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By Root 1702 0

he reached the lane, he found Alice in the middle of the path, on her knees and praying. He said, “Get on home, you.” She did not acknowledge him. “Get home if you know whas good for you.” He came up behind her and toed her left thigh. “You hear me, girl?” Whatever she was saying he could not understand, for it was more gibberish than usual. “You get home or I’ll put the strap to you.” He went on by and when he was at his door, he looked back and saw her standing. She turned fully around once and stopped, and he knew that it had been her in the woods. She came toward him and walked by, disappeared into the area that would take her out to the road. He heard her clearly now:

I met a dead man layin in Massa lane

Ask that dead man what his name

He raised he bony head and took off his hat

He told me this, he told me that.

It came into his head to go after her and strike her down, but when he got to the clearing beyond the cabins she was gone. He still heard the chanting but the more he stood there, the less certain he was about what he was hearing—her actual chanting or the memory of her chanting. And the sound of her voice seemed to come from everywhere.

He followed her the next night, resisted the need to go back to the woods and hid behind the barn until he saw her leave her cabin. Within minutes of her getting to the road, she had disappeared. He went down the way he thought she had gone, and in several more minutes, it occurred to him that he was farther from the Townsend plantation than he had been in many years. He knew everything about the plantation but what was just beyond Caldonia’s boundaries was alien to him. Moses looked about at the unfamiliarity and said quietly, “Alice? You there?” He called loudly. “Alice, you come here so I can see you. Come out here now, girl.” The sound of galloping horses came from up ahead and he ran back toward the plantation, but he felt the horses coming closer and dove into a stand of bushes beside the road. The thick summer dust they riled covered him and the bushes and he felt himself choking. He buried his mouth in the bushes and bit down into thorny leaves, afraid that even with the noise of their galloping, the white men on the horses would hear him coughing dust. His mouth bled. The horses and their men passed, but when he had coughed out the dust and blood and got to the road again, he was not as sure which way was the plantation. He was at a crossroads of sorts and he shivered to know he had put himself there, that he had followed a woman whose neck should have been wrung long ago. He turned about. One road looked to be the correct one but when he looked at the other three, they seemed right as well. The stars and the moon were as bright as the night before but, as Elias was to say to Skiffington, he was “world stupid,” and so the heavens meant nothing to him. “Sweet Jesus,” he said, walking in the direction the horses had gone. But that direction produced a small stand of trees that he had not passed earlier. “Sweet Jesus.”

He stood, trying to clear his head and spitting out blood. The sound of the horses and their patrollers was now a soft rumble along the ground. “Alice, come out here, I say.” He heard a twig break along one road, a sound almost identical to that of the night before, and he went down that road.

He got to the plantation a half hour later, his mouth swelling from the bites of the thorns. At Alice’s cabin he put both hands on the door, ready to push it in, and he knew immediately that she was inside, asleep or well on her way. He stepped back, out into the lane, and looked around. If her, then why not others who might have seen him in the woods? What would they think and what would they tell the mistress? Moses be alone out there in them woods, playin with hisself. No woman, no nothin, just hisself and hisself alone. They be talkin bout Alice, Missus, but Moses the one you gotta worry bout. Moses went toward his cabin. There were no windows on any cabin, for Henry would not have paid for the glass, but he felt their eyes watching him