unbuckled his overalls at the shoulders and let them drop around his ankles. His long johns, once white, looked like mottled cream. He pulled open the flap and let his thing out. It was long and straight and pale white as a lizard’s belly. Her stomach lurched. He was shuffling toward her. She felt it coming, hot and determined, no way to dam it up, and she leaned forward and puked the turnip greens and half-digested lumps of cornbread, spewed it all out onto the rough boards of the floor. She heaved, still sitting on the pot. He jumped back, kicking his overalls away from her vomit.
“Goddam, girl,” he said. “You gonna clean that up. What the hell ails you?”
“I told you,” she said, when she could stop gasping, could get her breath back. “Stay away from me!”
“You done done it now,” he said. “Git up off’n that pot and git that dress off and git on that bed. Do like I’m tellin you now, and I won’t hafta hurt you.”
She sat for a long time, her head down. She could hear him breathing, rasping. She could smell him, rancid and acidulous. Smell the decay of her own vomit, from the floor and her own mouth. She felt dirty, filthy. She needed a dipper of water. To rinse her mouth. To wash the muck and the grime from her mouth. She tried to spit again, but her mouth was dry.
All her sad, sorry life came down to this moment, her sitting in the sallow yellow of the lamp, on a grubby chamber pot, Alexander Mossback Frill standing there pumping his hand up and down on his thing. The old man was someone she had never even seen before an hour ago, never even known of his existence, and now it seemed like he held her life and whatever future she had in his grip. Well, he didn’t. She wouldn’t let him have that. She had the power to deny him that. To deny him everything.
“All right,” she said.
“Say what?”
“I said, ‘all right.’” She pulled her underpants from around her feet and stood up. She pulled the frayed dress over her head and stood there, naked. Then she fell backwards on the bed, spreading her legs like she’d seen her sister Evalene do in the bushes with the boy. The old man’s eyes were wide and heated. He stepped out of the overalls and yanked the bottoms of his long johns down his legs, his thing wobbling, and Minnie let her hand snake beneath the quilt and grip the knife. All right. She was the Devil’s handmaiden, her mother said. She was a freak, a monster, and maybe this old man was the Devil. Maybe that was it. Well, she had an answer to it, whatever it was.
He had one knee on the bed, leaning over her. He was trying to arrange himself, get between her legs, and she couldn’t see his face. She pulled the butcher knife out, at the same time pulling him forward, off balance, and let his own weight impale him on the knife. He grunted, then screamed. He straightened up. The knife was in his chest; it had gone precisely between two of his ribs. He screamed again. He was looking at her with shocked disbelief, with a kind of incredulous disappointment. She reached up and with the heel of her hand hit the butt of the knife hard, pushing it further in. The old man looked down at it and then back up at her. His mouth was open and she saw blood welling up there, and it ran down his chin and his neck, dripping on her, burning her skin. Then his eyes rolled back in his head so that she saw only red-veined gray. He slumped, crumpled, fell heavily backward and lay flat on the floor with the knife protruding from his chest, his old thing flopped to the side, his wrinkled skin ashen and pasty like a plucked turkey. His body was as hairless as an infant’s.
Minnie lay there, very still, afraid to move, watching the old man twitch and gasp for a minute and then grow still. She could see the life going out of him, his soul—if he had one—leaving him. He was the first dead person she’d ever seen. She did not even let herself ponder the fact that she had killed him, had robbed him of whatever desperate, hardscrabble living was left to him. Not much, she thought. Not much at all.
She used the quilt to wipe the blood from her chest and belly, then got up from the bed, being careful not to touch him or step in the blood or her vomit. The old man had landed square in the middle of it, and his bright blood was seeping into it, making little rivulets in the gray-green, thicker ooze. She wrinkled her nose. The whole pile smelled to almighty hell, like the old man had already started to rot. She found her underpants on the bed, stepped into them and pulled them up over her scrawny, little-girl’s butt. She held the too large, loose-fitting dress over her head and let it drape down over her. It struck her mid-calf and turned a skinny child into a bony old woman. She stood looking down at Alexander Mossback Frill; he lay with his mouth open, his head tilted to the side, his eyes wide open and staring fixedly at something high over her head. Maybe he was looking at Jesus. Maybe Jesus had finally come for him.
She looked around the room. There was half a pone of cornbread left in a cast-iron skillet, so she got it and shoved it into an empty flour sack she found on the floor. She had nothing to put the greens in, and, anyway, when she looked into the pot at the congealed grease on the surface of the pot liquor her stomach fluttered mightily and she had to look quickly away. There was a pie safe with nothing in it. A pan with four Irish potatoes and an orange, which she crammed in with the cornbread. She put the sack next to the door.
She had to find the keys. She guessed they were in the bib of his overalls, and they were, three little brass keys on a string. The first one she tried opened the padlock on the door, and she pulled it open, hearing the old boards scrape on the floor. At the sound the hound under the stoop growled. She stepped back inside and found a stick of firewood about two feet long. She put it next to the sack. Then she found a can of kerosene and one of coal oil. She took the quilt off the bed and threw it over the old man. She doused the mattress—ticking about gone, clouds of cotton poking out here and there—and the quilt covering the old man. Then she shook both cans all around the inside of the cabin until they were empty, then flung them one by one against the wall, which set the old hound to barking. The smell of the kerosene and oil made her lightheaded and dizzy. She got the box of wooden matches off the table. She got the stick of firewood and her sack and went out onto the porch.
The night was a great dome of stars overhead. She scratched a match and threw it through the door. Immediately the flames began to lick across the floor, spreading outwardly, toward the old man and the bed. She stepped down off the narrow porch. The hound came out, growling, showing her teeth, and she hit her in the ribs with the firewood as hard as she could; the hound let out a yelp, wheeled and limped off toward the woods, whining like a baby crying.
Minnie stood across the road, watching the old cabin being consumed by the fire. The words “a cleansing fire” came to her from somewhere, maybe from the preacher back at the migrants’ camp, maybe from the collected wisdom of her memory, maybe from the accumulated experience of her own soul. The fire hissed and crackled and roared with a ferocious purpose, the flames devouring the old tinderbox cabin as though it were made of paper. She watched bright red and orange sparks shooting toward the sky, rising and mingling with the silver sparks of the stars already there.
Minnie set out walking down the sandy shoulder of the road. It had turned cold, and she shivered in the thin dress. She would walk all night. She would keep walking for the rest of her life if she had to.
2
June 1964
In the small town of Piper, Florida, there lived a young man—or boy, though it would not be entirely accurate to call him a boy, since he was mature before his time, having endured the first fourteen years of his life in the same rundown house with a drunken father, who beat the boy regularly for the first ten years and then got his due from the boy for the last four—tall and muscular, handsome, appealing to women of all ages but choosing to spend
