“Slipped in here and done that before he left so my wife would find it.”

I studied where he was pointing.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “That’s been years ago, and it’s been cleaned up some time now.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“It doesn’t sound like much, but that thing right there, him doing that, running off, got me thinking maybe a colored slave wasn’t so different from a Hebrew slave, and I give in to another way of thinking. After I did I could never preach again. I was ruined for it. I had always used the sermon about Ham, who saw his father, Noah, naked and how Noah cursed Ham’s son for it. Cursed him because his father had seen his balls. Not Ham himself, but his son—Canaan—and all his descendants. Made them black, is how I was taught, and doomed to slavery for that ball watching. It made sense to me then, cause I hadn’t never thought on it. After the war I did consider it. I didn’t go around trying to spy me some men’s balls, but I’ve seen a few, which is a thing that will happen if you’re in the army or in a Yankee prison camp, like I was. Seeing them balls and them seeing mine didn’t make me want to curse no one with slavery for generations. It was bullshit, and I seen that clear as a sunny day.”

“You actually seen my balls,” I said, referring to my changing clothes in front of him.

He recollected a little, then laughed. “I guess I have, though I didn’t lay considerable observation on them.”

“I could lay a curse on you,” I said, “and from now on all white men will be slaves.”

He really laughed then, so hard in fact I thought he was going to fall off his chair and roll on the floor. It wasn’t that funny, but I guess it was causing him to let something stove up inside of him out. Laughing was good for that.

When he got his mind and mouth in line again, he said, “You know, Noah must have had one ugly set to have been offended so bad to have them spied on. I mean, that’s something, isn’t it? You’ve peeped on my nut sack, so a whole generation and their generations gets cursed.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Them must have been the ugliest nuts ever hung between a pair of legs.”

He grinned, and then his mind settled into something darker. The grin washed off his face like a stick-drawn line in the dirt washed away by fast water. “You know, my son went off in that war, too. Got killed the first day he was in a battle. He’s buried some sad place up in Virginia. He fought far away from me. Over in another part of the war—another theater, you might call it. Sometime after it happened, after I was out of the prison camp and home, a fellow that had been with him looked me up and gave me Tad’s pocket watch. He said it had stopped the moment he was shot and therefore was some kind of recognition from God of his death. Well, I had already come to that realization about Ham and Noah and Canaan, and had come to certain conclusions about slavery, but this clinched it. I’m thinking, my boy gets shot, and his watch stops, and that’s a sign from God? He couldn’t make that bullet miss or bring my boy home to me or bring him back from the dead, but he’d go to the trouble to stop a watch? How can they be sure his watch stopped at the exact moment of death in all the confusion of battle? Maybe it just stopped because he fell on it or some such. Before that moment, little signs like that meant something to me. A cloud shaped like an angel’s wings. A hawk flying overhead with a snake in its mouth.

“What happened to me when that fellow gave me that watch and went on his way was I gave the whole thing furious thought. God’s bucket from then on didn’t tote water. That bucket had a hole in it. I come to think on that watch some more, and it come to me that God wasn’t all loving. He was like a big watchmaker, and we were the innards of his watch, and this here earth we stand on is the watch’s slippery surface. Once God got the watch made, set it ticking, he sat back and said, ‘Well, good luck to you son of a bitches, cause I’m done.’ ”

I studied on his reasoning a bit, and damn if it didn’t make some sense to me, which scared me a little. If the big man was right, we was all on our own out here.

He looked at me just then, as if watching a bug crawl across my face, said, “Pie?”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Want a piece of pie? I got an apple pie in the warmer, and it looked to me it might have turned out all right, though it’s slightly sunk in the middle.”

It did turn out all right, and we ate it up, the whole damn pie. Drank about a pot of coffee, then he took me out back and we walked to a field that lay beyond what I had seen before. It was cleared, except for a few stumps and a giant oak out there in the middle of it, and there were chairs under it. We sat in them. Above us was this big gap in the limbs, like a window between tree and sky. You could look up and see the stars real good. That’s what we did, him explaining to me that there was things called constellations, and positioned as we were in our chairs, we was looking right at one. He told me what it was, but the name of it has faded from my mind now. I didn’t really care about any of that right then, so maybe it never really stuck to me. I was full of food and felt worn to a nubbin, in spite of all that coffee. Somewhere along the way, between him chattering about this set of stars and another, my head tossed back and I closed my eyes and slipped off to sleep like I was gently sliding down a muddy slope into a field of soft, dry grass and darkness.

3

When I woke up the next morning I was covered in dew, or at least my face was, but I had a thick blanket tossed over me, and I was beginning to get a little warm. Cracking an eye open, I found I was still under that oak out in the middle of the field.

Getting up, I stretched and seen there had been a note laid out on the ground, held down with a couple of rocks. It was dew-damp but not ruined. There was an arrow drawn on it, and that pointed toward the house. I reckoned on it for a while, trying to decide should I go back up to the house, or should I light out west. Thing made me decide was thinking on that excellent meal I’d had the night before, and there being most likely some kind of breakfast back at the house. Maybe I could pay for it by working it off. I knew there was some all-right white people, but last night I had come to consider there might even be some good ones. Then again, it could be like putting cheese in a rat trap, and that dinner last night was the cheese, and I’d get down to the house, and there Ruggert would be, waiting with a tall horse and a short rope.

Giving it a final turnabout in my head, I started down to the house. When I come up to the corral, the big fellow was out there feeding the horses, pouring grain from a sack into the trough.

“There you are,” he said. “I had a mind to think you run off.”

“Considered it,” I said.

“Tell you what,” he said. “Here’s how we’ll do it. Go in the house, have you some biscuits—they’re in the warmer—and pour you a cup of coffee. Have two cups if you like. You’re going to get sweaty when you come back, cause I’m going to put you to work, but if you need to take a bath—and from the way the wind is blowing your stink on me, I suspect you do—then there’s some hot water on the stove to put in the tub. It’s enough for a good splash bath, not much more. It will make you better to stand out here in the field with. Do that, then come out to the far field and we’ll pick some tomatoes. I done got the bags and such, so all you got to do is show. Is that fair enough to you, son?”

“Yes, sir.”

I went in the house, had two biscuits slathered in butter, drank two cups of coffee that I put milk and sugar in, poured water in the number 10 washtub that had been set out near the stove, and worked on my filthy body with some lye soap. I picked ticks and chiggers till I thought I got them all, then dressed and did a turn at the outhouse out back. Having had a refreshing morning constitutional, I strolled to where my host was working.