gone. The men who have had to decide what they love more, the everything, lovely and mean, right in front of them, or their own wrath and regard. And I choose the muck of this world, Sophia. I choose the everything.”
There were tears now in her eyes.
“Can I hold her?” I asked.
And she laughed through her tears and said, “Careful. She might well carry you off.”
Then she smiled and pulled baby Caroline up off her lap and, cupping her backside in one hand and shoulders in the other, presented her to me. And I saw baby Caroline look up with those green-grays and that same infant obsession. I reached out, trying to do my best imitation of Sophia, putting my hands directly under hers and then slipping them out. And I pulled the girl close to me until her head sat in the crook of my elbow. And when I felt her settle in, and she did not cry or wail, when I felt the warm muck of her in my arms, I thought of my father, and how he had never held me like this, not in symbol or in fact. And I remembered how I had, for all my youth, chased him, in search of this moment. And I thought of the woman who had given that moment to me, because that is what everyone told me, that my mother loved me more than anything, that she formed her life around me, until she was ripped away, my mother, whom I could not remember.
* * *
—
With Lockless hollowing itself out, with the Warrens all haunted and gray, and that dying season now folding into winter, Caroline was a light upon our world. It was Thena, with no one else there and willing, who had midwifed Carrie, and so, out of that feeling, Thena would at times care for the baby herself, to spell Sophia. That she did that following Sunday, when I was to repair the daubing on Sophia’s cabin. I worked for about an hour and then stepped inside. Sophia had started a fire. She was all bundled up and sat in front of the fireplace holding her hands toward it.
She looked at me and said, “You ain’t cold?”
“I am,” I said. “Can’t you tell?” And I put my hands on her cheeks and reached down to her neck. She laughed and shrieked, “Boy, stop!”
I chased her out of the cabin and into the Street for a few minutes until we collapsed in laughter onto the ground.
“All right, I really am cold now,” I said.
“I’m trying to tell you,” she said.
We went inside and sat by the fire. “Day like this,” she said, “could sure use me a demijohn. My Carolina Mercury, I tell you, he used to keep his share.” Then she looked at me and said, “Forgive me, Hi, I do not mean to speak of old things.”
“To be mine, can’t be mine,” I said. “Besides, give me an idea. Just wait right here.”
I walked back up to the house and into the Warrens. I stopped past Thena’s room and saw the door cracked open, and looking in I saw that Caroline was asleep on Thena’s bosom, much as Kessiah had told me she would be in days past. I walked into my room and took the bottle of rum that Mars had given me on my departure. When I got back, Sophia was sitting there with her hands underneath their opposite arms, and when I showed her the bottle she smiled and said, “I know there is something with you, something about the places you been.”
I opened the bottle and she said, “You ain’t the same man who left. You can try as you might to fool me, but you ain’t the same, I can see it, Hi. Can’t hide from me.”
I passed her the bottle and she took it to her mouth and tilted her head back as if trying to catch rain in her face, and then drank. “Ooh,” she said, wiping her mouth with her sleeve. “Yeah, you been some places.”
“But I am here now,” I said, and took a drink. “And besides, what about you?”
“What about me?” she said. “What you wanna know? I shall lay it out all before you.”
I took another drink, then sat the bottle on the ground.
“What happened?” I asked. “What happened after that night they had us out there?”
“Huh,” she said. “Well, they kept me pinned in that jail, much as I assume