“Hush.” He said it softly, wiped his knife blade on his trousers and stuck the knife into the side of the log he sat on.

“Your papa is old,” she said.

Floyd laughed at her. “No, he ain’t. He’s young as that crow he found in the field this morning with his wing broke by Roscoe Junior and his slingshot.”

“Your papa will make him fly again. Your papa has healing hands. But he can’t heal you.”

“Mama, stop. Give up.”

“He’s got that crow on the kitchen table now, rubbing his wing with tallow and turpentine to strengthen it, the crow looking at him all the while like he would kill him, was he able.”

“Mama, don’t talk to me in parables.”

“I won’t talk to you at all. You don’t talk. Only dodge and deny.”

“All right. Try me now.”

“You’ve got papers that say you can go and come anytime you please. F.P.C. papers you’ve got.”

“He’s old. You said so.”

“Better he be lonesome for you than find out how you feel. You can’t stay on, feeling the way you do. You know that.”

“I won’t leave Papa.”

“I don’t want you to—”

“You don’t care.”

“That ain’t so; you know it.”

“I don’t know it.”

“Floyd?”

“Yes, Mama?”

“Don’t you sigh to make me sorry for you!”

“No, Mama. No.”

“How could you let yourself? Boy!”

“Me and Leon, born together, boys together. Maybe it’s to do with that.”

“They would kill you for what you got in your heart.”

“No one going to kill me, Mama. I’m not one of your niggerish niggers to get drunk and give myself away.”

Her voice held wonder as well as outrage. “How do you think of her?”

“Mama, don’t. Don’t you now.”

Lovey put her head down on her folded arms and knees and cried.

“Oh, Mama,” he said, somewhere between compassion and exasperation.

She rose and flew at him, arms and hands swinging and flailing. “Don’t you! Don’t you!” She beat him about the head and shoulders until he was forced to move back and hold up his arms to guard his face. Inside the cabin the crow gave an angry, anguished cry at taking help from a man. Floyd turned, unable to deal or to reason with her, and ran into the falling darkness, because there was nothing more he could say.

Could he go? How could he stay?