Upstairs Lovey found Selma and gathered her into her arms, big though she now was. She sat on the side of the bed, holding the frightened child in a fierce embrace. Selma could not at first make any sense of what Lovey was saying, but gradually she got the idea that what had happened to her happened also to others, that it was not, as she had been sure, the first time it had ever happened in the world.

“Why?” she asked and cried again, in relief and anger.

“Law’ knows,” Lovey answered, and rocked and kissed the child.

13

A day has relatively few hours, but an extravagance of minutes and a multitude of seconds; and most of life’s events happen in seconds and minutes, not hours. With so many people and so many acres, a great many events were bound to occur on the plantation every day.

On the Wednesday after washday Clovis and a girl named Myrtis were in the peanut patch pulling up peanuts to feed the hogs. They pulled up the plants and shook earth off the nuts which budded from the underground roots. The work was easy. The day was hot. Myrtis told Clovis a dream she said she’d had the night before in which she had floated over Beulah Land like an angel. Actually, she’d had no such dream, but she wanted to make herself interesting, so she repeated a dream she’d heard her mother once tell: “Do it mean I gonna die soon?”

Clovis paused briefly to consider. “Yes.”

Shock held her quiet for only a moment; then Myrtis screamed with laughter. Clovis felt clever and pleased. Laughter bubbled up in her and increased that of Myrtis; and from the boredom of circumstance and the liveliness of their youth both became hysterical. Clovis hit Myrtis on the hand. Myrtis grabbed Clovis, embraced her, still shaking and squeaking with laughter. When Myrtis loosened her grip on her friend, Clovis became the friendly aggressor, pushing Myrtis, “Go on, girl!” then catching her in an embrace. They fell, and that made them laugh even harder, and when they had exhausted themselves laughing, when even the forced continuance of one did not set off a like response in the other, they sat without getting up and wiped their eyes and noses.

Myrtis pulled a peanut off a plant, opened the damp, soft shell and ate the two peas inside.

“That won’t get you calico for Christmas.”

They looked up, then stood up, not hastily, but not slowly either, Myrtis first, then Clovis.

Roscoe Elk sat on his mule named April and looked down at them.

“We just cuttin’ the fool; you know?” Myrtis said.

Roscoe was looking at Clovis, and it flattered her and made her uncomfortable. Sassily, she said, “Don’t fancy calico for Christmas, but might like silk.” He almost, not quite, smiled. “You fancy peanuts, Mister Elk?”

“Never had to eat ’em.”