inside, while the other turned toward the back side of the cabin, disappeared, then reappeared in the fields, darting now toward the woods at the far edge. I was certain that the shadow now running was a man, and the shadow gone into the cabin was his wife. It was a normal thing to see back then because so many marriages extended across the wide miles of the county. When I was small, I would wonder why any man would impair himself so. But now, watching the shadow bound through the fields, and standing there with Sophia, I felt that I understood.
“You know I’m from somewhere,” she said. “I had me a life before all of this. I had people.”
“And what was your life?”
“Carolina,” she said. “Born there the same year as Helen, Nathaniel’s woman. But it ain’t about her or him, you know. It’s about what I had down there.”
“And what was that?” I asked.
“Well, in the first place, I had a man. A good one. Big. Strong. We used to dance, you know. Go down with the folks to this old broke-down smokehouse on Saturdays and stomp the floor.”
She paused, perhaps to savor the memory.
“You dance, Hi?” she asked.
“Not even a little,” I said. “I am told my momma had the gift. But look like I favor my daddy in that capacity.”
“Ain’t about ‘favor,’ Hi, it’s about doing. Best thing about the dance is it really didn’t matter who had it and who did not. Only crime you could commit was to spend that whole night all lonesome against that old smokehouse wall.”
“Is that a fact,” I said.
“Yes, it is,” she said. “Now, don’t misunderstand: I was a caution. Every time I shook, I put some hen out her happy home.”
We both laughed.
“I’m sorry I didn’t get to see it—didn’t get to see you dance,” I said. “Everything had changed here by the time I came up, you know. And I was a different kind of child. Even now, a different kind of man.”
“Yeah, I see that,” she said. “Kinda remind me of my Mercury. He was a quiet one too. Was what I liked about him. No matter what happened, I knew it was between us. I should have known that it could not stand. But he danced, see. Man, in those days we’d dance before we would eat. Used to tear that old smokehouse down, and my Mercury, in brogans thick as biscuits, was light as a dove.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Same as happening up here. Same as happening everywhere. I had people, you know, Kansas, Millard, Summer…People, you know? Well, you don’t, but you understand.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”
“But wasn’t none like my Mercury,” she said. “Hoping he resting easy. Hoping he found himself some thick Mississippi wife.”
Now she turned without a word and started back.
“I got no idea what for I am telling you all this,” she said. I nodded and listened. It was always like this. People talked to me. They told me their stories, gave them to me for keeping, which I did, always listening, always remembering.
The next morning, I washed and walked out, just as the sun made its way over the trees. I passed the bowling green, then the orchards, where Pete and his team—Isaiah, Gabriel, and Wild Jack—were already picking and gently depositing apples in their burlap satchels. I walked until I was in the fallow field, covered with clover, walked until I saw the stone monument. I stood there for a moment, letting it all come back to me—the river, the mist, the high grass waving, black in the wind, and then the sudden appearance of the progenitor’s stone. I circled the monument once, twice, and then saw something glinting in the morning sun, and before even reaching down, before picking it up, before fingering its edges, before putting it in my pocket, I knew that it was the coin, my token into the Realm—but not the Realm I’d long thought.
6
I HAD BEEN THERE IN the fallow field. And if I had been in the field, then all of it—the river, the mist, the blue light—must bear out too. I stood stock-still amidst the timothy and clover, the coin now in my pocket, and felt a great pressure in my head, so that the world seemed to wheel and spin around me. I knelt down in the high grass. I could hear my heart pounding. I pulled a handkerchief from my vest and mopped the sudden drizzle of