The sun a watery red egg huge in dull haze coming through the live oaks beyond the yard.

Mebane strode through the spindle grass, sweeping the cane before him, the stalks cracking as the cane-tip smote them. His gait rocking and steady at once. As if he moved in gravity unlike other men. Foster followed him up to the low cabin, the whitewash peeling off the timbers in curls and blisters. Mebane stopped before the door and lifted his cane and brought it down upon the door, right above where a hole was cut through the door, the hole worn into a teardrop from years of working a leather latchstring. The string was gone. Mebane prodded with the cane and the door swung in.

“Right here is where she was born: your grandmother. Right here is where she lived until she was sixteen years old. With her mother and another old colored woman. The three of them stuffed inside of here. Summer days it must’ve been a little on the close side. You think about it. My daddy coming out here time to time after his pleasure. Nights I’d guess. Summer nights. Hot and rank in these nigger cabins. It makes you think. He must’ve someway liked the smell. Can you imagine that?”

Foster off to one side, the old man turned at the waist to glare at him. His eyebrows working, a writhe on his forehead. His mouth twitching, some disgust fighting a smile. As a mock at his words, the situation laid out before them. Or only a pleasant hatred, extruded slowly as if long awaited. Foster did not know. The sunlight spread down the side of the whitewashed walls; the open door was a bare oblong of dark.

Foster said, “Can I go inside?”

Mebane took his cane-tip away from the stone below the door. Stepped back, rocking unsteady in retreat. As if what he could not see left him without balance. “Go ahead,” he said. “Help yourself. The ancestral home.”

The cabin was dark inside, empty, the air dull, smelling of mice and little else. The inside walls were not whitewashed but the timbers were dark with soot and old lives. The fireplace small, swept clean. The pale rectangles of a snakeskin on the rough stone hearth. A rough plank platform built into one corner, what had once been a bed. That was all. He stepped up to the fireplace and stood looking at the old rough-laid stones, the crumbling clay mortar. There was fire-stain and soot on the chimney stones above the fireplace. He stood like that, trying to close off the summer day and his own fatigue and the old man wavering outside, stood to allow the lives fallow in the old walls come out, to announce themselves if they would.

“She had that pretty bred-down skin like new saddle leather and the same green eyes as my daddy had,” the old man called. Foster turned and standing back in the shadow looked out at him. “But what you haven’t asked, is how her own mother looked. What she came out of. Where you’ve failed, boy, is thinking back far enough. There is no simple answer otherwise.”