look about her and I could not decide if this was her usual teasing or if it was something deeper. She sat on a chair by the window and then invited me to take a seat myself on the bed. The baby was brown, about my complexion, and cooed quietly in Sophia’s arms. It was only then that I began to do the math of it all. So much had changed. I must have given some sign of this awareness, perhaps an arched eyebrow, or a widening of the eyes, because Sophia sucked her teeth, rolled her eyes, and said, “Don’t worry. She ain’t yours.”
“I am not worried,” I said. “I am not worried about anything anymore.”
And when I said this, I saw her relax just a bit, though she was trying to maintain that same cool distance she had offered up when I first arrived. She stood and walked to the window, all the time cradling the child.
“What is her name?” I asked.
“Caroline,” she said, still looking out the window.
“It’s a beautiful name.”
“I call her Carrie.”
“And that is beautiful too,” I said.
Now she sat down across from me, but she did not meet my eyes. She focused on the child, but did so in such a way that I knew the child was a pretense for not looking my way.
“I did not think you would come back,” she said. “Don’t nobody ever come back here. I heard Corrine Quinn had gotten ahold of you. Somebody said you was up in the mountains somewhere. In the salt mines, they said.”
“And who is ‘they’?” I asked, laughing quietly.
“That ain’t funny,” she said. “I was worried for you, Hiram. I am telling you, I was terribly scared.”
“Well, I wasn’t nowhere near no mines. It’s true I was in the mountains,” I said. “Up at Bryceton. But wasn’t no mines. Wasn’t half-bad, in fact. Quite beautiful up there. You should go sometime.”
And now Sophia laughed herself and said, “And you come back a joker, huh?”
“Gotta laugh, Sophia,” I said. “I have learned that you gotta laugh in this life.”
“Yeah, you do,” she said. “Though I find it harder every day. Need to think of good things and better times. Do you know I talk about you, Hi?”
“Talk about me to who?”
“To my Carrie. Tell her everything.”
“Huh,” I said. “Ain’t much else to talk about, it seem. Place so empty now.”
“Yeah,” said Sophia. “So many lost. So many gone. Natchez got ’em. Tuscaloosa. Cairo. Hauled ’em down into that big nothing. It get worse every day. Long Jerry from over at the MacEaster Place was by here only two weeks ago. I felt surely he was too old for them to take. He was here, right here, with a offering of yams, trout, and apples. Thena even came down. We fried it up and had a good supper together. Was just two weeks ago. And now he gone.
“It’s been so many, Hi. So many. I don’t know how they keeping this thing afloat. Was a girl named Milly come through here a few months back. Beautiful girl—which was her loss. She ain’t last but a week. Natchez. Fancy trade.”
“But you still here,” I said.
“Indeed, indeed,” she said. Now Caroline began to stir, wriggling in her mother’s arms, until she could turn her head and get a good solid look at me. And the child held me there with a stare of the deepest of intentions, regarding me in the way infants do when brought before someone unknown. I never knew what to do with that look. It discomfits me. But there was more because that look, and all its intense study, was the inheritance of her mother. Perhaps it was all the moments I had spent conjuring the face, recreating the particulars. And there was something else now, more math. Caroline had the same sun-drop eyes as her mother, but the color—an uncommon green-gray—came from somewhere else. I knew this because my own eyes were the same color, and the color was a Walker inheritance, given not only to me but to my uncle, Nathaniel.
Again, my looks must have betrayed me, because Sophia sucked her teeth, pulled Caroline close, stood, and turned away.
I know now what it is to feel things that you have no right to feel, I knew it even then though I did not know how to describe it. What I remember was one half of me wanted to get away from