Nell told Bruce and Floyd that Edna was busy with Sarah and could not be called out, so they explained their plan to her, and she promised to relay it to Edna and Lovey. How, she asked, were they going to tell Leon? Bruce said he would go to Savannah on the next train and bring Leon home.

When they came downstairs and went out through the breezeway, they found Driscoll Proctor still talking to the men, most of whom remained. Driscoll said, “Where is Roman?” They shook their heads and went to the barn for their horses.

20

“What ails you?” Clovis asked fretfully, coming into the room where Alonzo sat alone in front of the fireplace in which no fire burned. “Come dragging yourself home after we-all had our supper and then wouldn’t eat or say where you’d been—”

“Told you I wasn’t hungry.”

“You sick?”

“No.”

“Look funny. Where you been to?”

“Never mind.”

“That sweet potato you ate disagreed. I told Geraldine they was too green and stringy to bake good; they got to age first. But she say you like baked, and you’ll get baked as long as she does your cooking.”

“Mama, you got any whiskey?”

She looked at him closely; her face relaxed in relief. “Best thing for you, you got the upset stomach and nerves. I’ll get it.” She went off to her bedroom.

When she returned with a jug, she found him just as she had left him, but Geraldine stood beside him holding a shawl over one arm. “Look what I found,” Geraldine said. Alonzo kept his eyes on the dead fireplace, but Clovis looked and saw a shawl that was red with a dark blue binding, and in good condition except that it was dirty. “’Tisn’t mine,” she said.

“Well, whose is it?” Geraldine asked. “I never had nothing so good.”

“You bring the liquor, Mama?” Alonzo asked.

“Here.” She held out the jug and a glass. He uncorked the jug and poured whiskey into the glass. When he had drunk half of what he poured, he looked at the shawl for the first time.

“Where you find that?” he asked.

Geraldine said, “In the yard when I went to draw a bucket of water. I thought there was enough, but then I looked and there wasn’t. I stepped on it in the yard in the dark. First, I thought it was a dead bird, but it was this.”

He looked at it. “Give it to me.”

“You know whose it is?” Clovis asked.

“I dropped it,” he said, taking the shawl in his hands and holding it to his face to smell it before dropping it into his lap with a shrug of helplessness.

“Where you get such a thing?” Clovis asked roughly, to hide the fear that stirred in her like nausea.

Alonzo drank from the glass again, half of what was now left in it.