denver stretches out her right arm and takes a step or two. she trips and falls down onto the pallet.
newspaper crackles under her weight. she laughs again. "oh, shoot. beloved?"no one answers. denver waves her arms and squinches her eyes to separate the shadows of potatosacks, a lard can and a side of smoked pork from the one that might be human.
"stop fooling," she says and looks up toward the light to check and make sure this is still the cold house and not something going on in her sleep. the minnows of light still swim there; they can'tmake it down to where she is.
"you the one thirsty. you want cider or don't you?" denver's voice is mildly accusatory. mildly.
she doesn't want to offend and she doesn't want to betray the panic that is creeping over her likehairs. there is no sight or sound of beloved. denver struggles to her feet amid the cracklingnewspaper. holding her palm out, she moves slowly toward the door. there is no latch or knob —just a loop of wire to catch a nail. she pushes the door open. cold sunlight displaces the dark. theroom is just as it was when they entered-except beloved is not there. there is no point in lookingfurther, for everything in the place can be seen at first sight. denver looks anyway because the lossis ungovernable. she steps back into the shed, allowing the door to close quickly behind her.
darkness or not, she moves rapidly around, reaching, touching cobwebs, cheese, slanting shelves,the pallet interfering with each step. if she stumbles, she is not aware of it because she does notknow where her body stops, which part of her is an arm, a foot or a knee. she feels like an ice caketorn away from the solid surface of the stream, floating on darkness, thick and crashing against theedges of things around it. breakable, meltable and cold.
it is hard to breathe and even if there were light she wouldn't be able to see anything because she iscrying. just as she thought it might happen, it has. easy as walking into a room. a magicalappearance on a stump, the face wiped out by sunlight, and a magical disappearance in a shed,eaten alive by the dark.
"don't," she is saying between tough swallows. "don't. don't go back."this is worse than when paul d came to 124 and she cried helplessly into the stove. this is worse.
then it was for herself. now she is crying because she has no self. death is a skipped mealcompared to this. she can feel her thickness thinning, dissolving into nothing. she grabs the hair ather temples to get enough to uproot it and halt the melting for a while. teeth clamped shut, denverbrakes her sobs. she doesn't move to open the door because there is no world out there. shedecides to stay in the cold house and let the dark swallow her like the minnows of light above. shewon't put up with another leaving, another trick. waking up to find one brother then another not atthe bottom of the bed, his foot jabbing her spine. sitting at the table eating turnips and saving theliquor for her grandmother to drink; her mother's hand on the keeping-room door and her voicesaying, "baby suggs is gone, denver." and when she got around to worrying about what would bethe case if sethe died or paul d took her away, a dream-come-true comes true just to leave her on apile of newspaper in the dark.
no footfall announces her, but there she is, standing where before there was nobody when denverlooked. and smiling.
denver grabs the hem of beloved's skirt. "i thought you left me. i thought you went back."beloved smiles, "i don't want that place. this the place i am." she sits down on the pallet and,laughing, lies back looking at the cracklights above.
surreptitiously, denver pinches a piece of beloved's skirt between her fingers and holds on. agood thing she does because suddenly beloved sits up.
"what is it?" asks denver.
"look," she points to the sunlit cracks.
"what? i don't see nothing." denver follows the pointing finger.
beloved drops her hand. "i'm like this."denver watches as beloved bends over, curls up and rocks. her eyes go to no place; her moaningis so small denver can hardly hear it.
"you all right? beloved?"beloved focuses her eyes. "over there. her face."denver looks where beloved's eyes go; there is nothing but darkness there.
"whose face? who is it?""me. it's me."she is smiling again.
the last of the sweet home men, so named and called by one who would know, believed it.
the other four believed it too, once, but they were long gone. the sold one never returned, the lostone never found. one, he knew, was dead for sure; one he hoped was, because butter and clabberwas no life or reason to live it. he grew up thinking that, of all the blacks in kentucky, only thefive of them were men. allowed, encouraged to correct garner, even defy him. to invent ways ofdoing things; to see what was needed and attack it without permission. to buy a mother, choose ahorse or a wife, handle guns, even learn reading if they wanted to — but they didn't want to sincenothing important to them could be put down on paper.
was that it? is that where the manhood lay? in the naming done by a whiteman who was supposedto know? who gave them the privilege not of working but of deciding how to? no. in theirrelationship with garner was true metal: they were believed and trusted, but most of all they werelistened to.
he thought what they said had merit, and what they felt was serious. deferring to his slaves'
opinions did not deprive him of authority or power. it was schoolteacher who taught themotherwise. a truth that waved like a scarecrow in rye: they were only sweet home men at sweet home. one step off that ground and they were trespassers among the human race. watchdogswithout teeth; steer bulls without horns; gelded workhorses whose neigh and whinny could not betranslated into a language responsible humans spoke.
