Edward Jones - The Known World

Delphie stepped out of the cabin. She was not smiling because she was not very happy. Men like him never lived for very long. They died and were forgotten the week after the next. “I would not want that, Stamford. I would not want that at all.”

“Sure you do. You sure do. I’m tellin you I got what ails you, honey. Got that and more to spare.” In the wintertime, the man had advised the boy, you can wrap yourself up in all that young stuff, and then you don’t need to come out till springtime. Stay hibernatin like them bears. “Just gimme one chance to show you what I gots, honey. Just one chance.”

Delphie looked up and down the lane. The rain was gentle right then, not hard, and she could see that just by how the sparse patches of grass did not lean and fuss when the rain hit them. Her eyes came back to Stamford and she realized that she pitied him more than she had ever pitied any human being. More than even a child lying dead and motherless in the road. She remembered what he called out in his dreams in the days after Clement beat him.

Stamford reached up and touched her breast. Now the titty, the man had advised the boy, is the real talker on a woman, you see what I mean. You have to tell it what you want even when that damn young stuff’s mouth is saying something opposite a what you want. Talk to the titty first and the door will open just like that.

Delphie took his hand from her breast, firmly, and Stamford let it drop down to his side. His blood had soaked seven large rags. With his other hand Stamford wiped the rain from his face, but it was all for nothing because he was standing in the open and more rain quickly covered his face. Finally, he saw what she saw. The rain stopped for about ten seconds and, his mouth still locked in a grin, Stamford looked around to see what the new silence was all about. When he returned, she was waiting. “I would not ever be with you,” she said. The rain came back. Delphie stepped closer to him and for just that moment he was hopeful, forgetting her words and taking in the smell of her. Delphie put her hands to his shoulders, held on to them, taking the full measure of him. “You too heavy a man for me to carry, Stamford. I done carried heavy men and I know how they can break your back. I ain’t got but this one back and I don’t want it broke again, least not before it can see fifty years.” She stepped back, turned and went into her home. She was used to nursing people, trying to heal them, and so it was a long moment before she shut the door, and when she did shut it, it made no sound.

Stamford stepped fully out into the lane, into mud. The man, the adviser, was silent in his head. He walked absently away from where he was originally headed and trudged through the mud toward Caldonia’s house. As the rain came harder, he understood that he was actually walking away from his own cabin and he turned around and through the heavy rain tried to make out just which cabin was his own. He went down the lane. The mud pulled at him. He walked on and gradually became aware of his surroundings. He passed Celeste and Elias’s cabin. He stopped. It’s rainin, he thought. Damn if it ain’t rainin cats and dogs out here.

He stood there for a very long time, and the longer he stood, the more he sank. All the heart he had for living in the world began to leave him. He could feel the life running down his chest, his arms and legs, doing something for the ground that it had never been able to do for him. If God had asked him if he was ready right then, there would have been only one answer. “Just take me on home. Or spit me down to hell, I don’t care anymore. Just take me away from this.”

He stepped on, slowed down by the mud.

As he neared his cabin, another door opened and Delores, seven years old, came out of her place with a bucket in her hand. Once she hit the lane, with Stamford only three feet away, she slipped and fell into the mud.

“You gotdamn little fool,” Stamford said, helping the child up. “What you doin out here in all this mess?”

“Goin to get some blueberries,” Delores said. In one part of the world, way off to the right of the cabins, lightning came and went quickly before the man or the girl knew what had happened.

“What?” Stamford said. “Ain’t you got the sense God gave you, girl?” If he knew her name, he had long ago forgotten it.

“I do,” Delores said, “so you just leave me lone.” She and Tessie, Celeste and Elias’s oldest, were the only children in the lane who were not afraid of Stamford, did not care about his nails and muddy-water diet. “Just leave me be.”

Stamford handed her the bucket. “Where in God’s hell you goin in all this rain, girl?”

“I done told you: I’m huntin up blueberries,” she said. Neither the man nor the girl noticed Delores’s brother, four-year-old Patrick, standing in the doorway of their cabin. His sister had told him to stay inside with the door closed until she got back. “I’m goin to pick some blueberries,” Delores said. “Now just leave me lone so I can go.” She wiped the rain from her eyes and blinked up at Stamford.

“Blueberries?” He looked around at the cabins as if the blueberry patch was just a few steps away. “Where your mama?”

“Up at the house helpin out.”

“Where your daddy?” Stamford asked.

“Over to the barn helpin with that sick horse.”

“Lord, Lord,” he said. “Hand me that damn thing. Give that bucket here.”

“I need it for my blueberries. Me and my brother want blueberries.” She looked at her cabin and saw her brother. “Ain’t I told you to stay inside?” she hollered at Patrick, who hunched his shoulders, then stuck his tongue out at her, something his father had told him never to do. Patrick slammed the door shut.

“I’ll get the damn blueberries and you just go in the house,” Stamford said. The thunder and lightning were closer, and Stamford was now aware that there was more than rain about. He looked at the girl and the bucket. “I’ll get the damn things.” He knew he was going to die but he thought this little thing might provide him with a nothing stool way off in the corner of heaven that nobody cared about. That corner of heaven reserved for fools, people too stupid to come out of the rain. People got to that corner by heaven’s back door.

“You promise?” Delores said.

“If I said it, I damn sure meant it. Now get on in the house fore you catch your death.” The girl went inside.

Stamford emptied out what rain had collected in the bucket since the girl left her home. He walked toward where he knew the blueberries were, again the only person in the lane. He had heard of a poison plant one man had taken to get to the other side, but because Stamford had never thought he would want to die with all the young stuff on the earth, he had not taken note of what the plant was or where it could be found. A woman on one plantation in Amelia County had sharpened a stone and cut both her wrists. Bled out into the ground. He had heard that she was a real pretty woman so that must have been a waste of good stuff. Maybe she was a cripple like Celeste. Pretty was good. Cripple, not so good. The man, the adviser, was still silent in his head, and Stamford went beyond the lane out into a wide place not far from the useless woods where Moses went to be with himself. The thunder and lightning were now even closer, about two miles or so beyond where he believed the sweetest berries could be picked. Best hurry, he thought. Best get outa this weather. He wanted to die but he really didn’t want to catch a cold to do it.

The patch he found was priceless, a hunk of ground that was partly on the plantation of the white people next door. Stamford didn’t care. He climbed over the fence when he saw some he wanted. He worked steadily and was done in less than a half hour. He hefted the bucket. Yes, that would satisfy two babies’ bellies until supper. He walked away from the patch, came back on the Townsend plantation. Soon the useless woods was on his right, and the lane and the cabins more than half a mile away. He was on a nice piece of open ground that some women said had the prettiest baby’s breaths and morning glories. He had picked some when he was courting Gloria. Beautiful flowers in a man’s sweaty hands. But they got the job done. Yessiree bob. Maybe he could kill her before he died. That would learn her. Send her ass to hell so she could sit on one of the devil’s wobbly two-legged stools for the rest of eternity just so she could ponder what she done to him. Kill her and then sit on a rise himself and watch her suffer for the rest of eternity. Then he began to think that bad talk and children’s blueberries didn’t go together. The rain continued and the thunder and lightning came nearer.