Alice went on chanting and then she did a dance.

“Oh, let her alone,” Barnum Kinsey said. “She just that crazy woman from Nigger Henry’s place.”

“I’ll do what the hell I want!” Travis said. He liked Barnum better when Barnum had been drinking, when he was liable to be quiet.

“I’m just sayin, Harvey, that you know by now she ain’t no more harm. Probably even more crazy than usual since Henry died.”

“Master dead master dead master died.”

“I’m gettin plenty tired of seein you out here like this,” Travis said. “I never sleep good after I see this thing dancin in the road. My skin start crawlin.” The third patroller started laughing, but Barnum was silent. There was a weak moon and the third patroller was holding a lantern. Skiffington had been rotating the patrollers again and the man with the lantern was new to this part of the county, and though the others had assured him there was nothing to worry about, his wife, pregnant with their second child, had sent him out with a lantern. “We should start chargin Nigger Henry every time we see one a his niggers in the road.”

“Henry dead. I told you,” Barnum said, and the patroller with the lantern laughed again. He was very young. “Ain’t you listened to a word she been sayin.” Barnum, that morning, had promised his wife that he would not drink anymore. They had cried together and ended up on their knees, praying. Their children came in and seeing their parents praying, the children had gone to their knees as well. This was Barnum’s second set of children, the first set having grown up and went far out into the world to forget a father who loved them but who was, in the eyes of that world, little more than a nigger.

Alice danced past the man in front with the lantern. She pointed at Travis. “Hey, now!” he said, frightened that she was doing something evil. “Damn!” The other patrollers laughed at him.

“Master died master died master died.” She kicked her legs out and pointed at Travis and his horse.

“Dear Lord!” Travis said. “Leave her, boys. Just leave her,” and he rode around the woman, who was still kicking and still chanting. The other two patrollers started moving as well.

Barnum stopped. “You better go on home. I want you to go on home now.” Alice told him again that the master was dead. She did not stop kicking. “I know,” Barnum said, “but you best go home.” The men rode away.

After a time, Alice went down the way the men had come. She shook the dirt of the road from her frock. She wouldn’t get back to her cabin until about two-thirty that morning. What moon there was was now gone. She began to chant after a few yards and was just as loud as she had been in the beginning. On a day before the mule kicked her in the head, an African woman who spoke very little English had told her that some angels were hard of hearing, that it was best to speak real loud when talking to them.

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.

Elias finished the doll for Tessie his daughter the night of the day they buried Henry Townsend. He put the whittling knife on the ground beside the tree stump he was sitting on and held the doll for some time in both his hands, feeling empty and restless now that the task was done. Since his marriage to Celeste, it had helped to always have something for his hands to do when he could not shut them down in sleep. His legs never shut down-they kicked and twitched in his sleep and Celeste always threatened to tie them down for the night. “I tell you, husband, you plannin on cripplin me some more with them runnin feet.”

He ran his finger over the face of the doll and then he kissed its forehead. He had wanted it to look like Tessie but he knew he had fallen far short of that. He needed something else now for his hands, and soon. Maybe some carved figure for his oldest son, a horse. He had seen a boat once, that last day with his mother, but he did not think he could do a boat the way the first one lived on in his head, a silent brown giant sailing away under a blue sky. Any boat he would try to carve might turn out like that first comb for Celeste his wife. And besides, where could his boy sail it? Down, down in a well where he could not even see it? He would tell Tessie that the doll had the face of his own mother, for her idea of what her grandmother looked like would probably be the same as his memory of her, and that memory had shredded down to nothing over the thirty years.

Elias stood up and brushed the shavings from his shirt and pants. He was alone in the lane. The silent pledge he had made to Henry once upon a time was now no more. But that did not matter, dead man or no dead man. Elias looked up and found the winking stars in a clear part of the sky that were supposed to have guided him away. How ready he had been, at ease, legs powerful, heart desperate to beat under another moon and sun. He sat down again and put the doll inside his shirt and leaned over to pick up another piece of wood. It was nearing nine-thirty. As he took up the knife, Alice came out of her cabin and danced down the lane and stood before him with her hands on her hips. They had rarely spoken because nothing she said ever made sense. “Whatcha makin now?” she said, surprising him. “Somethin for my boy.” “Well, you just make it good, make it to last,” Alice said. He waited for her to follow up with some nonsense, but she just stood as she had been. Maybe the moon, or the lack of it, determined her ways. “Don’t be late,” Elias said to her. “Don’t be late goin out and about.” “Don’t you be late neither,” she said and danced away. He watched her, and for the first time he was afraid for her. He would begin at the horse’s head, which would be the hardest part. No boat. Why put such a notion in a boy’s head anyway? He put the wood in his left hand and the knife in his right, and then he began to cry. “Don’t be late,” he said over and over again. “Don’t be late.”

Two days after Henry bought Elias in 1847 from the white newlyweds passing through from Bath County, Elias found Celeste sitting on the ground. He knew only Moses and the men in his cabin, but had seen her from afar, limping here and there. She seemed to have been playing with or helping two children who were now skipping away. “Come on, Celeste,” the children said. “I be there directly,” she said. She struggled to get to her feet and after many tries she was standing. She stood quietly and unmoving for some time, looking down at her feet covered by her long green frock. The children called to her but she did not move. Finally she went off, taking one lumbering step after another. He watched the whole time but had not moved to help her. Escaping had been his only thought since he had come from Bath with the newlyweds who had argued with each other the whole way, and he didn’t want to be touched by any other notion. He turned and thought he was getting away before she noticed him, but she had first sensed and then seen him and she would not forget it. She had not wanted his help, but she felt he was watching a show with a cripple woman and had enjoyed it and that was not right.

She had been bought for $387 a year or so before him, but as long as she had been on the plantation, Celeste had not been known by anyone to be a hurtful woman. She never said “Master” or “Mistress” to Henry or Caldonia; just “Mr.” and “Ma’am,” her small way of saying no to everything. She had the best heart, people said of Celeste. But over the next weeks she came to resent Elias for being a cripple woman watcher and could not stop herself from being mean to him whenever she could. He would be eating his dinner at the edge of a field off to himself and she would go out of her way to limp by him and work up as much dust as she could, dirtying his food. She liked to work a row opposite one he was on just to show others how slow he was. She told people he was a lazy somebody and she didn’t mind if he heard her. When she walked down the lane and he was standing in her way, she limped faster and dared him not to move. “What you do to that woman,” someone funned him after seeing Elias nearly run over, “for her to rue the day you was ever born?”