must have loved what she saw because she leaned over and kissed the tenderness under Sethe's chin.
They stayed that way for a while because neither Denver nor Sethe knew how not to: how to stop and
not love the look or feel of the lips that kept on kissing. Then Sethe, grabbing Beloved's hair and blinking
rapidly, separated herself. She later believed that it was because the girl's breath was exactly like new
milk that she said to her, stern and frowning, "You too old for that."
She looked at Denver, and seeing panic about to become something more, stood up quickly, breaking
the tableau apart.
"Come on up! Up!" Sethe waved the girls to their feet. As they left the Clearing they looked pretty
much the same as they had when they had come: Sethe in the lead, the girls a ways back. All silent as
before, but with a difference. Sethe was bothered, not because of the kiss, but because, just before it, when
she was feeling so fine letting Beloved massage away the pain, the fingers she was loving and the ones
that had soothed her before they strangled her had reminded her of something that now slipped her mind.
But one thing for sure, Baby Suggs had not choked her as first she thought. Denver was right, and walking
in the dappled tree-light, clearer-headed now—away from the enchantment of the Clearing—Sethe
remembered the touch of those fingers that she knew better than her own. They had bathed her in sections,
wrapped her womb, combed her hair, oiled her nipples, stitched her clothes, cleaned her feet, greased her
back and dropped just about anything they were doing to massage Sethe's nape when, especially in the
early days, her spirits fell down under the weight of the things she remembered and those she did not:
schoolteacher writing in ink she herself had made while his nephews played on her; the face of the woman
in a felt hat as she rose to stretch in the field. If she lay among all the hands in the world, she would know
Baby Suggs' just as she did the good hands of the whitegirl looking for velvet. But for eighteen years she
had lived in a house full of touches from the other side. And the thumbs that pressed her nape were the
same. Maybe that was where it had gone to. After Paul D beat it out of 124, maybe it collected itself in the
Clearing. Reasonable, she thought.
Why she had taken Denver and Beloved with her didn't puzzle her now—at the time it seemed
impulse, with a vague wish for protection. And the girls had saved her, Beloved so agitated she behaved
like a two-year-old.
Like a faint smell of burning that disappears when the fire is cut off or the window opened for a
breeze, the suspicion that the girl's touch was also exactly like the baby's ghost dissipated. It was only a
tiny disturbance anyway—not strong enough to divert her from the ambition welling in her now: she
wanted Paul D. No matter what he told and knew, she wanted him in her life. More than commemorating
Halle, that is what she had come to the Clearing to figure out, and now it was figured. Trust and