his strength had lain in knowing that schoolteacher was wrong. now he wondered. there wasalfred, georgia, there was delaware, there was sixo and still he wondered. if schoolteacher wasright it explained how he had come to be a rag doll — picked up and put back down anywhere anytime by a girl young enough to be his daughter. fucking her when he was convinced he didn't wantto. whenever she turned her behind up, the calves of his youth (was that it?) cracked his resolve.
but it was more than appetite that humiliated him and made him wonder if schoolteacher wasright. it was being moved, placed where she wanted him, and there was nothing he was able to doabout it. for his life he could not walk up the glistening white stairs in the evening; for his life hecould not stay in the kitchen, in the keeping room, in the storeroom at night. and he tried. held hisbreath the way he had when he ducked into the mud; steeled his heart the way he had when thetrembling began. but it was worse than that, worse than the blood eddy he had controlled with asledge hammer. when he stood up from the supper table at 124 and turned toward the stairs,nausea was first, then repulsion. he, he. he who had eaten raw meat barely dead, who under plumtrees bursting with blossoms had crunched through a dove's breast before its heart stopped beating.
because he was a man and a man could do what he would: be still for six hours in a dry well whilenight dropped; fight raccoon with his hands and win; watch another man, whom he loved betterthan his brothers, roast without a tear just so the roasters would know what a man was like. and itwas he, that man, who had walked from georgia to delaware, who could not go or stay put wherehe wanted to in 124 — shame.
paul d could not command his feet, but he thought he could still talk and he made up his mind tobreak out that way. he would tell sethe about the last three weeks: catch her alone coming fromwork at the beer garden she called a restaurant and tell it all. he waited for her. the winterafternoon looked like dusk as he stood in the alley behind sawyer's restaurant. rehearsing,imagining her face and letting the words flock in his head like kids before lining up to follow theleader.
"well, ah, this is not the, a man can't, see, but aw listen here, it ain't that, it really ain't, ole garner,what i mean is, it ain't a weak-ness, the kind of weakness i can fight 'cause 'cause something ishappening to me, that girl is doing it, i know you think i never liked her nohow, but she is doing itto me. fixing me. sethe, she's fixed me and i can't break it."what? a grown man fixed by a girl? but what if the girl was not a girl, but something in disguise?
a lowdown something that looked like a sweet young girl and fucking her or not was not the point,it was not being able to stay or go where he wished in 124, and the danger was in losing sethebecause he was not man enough to break out, so he needed her, sethe, to help him, to know aboutit, and it shamed him to have to ask the woman he wanted to protect to help him do it, god damn itto hell.
paul d blew warm breath into the hollow of his cupped hands. the wind raced down the alley so fast it sleeked the fur of four kitchen dogs waiting for scraps. he looked at the dogs. the dogslooked at him.
finally the back door opened and sethe stepped through holding a scrap pan in the crook of herarm. when she saw him, she said oh, and her smile was both pleasure and surprise. paul dbelieved he smiled back but his face was so cold he wasn't sure.
"man, you make me feel like a girl, coming by to pick me up after work. nobody ever did thatbefore. you better watch out, i might start looking forward to it." she tossed the largest bones intothe dirt rapidly so the dogs would know there was enough and not fight each other. then shedumped the skins of some things, heads of other things and the insides of still more things — whatthe restaurant could not use and she would not — in a smoking pile near the animals' feet.
"got to rinse this out," she said, "and then i'll be right with you."he nodded as she returned to the kitchen.
the dogs ate without sound and paul d thought they at least got what they came for, and if she hadenough for them — the cloth on her head was brown wool and she edged it down over her hairlineagainst the wind.
"you get off early or what?""i took off early.""anything the matter?""in a way of speaking," he said and wiped his lips.
"not cut back?""no, no. they got plenty work. i just — ""hm?""sethe, you won't like what i'm 'bout to say."
