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By Root 1768 0

vague, still full from my very heavy meal the night before, and also extremely thirsty. I had not picked a spot near water, and there were no streams nearby, so I made up my mind to approach the house I saw across the road. I must say that I was daunted, as it was one of those large places with columns, constructed of whitewashed brick, that was set back on a lawn. As I trudged toward the veranda, a pain seemed to lift up through my neck into my head, lodging itself in two burning points at the back of my skull. I grew dizzy, paused, took my hat off, and put my head between my knees for a moment, got clear again, and resumed trudging. About ten yards from the house, I realized that I had left my case under the hay. I let out a groan and dropped to the grass. Going back to get it, and going on to the house without it, seemed equally impossible.

The green lawn stretched away on all sides. As I lay down within it, it grew as large as a prairie, seeming to run to the horizon, as a prairie did, and to end only in the same sort of threatening clouds that had so recently oppressed me with their torrential, fiery tempests. This lawn gave me such a lonely feeling, such a feeling of general abandonment, that I started to cry and therefore had to pull my hat over my face. The pain in my head, which had subsided somewhat, was now matched by pains elsewhere, the source of which was utterly mysterious to me, unless they were the evidence of some sort of general collapse of my soul and body under the pressures of grief and exhaustion. The darkness inside my hat gave me some relief, though, and as I lay there gripping Thomas’s watch, I did feel myself swoon away.

"You be moanin’ purty bad, ma’am," said a voice.

And in my own voice, Lydia’s voice, I said, "Something is wrong with me." My voice came out high and light, as easy as water. I needed water. I said, "I’m thirsty," and I took the hat away from my eyes. A Negro woman was squatting beside me, perhaps thirty years of age, wearing a faded gown and a white kerchief around her head. She put her hand around the back of my neck; it was cool and firm, large and strong. She said, "You sit up, now, and I ken gi’ you somethin’ ta drink, ’cause I got milk right here from de springhouse."

I knelt forward and drank from a cup.

"What you be wearin’ man’s clothes for? Ain’ you got no dress?"

"I want to kill someone."

The Negro woman laughed.

But after that her face closed over, and she said, "Missy Helen done seen you from de house, and she sent me down heah. I see her lookin’ right now. You cain’ lay out on de grass—"

And a voice called from the house, "Lorna! Who is that young man? See him off! I won’t have any loiterers about with the master gone!"

Lorna stood up and went out of my sight. I closed my eyes. Sometime later, Lorna and her mistress were both kneeling above me. I opened my eyes and beheld their faces, framed in dark clouds, both looking seriously down at me, one black, one pale blond. The hand of the mistress, just a girl, smaller but no less cool than the hand of the slave, smoothed my hair away from my face. She said, "Lorna says you’re a female."

I said nothing. She felt my cheeks and said, "I do believe you are a female. Well, mercy me! And you surely got a fever. Well, we’ll take you in, I suppose, but it’s a good thing for you you’re a female, because Papa wouldn’t like me to be taking in a man!"

I said, "I only need some water. I’ve got to get to Blue Springs."

They looked at me, then Lorna said, "You be walkin’? I ain’ seen no horse nor buggy."

I nodded.

She said, "Ain’ walkin’ to no Blue Spring today. Big storm comin’ up, for one thing. It gone rain any moment!"

And it was true. As they helped me sit up, I could feel it in the breeze.

In the kitchen, sitting on a bench beside a stove, a bowl of corn pudding in one hand and a spoon in the other, I was seized with the worst pain of all, and I swooned away right then and there.

CHAPTER 22

I Am Taken In

If domestics are found to be incompetent, unstable, and unconformed to their station, it is Perfect