the bank, long as their arms and rattling with seeds, and they would make music with them and weave them into wreaths.
Nan did not go to church with the family (what did she need with the Lord, Juke said, when He had already withheld his blessings?), and so she did not go to the creek with Elma on Sundays. It wasn’t proper to bathe with coloreds, Juke said, though Elma had washed Nan in the tub when she was small, though they went to the privy together, and though Elma had shown Nan how to fold a rag when her bleeding came last year, just as Ketty had shown her. Nan bathed on Tuesdays, the day they did the wash, and Elma’s father bathed in town at the mill when he made deliveries, in a shower stall with heated water.
So late one September night in 1929, when Elma went to the privy and heard footsteps on the path to the creek, she thought it must be the new field hand. The footsteps were slow, careful. Branches snapped. Genus Jackson had lived in the tar paper shack for little more than a month. Other than the field hand they called Long John, he was as tall a man as she’d seen, but he made his way through the cotton field hunched over on his long, cornstalk legs, his back sickle shaped, his gait tight, as though hiding some pain in his gut. He’d said barely ten words since he’d come to the crossroads. He didn’t join in the songs while he picked. He kept his distance from Elma and Nan, from Ezra and Long John and Al and, when they were there, Al’s three sons. He hid his face under his hat. But the other day, when the gate to the chicken yard had come off its hinge, he’d helped her lift it back into place, and when he’d smiled she saw that one of his front teeth was missing, and when she looked again she saw that it wasn’t missing but gray as a fossil. He told her his name. He asked for hers, and nodding at the house, Nan’s. The tooth made him look like a little child and an old man at the same time. He was, she noticed, not much older than she was, which was seventeen. On his head was a corn-shuck hat and on his feet were a pair of boots made from what looked like alligator hide.
Now he walked without shoes, and without a lantern. There was a slice of moon to see by, and under its white glow, through the privy window, Elma watched him disappear in his union suit through the pines.
It was Saturday—maybe Sunday already. In a few hours, she would wake to do her milking and her feeding and then she would go down to the creek herself. And in fact the next morning, the cake of lye soap she’d left in the crook of the catalpa tree wasn’t yet dry. She had made it herself, with bits of cornmeal and lavender leaf, in the same tub where she washed the laundry and cooked the lard. She held the soap to her nose, then ran it roughly between her legs, then dried and dressed and went to church with her father.
That evening, after a day of picking, after supper, she knocked on the door of Genus Jackson’s shack with a slice of blackberry pie. He wasn’t there. She looked in the fields, in the yard, the barn. She found him in the hayloft. He tossed a bale of hay down the ladder and almost knocked her over with it, knocked the plate out of her hands instead, sent the fork flying. He raced down the ladder fast as he could in those boots, swearing under his breath. “Miss Elma! I could a crushed you flat!”
Under the bale, the pie was smashed to muck. Elma laughed, and then Genus laughed at her laughing, and then seeing the tooth’s dull shine made her stop laughing and filled her chest with an icy heat. She shook the hay from her apron. “Well, there goes one delicious slice of blackberry pie,” she said.
She could see he was pained by this. She wondered if he was sorry for her trouble or just hungry. He took breakfast and supper alone in his shack, and dinner with the other hands, under the cottonwood tree. Nan delivered it to him in a straw basket.
“I’m powerful sorry, miss,” he said. The barn cat appeared and began to lick the plate, and Elma let her. “And you just trying to do me a kindness.”
“What happened to your tooth?” she asked him, pointing to her own incisor. He touched the tooth. He had large hands and long fingers and fingernails the shape and color of the inside of an almond. She could smell the sweat on him, and her soap, lavender and lye.
“My auntie called it my shark tooth.”
“You were born with it?”
“Naw. I got kicked by a horse name of Baby.”
Elma laughed again. “Did it hurt?”
“Like the devil. She had the devil in her, that one. Horse the same color as the tooth. I reckon she didn’t want me to forget her.”
“It don’t look like that,” Elma said. “It’s pretty as a silver tooth.”
He smiled, showing it again.
“How come you walk bent over that way? Was that the devil horse too?”
“You ain’t afeared of asking questions, are you, miss?”
“My daddy says I got a loose tongue.”
“You ever carry a cotton bag over your shoulder?”
“Since I was a tot.”
“Well, you tall as I am, it’s inclined to bend you in half too.”
Then it was Genus’s tongue that got loose. He had questions for Elma, about the house, the farm, about Nan. With her mind Elma followed the sweat traveling down his temples. She traced the curve of his nostrils. They stayed out in the barn until the yard was in shadow.
“Stay here.” She held up a finger. “I’ll get you another slice of pie.”
But from the porch, Elma’s father saw her coming through the yard looking dazed, saw her smoothing her apron, pulling hay from her hair. He stood up from his chair. Where had she been? What was she doing in the barn? She was to bring no one no kind of pie, get in that house. And Elma went inside and Juke went to the barn, where he found Genus Jackson sitting on a hay bale, sweaty and satisfied, licking blackberry juice from the tines of a fork. When Juke returned to the house, he said to Elma, “Learned that boy not to come near you again. Don’t make me take the hoe to you too.”
He had never taken a hoe or a hand to her. She had not known him to take a hand to anyone. So she had said nothing. She had not protested. She had not explained. She did not know how bad a beating it had been. Later, when she suspected how bad, when she began to learn to protest, she would wonder why her father had kept Genus on the farm when he could have had a new man in the shack by dark. If only he had run him off the farm! But Genus woke up same as always and carried on, and so she did too. She believed she must have done wrong, that she had invited Genus’s punishment, and that she must be very careful.
The following Saturday, there was rain. They were all glad. Genus did not go down to the creek in the middle of the night, or Elma didn’t hear him.
But the Saturday after that, Elma heard his door open and close. She counted to one hundred, crept into the kitchen, and took the whole blackberry pie from the windowsill, where she’d left it to cool that afternoon. It would be her way of making amends for the hot water she’d put him in. There was no way to talk in the daytime, not with her father’s eyes on them. The moon was brighter tonight, near full, but her bare feet didn’t need it to find their way down the path. She knew which branches to move aside to avoid snapping, which roots and rocks to step over.
He was humming. She heard it as she came to the edge of the sandhill, before the land sloped down to the shore. Under the lowest-hanging turkey oak, she placed the pie on a flat rock and lay down, pressing her chest to the ground. She watched as Genus shed his union suit, took her soap from the catalpa, and waded into the water.
She had never seen a man the way the Lord intended. There had been men around her all her life, her father, Nan’s father, the landlord, the field hands from town, the last hired man who had lived in the shack—a scrappy, white-whiskered white man named Jeroboam who as far as Elma could tell didn’t bathe at all. She had seen nothing of them but their sunburnt backs. Now there was her beau Freddie Wilson, the landlord’s grandson, who liked to press his manhood upon her while he taught her to drive his Chevy. “Less go ride,” he’d say, and he’d sit her between his blue-jeaned legs, nearly in his lap, the jar of her daddy’s gin in his hand cool against her thigh through her dress,