丹芙伸出右手，迈了一两步。她脚下一滑，倒在草荐上。报纸在她的重压下哗啦乱响。她大笑起来。
“哎呀，呸。宠儿？
”
没人答应。丹芙挥着胳膊，挤着眼睛，从土豆麻袋、一个猪油罐头和一块熏肉的侧影中辨别着人影。
“别闹了。
”她说着，仰起头去看阳光，以便搞清楚这仍是在冷藏室，而不是梦中发生的事情。
光线的小鱼仍在那里游动；它们游不到她站立的地方。
“是你喊渴的。你还想不想喝苹果汁了？
”丹芙的声音里有温和的责备。温和的。她不想得罪人，也不愿流露那毛发一般爬遍全身的恐慌。没有宠儿的一丝影子或声音。丹芙从哗啦作响的报纸中挣扎起来。她伸出手掌，慢慢地摸向门口。没有插销，也没有门把手———只有一圈铁丝，拴在一颗钉子上。她推开门。寒冷的阳光取代了黑暗。屋子里同她们进来的时候一模一样———只是宠儿不在了。再找下去没有意义，所有的东西都一目了然。但丹芙还是要找，因为这个损失是无法弥补的。她走回棚屋，让门在身后猛地关上。不管黑不黑，她快速地转着圈，搜索着，摸到了蜘蛛网、奶酪，撞歪了架子，每走一步草荐都绊她。即使绊倒在地，她也没有感觉，因为她不知道自己的身体停在何处，自己的哪一部分是胳膊、脚或者膝盖。她觉得自己好像是一块从小溪坚实的冰面上扯下的冰坨，漂浮在黑暗中，撞击着它周围一切物体的边缘。易碎，易融，而且冰冷。
她呼吸困难，而且，就算有光亮也看不见任何东西，因为她哭了。她刚预感到要出事，它就发生了。就像走进一间屋子那样容易。在树桩上神奇地现身，脸庞被阳光抹去；然后，在棚屋里神奇地消失，被黑暗活活吞吃。
“别，”她艰难地哽咽着，“别。别回去。
”
这比保罗·d来到124号那天她对着炉子无助地哭泣更糟。这更糟。那时是为了她自己。现在她哭，是因为她没有了自己。死亡与此相比不过是一顿空过去的餐饭。她能感觉到厚重的自己在变稀、变薄，消融殆尽。她抓住太阳穴上的头发，想把它们连根拔下来，使消融暂停片刻。
丹芙咬紧牙关，止住啜泣。她没有过去开门，因为外面没有世界。她决定留在冷藏室里，让黑暗像吞噬头顶上光线的小鱼一样吞噬她。她不能忍受又一次离弃，又一次玩弄。有一阵子，她醒来时发现哥哥们一个接一个地不在床的下铺用脚丫戳着她的后脊梁了。那天，她坐在桌旁吃萝卜，把酒留给奶奶喝；妈妈却把手放在起居室的门上，说：
“贝比·萨格斯去了，丹芙。
”当她正在为塞丝死去或者被保罗·d带走情形会怎样而担心时，梦想成真了，成真却只是为了将她抛弃在黑暗中的一堆报纸上。
没有脚步声通报，可是她来了，站在刚才丹芙没找见人的地方，而且微笑着。
丹芙抓住宠儿的裙角。
“我以为你离开我了。我以为你回去了。
”
宠儿微笑着说：
“我不要那个地方。这儿才是我待的地方。
”她在草荐上坐下，然后大笑着躺倒，看着上方的光束。
偷偷摸摸地，丹芙把宠儿的裙角捏在手里，一直不松开。她做得有道理，因为突然间宠儿坐了起来。
“怎么了？
”丹芙问。
“看。”她指着阳光的碎片。
“什么？我什么也没看见。
”丹芙顺着她的手指望去。
宠儿放下手。
“我就像这样。
”
丹芙看见宠儿弯下身去，蜷缩成一团晃动着。她的眼里空洞无物；她的呻吟这样轻，丹芙几乎听不见。
“你没事吧？宠儿？
”
宠儿调整着眼睛的焦点。
“在那儿。她的脸。
”
丹芙跟着宠儿的眼睛走；除了黑暗什么也没有。
“谁的脸？是谁？
”
“我。是我。
”
她又笑起来。
最后一个“甜蜜之家”的男人，被如此命名、而且被相识者如此称呼的那个人，曾经笃信这个名字。其他四个也曾经笃信过，可是他们早已不在了。卖掉的那个再没回来，丢掉的那个再没找到。
有一个，他知道，肯定死了；另一个，他希望也死了，因为牛油和酸奶疙瘩不是生活，也不是生活的理由。他从小到大，一直有这个想法，那就是，在肯塔基所有的黑人当中，只有他们五个是男子汉。加纳允许和鼓励他们纠正他，甚至可以反对他。他们能够发明干活的方法；看看需要什么，不用批准就着手去办。可以赎出一个母亲，挑选一匹马或者一个妻子，摆弄枪支；要是他们愿意的话，甚至可以学习读书———可他们并不愿意，因为对于他们来说，任何重要的事情都不能写在纸上。
就是那么回事么？那就是男子气概么？让一个据说明白的白人命名一下？让那个不是仅仅派给他们活干，而是给了他们决定怎么干活的特权的人给命个名？不。他们和加纳的关系是最铁的：他相信并信任他们，最要紧的是他听他们说话。
