the yearn of the earth beneath his feet. It was going to get him at the stile again, he knew, but he had to live with that fact. I just get them fat white folks to the ant bed, I quit, he said to the clouds of dust floating up before him. You can have all of it then. I give it on up. He ran on, changing to a new tack every few feet, the pointing arm dead in the air above him, and listened to the shine rumble and slide through all the crannies of his head.
“It’s gonna be hard times in the morning,” he said out loud and aimed at the fence stile coming up. It most always is.
You’ve got to say something to me, she said. You don’t talk to me right. Now you got to say something to me.
I’m talking to you, he said. I’m talking right now to you. What you want me to say? This?
And he did a thing that made her eyes close and the itching start in her feet and begin to move up the back of her legs and across her belly and along her sides down each rib. Oh, she said, it’s all in my shoulders and the back of my neck.
She let him push her further back until her head touched the green and gold bedspread, and one of her hands slipped off his shoulder and fell beside her as though she had lost all the strength in that part of her body. The arm was numb, but tingling like it did in the morning sometimes when she had slept wrong on it and cut off the circulation of blood. She tried to lift it and something like warm air ran up and down the inside of her upper arm and settled in her armpit under the bunched-up sleeve of the dress.
No, she said, it’s hot and I’m sweating. It’s going to get all over her bed. It’ll make a wet mark, and it won’t dry and she’ll see it.
He said no and mumbled something else into the side of her throat that she couldn’t hear. Something was happening to the bottoms of her feet and the palms of her hands. It was crawling and picking lightly at the skin. Just pulling it up a little at a time and letting it fall back and doing it over again until it felt like little hairs were raising up in their places and settling back over and over.
Talk to me, she said into his mouth. Say some things to me. You never have said a thing yet to me.
I’ll say something to you, he said, and moved against her in a way that caused her to want to try to touch each corner of the bed.
If I put one foot at the edge down there and the other one at the other corner and then my hands way out until I can touch where the mattress comes to a point, then if somebody was way up above us and could look down just at me and the way I’m laying here, it would look like two straight lines crossing in the middle. That makes an X when two lines cross. And in the middle where they cross is where I am.
Please, she said to the little burning spots that were beginning to start at each end of the leg of the X and to move slowly towards the intersection, come reach each other. Meet in the middle where I am.
But the little points of fire, like sparks that popped out of the fireplace and made burn marks on the floor, were taking their own time, stopping at one place for a while and settling there as if they were going to stay and not go any further and then when something finally burned through and broke apart, moving up a little further to settle a space closer to the middle of the X.
Just a word or two, she said to him, that’s all I want you to say.
He said something back to her, something deep in his throat, but her ears were listening to a dim buzz that had started up deep inside her head, and she couldn’t hear him.
What? she said. What? One foot and one hand had reached almost to the opposite corners of the bed and she strained, trying to make that line of the X straight and true before she turned her mind to the other line.
He moved above her, and suddenly the first line fell into place and locked itself, and the little burning spots along that whole leg of the X began to gather themselves and move more quickly from each end toward the middle where they might meet.
The buzz inside her head that wouldn’t let her hear suddenly stopped the way you would click off a radio, and the sound of a mockingbird’s call somewhere outside came twice and acted like something being poured into her head. It moved down inside like water and made two little points of pressure which were the bird calls and which stayed, waiting for something.
You talk to her, she said to him, her mouth so close to the side of his head when she spoke that her lips moved against the short hairs growing just behind his ear. I hear you say things to her. In the night. I hear you in the night. Lots of times.
Her other foot and hand were moving now on their own, and she no longer had to tell them what to do. The fingers of the hand reached, stretched, fell short, tried again and touched the edges of the mattress where the two sides came together. The green and gold spread moved in a fold beneath the hand, and as it did, the foot which formed the last point of the two legs of the X finally found its true position, and the intersecting lines fell into place at last, straight as though they had been drawn by a ruler. And whoever was looking at her from above could see it, the two legs of the X drawing to a point in the middle where they crossed and touched, and something let the burning points know the straight path was clear, and they came with a rush from each far point of the two lines, racing to meet in the middle where everything came together.
Say it, she managed to get the words out just before all of it reached the middle which was where she was, and he said something, but she couldn’t hear anything but the fixed cry of the mockingbird and she blended her voice with that, and all the burning points came together and touched and flared and stayed.
Nancy saw him first, way up beyond where the heat rising from the surface of the highway made everything look wavy like water. But I told her it was just a large cow or maybe Wylie Knight’s young bull standing in the middle of Farm-to-Market Road 1276.
“Nuh-uh,” my sister said, coming to a dead stop on the shoulder of the road. “That’s Weldon Overstreet, and I’m going back home.”
She was wearing shoes, sandals I remember, and so could afford to stand in one place for longer than a second or two at a time while she thought about something other than her feet. But I was barefoot, like always in the summer, and I had to stay in motion to keep the asphalt from burning clean through the skin on the bottom of my soles, tough though they were by the middle of August in East Texas.
“It’s not him, neither,” I said, lifting first one foot then the other like a soldier marching in place. “It’s just that Brahma bull, and he’ll go off in the woods when he sees us coming. Let’s get to moving.”
“Stand in the gravel if your feet’re burning. Get off the road.”
She knew I couldn’t do that because of the grass burrs up and down every roadside in that part of the country, so I didn’t even bother to answer.
“I’m going back home,” Nancy said. “You can go on by yourself if you’re so sure it ain’t Weldon.”
“No, you’re not,” I said. “You know Mama’ll just send us back out again, and we’ll have all this road to do over. Let’s just go on a little closer.”
I reached over and took the empty two-gallon jug out of her hands to carry, and that got her going again, not nearly as fast this time, but at least my feet were spending more time in the air and less on the black asphalt after
