Home by Toni Morrison

could from Lotus and its dangerous bed-bug-crazy country folk.
    Cee’s toes scooted the gravel as the tops of her feet were dragged down the narrow road to Miss Ethel Fordham’s house. Frank picked his sister up again and, carrying her tightly in his arms, mounted the porch steps. A group of children stood in the road fronting the yard watching a girl bat a paddleball like a pro. They shifted their gaze to the man and his burden. A beautiful black dog lying next to the girl rose up and seemed more interested in the scene than the children. While they stared at the man and woman on Miss Ethel’s porch, their mouths opened wide. One boy pointed at the blood staining the white uniform and sniggered. The girl hit him on the head with her paddle, saying, “Shut it!” She recognizedthe man as the one who long ago had made a collar for her puppy.
    A peck basket of green beans lay by a chair. On a small table were a bowl and paring knife. Through the screen door Frank heard singing. “Nearer, my God, to Thee …”
    “Miss Ethel? You in there?” Frank hollered. “It’s me, Smart Money. Miss Ethel?”
    The singing stopped and Ethel Fordham peered through the screen door, not at him, but at the slight form in his arms. She frowned. “Ycidra? Oh, girl.”
    Frank couldn’t explain and didn’t try to. He helped Miss Ethel get Cee on the bed, after which she told him to wait outside. She pulled up Cee’s uniform and parted her legs.
    “Have mercy,” she whispered. “She’s on fire.” Then, to the lingering brother, “Go snap those beans, Smart Money. I got work to do.”

THIRTEEN

    I t was so bright, brighter than he remembered. The sun, having sucked away the blue from the sky, loitered there in a white heaven, menacing Lotus, torturing its landscape, but failing, failing, constantly failing to silence it: children still laughed, ran, shouted their games; women sang in their backyards while pinning wet sheets on clotheslines; occasionally a soprano was joined by a neighboring alto or a tenor just passing by. “Take me to the water. Take me to the water. Take me to the water. To be baptized.” Frank had not been on this dirt road since 1949, nor had he stepped on the wooden planks covering the rain’s washed-out places. There were no sidewalks, but every front yard and backyard sported flowers protecting vegetables from disease and predators—marigolds, nasturtiums, dahlias. Crimson, purple, pink, and China blue. Had these trees always been this deep, deep green?The sun did her best to burn away the blessed peace found under the wide old trees; did her best to ruin the pleasure of being among those who do not want to degrade or destroy you. Try as she might, she could not scorch the yellow butterflies away from scarlet rosebushes, nor choke the songs of birds. Her punishing heat did not interfere with Mr. Fuller and his nephew sitting in the bed of a truck—the boy on a mouth organ, the man on a six-string banjo. The nephew’s bare feet swayed; the uncle’s left boot tapped out the beat. Color, silence, and music enveloped him.
    This feeling of safety and goodwill, he knew, was exaggerated, but savoring it was real. He convinced himself that somewhere nearby pork ribs sizzled on a yard grill and inside the house there was potato salad and coleslaw and early sweet peas too. A pound cake cooled on top of an icebox. And he was certain that on the bank of the stream they called Wretched, a woman in a man’s straw hat fished. For shade and comfort she would be sitting under the sweet bay tree, the one with branches spread like arms.
    When he reached the cotton fields beyond Lotus, he saw acres of pink blossoms spread under the malevolent sun. They would turn red and drop to the ground in a few days to let the young bolls through. The planter would need help for the laying by and Frank would be in line then, and again for the picking when it was time. Like all hard labor, picking cotton broke the body but freedthe