(BERNIECE and DOAKER exit up the stairs.)

BOY WILLIE: (Calling after them.) If you see Sutter up there . . . tell him I’m down here waiting on him.

LYMON: What if she see him again?

BOY WILLIE: That’s all in her head. There ain’t no ghost up there.

(Calls.)

Hey, Doaker . . . I told you ain’t nothing up there.

LYMON: I’m glad he didn’t say he was looking for me.

BOY WILLIE: I wish I would see Sutter’s ghost. Give me a chance to put a whupping on him.

LYMON: You ought to stay up here with me. You be down there working his land . . . he might come looking for you all the time.

BOY WILLIE: I ain’t thinking about Sutter. And I ain’t thinking about staying up here. You stay up here. I’m going back and get Sutter’s land. You think you ain’t got to work up here. You think this the land of milk and honey. But I ain’t scared of work. I’m going back and farm every acre of that land.

(DOAKER enters from the stairs.)

I told you there ain’t nothing up there, Doaker. Berniece dreaming all that.

DOAKER: I believe Berniece seen something. Berniece levelheaded. She ain’t just made all that up. She say Sutter had on a suit. I don’t believe she ever seen Sutter in a suit. I believe that’s what he was buried in, and that’s what Berniece saw.

BOY WILLIE: Well, let her keep on seeing him then. As long as he don’t mess with me.

(DOAKER starts to cook his breakfast.)

I heard about you, Doaker. They say you got all the women looking out for you down home. They be looking to see you coming. Say you got a different one every two weeks. Say they be fighting one another for you to stay with them.

(To LYMON.)

Look at him, Lymon. He know it’s true.

DOAKER: I ain’t thinking about no women. They never get me tied up with them. After Coreen I ain’t got no use for them. I stay up on Jack Slattery’s place when I be down there. All them women want is somebody with a steady payday.

BOY WILLIE: That ain’t what I hear. I hear every two weeks the women all put on their dresses and line up at the railroad station.

DOAKER: I don’t get down there but once a month. I used to go down there every two weeks but they keep switching me around. They keep switching all the fellows around.

BOY WILLIE: Doaker can’t turn that railroad loose. He was working the railroad when I was walking around crying for sugartit. My mama used to brag on him.

DOAKER: I’m cooking now, but I used to line track. I pieced together the Yellow Dog stitch by stitch. Rail by rail. Line track all up around there. I lined track all up around Sunflower and Clarksdale. Wining Boy worked with me. He helped put in some of that track. He’d work it for six months and quit. Go back to playing piano and gambling.