Warrens were revealed for what they had always been—a dungeon beneath a castle, dank and gray, an effect augmented by the array of lanterns that had fallen into disrepair and now left long stretches of the Warrens in darkness.
When I arrived, Thena was not there. I decided to sit and wait. She arrived a few minutes later, looked at me, and said, “Evening.”
“Evening,” I said.
“You ate?”
“Naw.”
We had greens, fatback, and ash-cake. We ate silently, as we had always done when I was a child. Then, after cleaning up, I bid Thena good night and returned to my room. We continued this routine for a week. And then one unseasonably warm evening, at my suggestion, we took our plates out to the end of the Warrens tunnel, where I had, all those years ago, entered with her. We sat there eating, watching the sun set over the country.
Thena said, “So you done seen Sophia?”
“Not yet,” I said. “Figured she spent most of her time over at Nathaniel’s now.”
“Naw,” said Thena. “She right down there on the Street. Nathaniel almost always in Tennessee now. So ain’t too much reason for her to be over there. But he and Howell and Corrine got some sort of arrangement on her. Can’t say I understand it, except that she is left there to her business.”
“To her business?” I asked.
“Till they figure out what to do with her, I’m guessing. They don’t make a habit of sharing such things with me, as you know.”
“I should see her,” I said.
“Only if you ready,” Thena said. “Best not to rush such things. Lot done changed down this way.”
The next day was a Sunday, my day. I held myself back until the afternoon. Then, realizing I must see her sometime anyway, and feeling I would never be ready, I took my walk down to the Street, down to the place of my birth. And much as I had expected, the Street too had fallen into disrepair. There were no chickens roaming about, and all the old gardens were overgrown. These were the last days of the section of the vast Southern Empire that held Virginia as its ancestral seat. And it has been said, the fact of this falling is the fault of its masters, that had the Quality adhered to the hollow virtues of old, perhaps this empire would have stretched forth for a thousand years. But the fall was always ordained, because slavery made men wasteful and profligate in sloth. Maynard was crude and this was his greatest crime. In fact, he mirrored so much of the Quality. He simply lacked the guile to hide it.
The first bite of winter air had blanketed over Elm County, so that I grew wistful of summer Sundays and that other time when all of my young friends would have been out playing our little games of marbles and tag. Thena told me that Sophia had taken up in that same far cabin at the end of the Street where Thena and I had lived in the days following my mother’s departure. Looking down the bank of houses, I saw a woman emerge with a small child on her hip. The woman bounced the baby a few times, and then looked up and saw me. She gave me a look of puzzled interrogation, nodded an acknowledgment, and walked back inside. I stood there a second waiting, and then the woman stepped out of the cabin again, without the baby, and it was only then that it dawned on me that the woman was Sophia.
When Sophia stepped back out, she was different. She stood there, a few yards away, at the far end of the street, Sophia, my Sophia, unsmiling. I did not know what any of it meant. Was she angry with me for leading her to Ryland? Had I dreamt up that whole evening, of us out there, in union? Had it all been a childish flirtation between us? Did she now love another? And who was that baby?
“Gon stand down there all day?” she yelled down at me. Then she walked back inside. I followed until I was outside Thena’s old cabin, and memories of myself, appearing before her with only my victuals, overran me. But there was not much time for such things. And looking in, I saw Sophia had the baby on her hip again, bouncing her just as she had outside, singing a song.