We seemed to eat it anyhow, even I who'd felt I could never eat again.

After that I sat at the kitchen table and carefully turned the worn collar of one of Palmer's work shirts before he rose up from reading the paper and said "Bedtime." Every move I or Palmer or August had made in those slow hours seemed made by a ghost or a ghost in a dream.

It was only when I went in to undress and found my husband still awake, propped up and reading The Life of Thomas Jefferson (a book I knew he'd read twice before) that I fully realized all this was real. This whole past day with its grief and its news and what now felt like raw devastation was as real as the plainest average Sunday. The first symptom that stunned me was blindness. Actual blindness came on me. All I could see was a pure blank screen clear as any washed blackboard with no sign of an answer and,

G.o.d knows, no map of where to turn. It scared me worse than anything in years.

Then in maybe a minute the blindness began to break up at the edges, and the first thing I saw was a snapshot of August beside me on the wall. From the start he'd been the keenest watcher of the world I've yet known. He'd turn those huge eyes on you and stare, then give a long blink as if to photograph what he'd learned. I glanced back to Palmer.

Cold as the previous night had been, tonight was much warmer. And Palmer lay on the top of the cover in nothing but his pajama pants--no shirt, bare-chested. He even looked up and offered his smile.

I faced the closet and wondered how I could manage undressing myself in plain view and pulling a nightgown over my sick head in the vicinity of this much treachery, not to mention the nearness of Palmer's skin that looked more awful in my eyes now than it ever had when covered with ticks from his days in the woods. The problem froze in place for a while till Palmer must have noticed.

In a level voice so quiet that August wouldn't be roused or Betsy through these porous walls, he said "Did Mother or Ferny upset you?"

That freed me enough, not to turn and face him but at least to peel to my slip, pull my gown on and finish undressing myself beneath it. Before I turned I answered his question. "They told me a good deal --I won't lie to you."

"And it threw you badly?"

I faced Palmer then through the ten feet of dim air moving between us.

I said "I don't even know if I'm alive." It was merely the truth, not one false syllable.

"You're alive, yes ma'm. We proved it last night right here in these sheets." Palmer pressed his whole left hand into the mattress.

I said "I felt alive but that was last night." Warm as tonight was I suddenly shook with a quick hard chill. "You felt like a human then too."