他认为他们说的话有价值，他们的感觉也是严肃的。听从他的奴隶的意见并不会剥夺他的威严和权力。
“学校老师”教给他们的却恰恰相反。一个像黑麦田里的稻草人一样左右摇摆的真理：他们只在“甜蜜之家”才是“甜蜜之家”的男人。走出那块土地一步，他们就是人种中的渣滓。是没有牙的看门狗；是没有角的公牛；是阉割的辕马，嘶叫声不能翻译成一种重任在肩的人使用的语言。他的力量曾经表现为知道“学校老师”是错的。现在他糊涂了。尽管有过佐治亚的阿尔弗雷德，有过特拉华，有过西克索，可他还是糊涂。如果“学校老师”是对的，那就可以解释他怎么成了一个布娃娃———让一个年轻得可以做他女儿的姑娘随时随地捡起来、丢回去。让他在确信自己根本不情愿的时候操她。无论她什么时候撅起屁股，他年轻时代的小母牛（真是那样么？）就击碎了他的决心。
然而不止是欲望侮辱了他，使他怀疑“学校老师”是否正确。那东西被牵动着，送进她要他放的地方，而他对此却无能为力。他这辈子再不能在晚间走上闪闪发光的白楼梯了；他这辈子再不能在夜里待在厨房、起居室、贮藏室里了。他试过。像从前潜进泥浆时那样屏住呼吸；像从前颤抖开始时那样铁了心肠。可是这比那更糟，比他用一把长柄大铁锤控制住了的血的漩涡还糟。每当他从124号的餐桌旁站起来转向楼梯时，他先是觉得恶心，然后就心生反感。他，他。是他吃了尚未死干净的生肉，是他在鲜花盛开的梅树下咬穿一只鸽子的胸脯，鸽子的心还没有停止跳动。因为他是一个男人，而一个男人想干什么就能干什么：当夜幕降临的时候，在一眼枯井里六小时一动不动；赤手空拳打败浣熊；观看另一个与他情逾手足的男人被烧烤，却不掉一滴眼泪，只是为了让烧烤他的人知道一个男人是什么样子。而且，就是他，那个男人，曾经从佐治亚走到了特拉华，而在124号里面，却不能在他想待的地方自主地去留———耻辱啊。
保罗·d不能指挥他的双脚，可是他认为自己还能说话，于是他下定决心以这种方式爆发。他要跟塞丝谈谈过去的三个星期：当她从她称做餐馆的那家露天啤酒馆下班、单独回家的时候，揪住她，向她和盘托出。
他等着她。冬日的午后看上去已像黄昏，他在索亚餐馆后面的巷子里站着。一边想象着她的面容，一边排练，让词句在他脑袋里聚集起来，好像准备排好队、跟着排头走的孩子们一样。
“这个，呃，这事不是，一个男人不能，你瞧，可是噢听着，不是那个，真的不是，老家伙加纳，我的意思是，这不是个弱点，我能战胜的那种弱点，因为、因为我出了点儿事，是那个姑娘干的，我知道你觉得我从来不可能喜欢她，可这是她对我干的。耍我。塞丝，她耍了我，可我甩不掉她。”
什么？一个壮年男子汉让一个小姑娘给耍了？可是如果那姑娘不是个姑娘，而是什么东西假装的呢？是一个貌似甜姑娘的下流坯，而操她还是没操她就不是关键，问题是他不能够在124号里面自由去留，而且危险在于失去塞丝，因为他不能像个十足的男子汉一样爆发，所以他需要她，塞丝，来帮助他，来了解这件事情，而他又耻于去乞求他想保护的女人来帮助他，真他妈的。
保罗·d向自己扣起的双手中呵着热气。风疾速穿过胡同，梳亮了四只等待残羹剩饭的厨房狗的皮毛。他看着狗。狗看着他。
后门终于开了，塞丝用臂弯夹着剩饭锅，迈了出来。她一看见他，马上“哦”了一声，微笑里有喜悦也有惊讶。
保罗·d觉得自己回了一笑，可是他的脸冷得厉害，他自己也拿不准。
“伙计，你让我觉得像个小姑娘，下班后还过来接我。从前可没有人这么待过我。你最好留神，我要盼起来可没个够啊。
”她麻利地把那些最大块的骨头扔在地上，这样狗就会知道骨头够吃，用不着争来抢去了。然后她倒出来一些东西的肉皮、一些东西的头和另一些东西的下水———餐馆不能用、她也不愿要的———在狗的脚边堆了一大摊，冒着热气。
“得回去把这个刷净了，”她说道，“马上就来。
”
他点点头，她又回到厨房。
狗默不作声地吃着。保罗·d心想，它们至少得到了想要的东西，要是她有足够的东西给它们———她头上的棕色围巾是羊毛的，她把它压到发际挡风。
“你早收工了还是怎么的？
”
“我提前走了。
”
“有事儿吗？
”
“可以这么说。
”他说着，抹了一下嘴唇。
“不是裁人了吧？
”
“不，不是。他们有的是活儿。只是我———”
“嗯？”
“塞丝，我说的话你不会爱听的。
”