only his bare feet and trouser legs. "How's the nose?" she asked.
"Still hurts," said the boy. He scootched forward and dropped down a couple of steps by bouncing on his bottom.
"But not too bad," she said. "Healing fast."
"They was only girls," he said scornfully.
"You didn't think such scorn of them when they were pounding on you," she said.
"But you didn't hear me callin' uncle, did you? You didn't hear no uncle from me."
"No," said Peggy. "No uncle from you."
"I got me an uncle, though. Big Red man. Ike."
"I know of him."
"He comes most every day."
Peggy wanted to demand information from him. How does Ta-Kumsaw get here? Doesn't he live west of the Mizzipy? Or is he dead, and comes only in the spirit?
"Comes through the west door," said the boy. "We don't use that one. Just him. It's the door to my cousin Wieza's cabin."
"Her father calls her Mana-Tawa, I think."
The boy hooted. "Just giving her a Red name don't mean he can hold on to her. She don't belong to him."
"Whom does she belong to?"
"To the loom," he said.
"And you?" asked Peggy. "Do you belong to the loom?"
He shook his head. But he looked sad.
Peggy said it as she realized it: "You want to, don't you."
"She ain't going to have no more daughters. She don't stop weaving for him anymore. So she can't go. She'll just be there, forever."
"And nephews can't take her place?"
"Nieces can, but my sisters ain't worth pigslime, in my opinion, which happens to be correck."
"Correct," said Peggy. "There's a t on the end."
"Correckut," the boy said. "But what I think is they ought to spell the words the way folks say 'em, stead of making us say 'em the way they're spelt."
Peggy had to laugh. "You have a point. But you can't just start spelling words any which way. Because you don't say them the same os someone from, say, Boston. And so pretty soon you and he would be spelling things so differently that you couldn't read each other's letters or books."
"Don't want to read his damn old books," said the boy. "I don't even know no boys in Boston."
"Do you have a name?"
"Not for you to know," said the boy. "You think I'm stupid? You're so thick with hexes you think I'm going to give you power over my name?"
"The hexes are to hide me from others."
"What do you have to hide for? Ain't nobody looking for you."
The words struck her hard. Nobody looking for her. Well, there it was. Once she had hidden so she could return to her own house without her family knowing her. Whom was she hiding from now?
"Perhaps I'm hiding from myself. Perhaps I don't want to be what I'm supposed to be. Or perhaps I don't want to keep living the life I already started to live."
"Perhaps you don't know squat about it," he said.
"Perhaps."
"Oh, don't be so mysterious, you silly old lady."
Silly she might accept, but old? "I'm not that many years older than you."
"When people say perhaps it's cause they're lying: Either they don't believe the thing they're saying, or they do believe it only they don't want to admit they do."
"You're a very wise young man."
"And the real liars change the subject the minute the truth comes up."
Peggy regarded him steadily. "You were waiting for me, weren't you?"
"I knew what Aunt Becca would do. She don't tell nobody nothin'."
"And you're going to tell me?"
"Not me! That's trouble too deep for me to get into." He smiled. "But you did stop the three witches from making soup of me. So I got you thinking in the right direction, if you've got the brains to see it." With that he jumped up and she listened as his feet slapped up the stairs and he was gone.
The choice was for Peggy to be happy. Becca said that, or said that her sister said it - though it was hard to imagine that blank-faced woman caring a whit whether anybody was happy or not. And now the boy got her talking about why she was hiding behind hexes, and said that he had guided her. The choice she was being offered was obvious enough now. She had buried herself in her father's work of breaking the back of slavery, and had stopped looking out for Alvin. They wanted her to look back again. They wanted her to reach out for him.
She stormed back into the cabin. "I won't do it," she said. "Caring for that boy is