“It’s about one-thirty, Daddy.” His daughter, Tisha Anne, stands on his other side, but he does not look at her. He still looks at the three standing by his bedside. Who are they? his eyes ask. Three ghosts? Apparitions? Spirits? Is this death come to take me?

“Asa?” Zeke stands uncomfortably, his face caught in a grimace.

“That you, Zeke?”

“Yeah, boy, it is.”

For a minute Asa continues to look puzzled, trembling, looking at the old man, the old woman, the tall man in the center, his hand still wavering in midair as if about to point out something arcane and mysterious. He puts his hand down, closes his eyes, and sighs phlegmatically. His breathing is ragged, as if he had run up many flights of stairs. He asks with his eyes still closed: “That Ruth? That you, Jimmy Greene?”

His daughter answers yes. He falls asleep.

—Woman, you can’t throw me out of my own house.

—Oh, yeah. Watch me.

—I live here.

—You don’t live nowhere, nigger. You live where you can get your hands on a bottle of liquor. That’s where you live; you live where you passes out. But I swear to God you won’t pass out here no more.

—Stop, Ruth, dammit. I said stop it, right now. Don’t you throw another thing—

—No. No. No, Goddamn it. I tried—Lord knows I tried—but I ain’t gone try no more. You gone, Jethro. Gone.

—Woman, I’ll—

—And if you ever lay a hand on me, nigger, I’ll kill you.

It seems to be that way with old ones: things known and not known are one and the same. They begin to place true importance on something young people, except perhaps the very young, pay no attention to—feelings. When was it? When she was seventy-­eight? Eighty-three? Eighty-nine? Suddenly the things she felt became more real to her, as if she could reach out and touch them. Just like the old saying, I can feel it in my bones, she too now could feel things like the coming of spring, or an early frost, or a bad storm, or the creation of a youngin. It was as if, like the blind who hear better than the sighted, she had been given this sixth sense in the place of her failing legs and curved back and stiff, aching joints. She believed it to be no miracle, nor anything important or special. No particular blessing or curse. It was nothing, she suspected, that other old folks didn’t have as well.