eyed with hunger and loneliness, be knocked at the first back door he came to in the colored section of
Wilmington. He told the woman who opened it that he'd appreciate doing her woodpile, if she could spare
him something to eat. She looked him up and down.
"A little later on," she said and opened the door wider. She fed him pork sausage, the worst thing in
the world for a starving man, but neither he nor his stomach objected. Later, when he saw pale cotton
sheets and two pillows in her bedroom, he had to wipe his eyes quickly, quickly so she would not see the
thankful tears of a man's first time. Soil, grass, mud, shucking, leaves, hay, cobs, seashells—all that he'd
slept on. White cotton sheets had never crossed his mind. He fell in with a groan and the woman helped
him pretend he was making love to her and not her bed linen. He vowed that night, full of pork, deep in
luxury, that he would never leave her. She would have to kill him to get him out of that bed. Eighteen
months later, when he had been purchased by Northpoint Bank and Railroad Company, he was still
thankful for that introduction to sheets.
Now he was grateful a second time. He felt as though he had been plucked from the face of a cliff and
put down on sure ground. In Sethe's bed he knew he could put up with two crazy girls—as long as Sethe
made her wishes known. Stretched out to his full length, watching snowflakes stream past the window
over his feet, it was easy to dismiss the doubts that took him to the alley behind the restaurant: his
expectations for himself were high, too high. What he might call cowardice other people called common
sense.
Tucked into the well of his arm, Sethe recalled Paul D's face in the street when he asked her to have a
baby for him. Although she laughed and took his hand, it had frightened her. She thought quickly of how
good the sex would be if that is what he wanted, but mostly she was frightened by the thought of having a
baby once more. Needing to be good enough, alert enough, strong enough, that caring—again. Having to
stay alive just that much longer. O Lord, she thought, deliver me. Unless carefree, motherlove was a killer.
What did he want her pregnant for? To hold on to her? have a sign that he passed this way? He probably
had children everywhere anyway. Eighteen years of roaming, he would have to have dropped a few. No.
He resented the children she had, that's what. Child, she corrected herself. Child plus Beloved whom she
thought of as her own, and that is what he resented. Sharing her with the girls. Hearing the three of them
laughing at something he wasn't in on. The code they used among themselves that he could not break.
Maybe even the time spent on their needs and not his. They were a family somehow and he was not the
head of it.
Can you stitch this up for me, baby?
Um hm. Soon's I finish this petticoat. She just got the one she came here in and everybody needs a
