When He is ready for it He will show His will to them that have the say-so.”
“Yes.
The say-so.” They glared at one another, still, breathing quietly.
“The madam.
When He is ready, He will reveal it to her.”
“You mean, if the madam knows, she will send him away?
Yes.
But I can’t wait.”
“No more can you hurry the Lord God.
Ain’t I waited five years?”
She began to beat her hands lightly together.
“But don’t you see?
This may be the Lord’s way.
For you to tell me.
Because you know.
Maybe it’s His way for you to tell me and me to tell the madam.” Her mad eyes were quite calm, her mad voice patient and calm: it was only her light unceasing hands.
“You’ll wait, the same as I waited,” he said. “You have felt the weight of the Lord’s remorseful hand for maybe three days.
I have lived under it for five years, watching and waiting for His own good time, because my sin is greater than your sin.” Though he was looking directly at her face he did not seem to see her at all, his eyes did not.
They looked like they were blind, wide open, icecold, fanatical. “To what I done and what I suffered to expiate it, what you done and are womansuffering ain’t no more than a handful of rotten dirt.
I done bore mine five years; who are you to hurry Almighty God with your little womanfilth?”
She turned, at once.
“Well.
You don’t have to tell me.
I know, anyway.
I’ve known it all the time that he’s part nigger.” She returned to the house.
She did not walk fast now and she yawned, terrifically.
‘All I have to do is to think of some way to make the madam believe it.
He won’t tell her, back me up.’
She yawned again, tremendously, her face emptied now of everything save yawning and then emptied even of yawning.
She had just thought of something else.
She had not thought of it before, but she believed that she had, had known it all the while, because it seemed so right: he would not only be removed; he would be punished for having given her terror and worry.
‘They’ll send him to the nigger orphanage,’ she thought ‘Of course.
They will have to.’
She did not even go to the matron at once.
She had started there, but instead of turning toward the office door she saw herself passing it, going on toward the stairs and mounting.
It was as though she followed herself to see where she was going.
In the corridor, quiet and empty now, she yawned again, with utter relaxation.
She entered her room and locked the door and took off her clothes and got into bed.
The shades were drawn and she lay still, in the more than halfdark, on her back.
Her eyes were closed and her face was empty and smooth.
After a while she began to open her legs and close them slowly, feeling the sheets flow cool and smooth over them and then flow warm and smooth again.
Thinking seemed to hang suspended between the sleep which she had not had now in three nights and the sleep which she was about to receive, her body open to accept sleep as though sleep were a man.
‘All I need do is to make the madam believe,’ she thought.
And then she thought, He will look just like a pea in a pan full of coffee beans.
That was in the afternoon.
At nine that evening she was undressing again when she heard the janitor come up the corridor, toward her door.
She did not, could not, know who it was, then somehow she did know, hearing the steady feet and then a knock at the door which already began to open before she could spring to it.
She didn’t call; she sprang to the door, putting her weight against it, holding it to.
“I’m undressing!” she said in a thin, agonised voice, knowing who it was.
He didn’t answer, his weight firm and steady against the crawling door, beyond the crawling gap.