She walked back to the block, and she stood in front of the giant, and she had to tip her head back a long way to look at him. “My name is Mrs. Renfruit,” she said. I have a place 11 miles east.
There is no cotton on it worth speaking of, and there is not enough to eat, but nobody there will strike you.“ He did not move. He did not look at her. He looked out over her head at the road, at the dust, at the buzzards with those crooked jaws set. The way a man looks at whether he has decided to stop minding. ”Can you walk 11 miles? she asked.
He stepped down off the block. The boards groaned again, and he stood waiting by her mule cart, like a house someone had moved.
The road east out of Natchez ran through the lowest hills, and in July it was a trench of white dust 12 feet deep in places, cut down through the soft earth by 60 years of wheels, with the roots of the beeches hanging out of the banks overhead like the underside of something turned over. The mule went at a walk. Mrs. Renfruit drove. The giant would not sit in the cart. He walked behind it, and after four miles she stopped arguing about it.
At the top of the second hill, a rain came in off the river, warm as bath water, and it laid the dust and turned the cut into a red creek, and they went on through it. She watched him in the corner of her eye. He walked with a short, careful hitch on the left side, an old thing, a hip that had been out and put back badly. He never once looked at the woods. That was the thing she noticed and could not stop noticing.
Every man she had ever known who had been sold and moved looked at the woods. They looked at them the way a hungry man looks at a bakery window. Sidelong, quick, ashamed. This one did not. He looked at the road and at the back of the cart and nowhere else.
And she understood that somewhere in the last 11 years the woods had been taken out of him.
Tallow Creek sat at the end of a lane of dying cedars. A house of six rooms unpainted, its gallery sagging on the west end where the sill had rotted, a kitchen out back, a gin house with half its roof gone, a barn, and a row of eight cabins of which one had stood empty for 11 years. 420 acres, 18 people, two mules where there had been nine. They came out to look at him. They always came out to look, and the looking was never idle, because a new man on a place was a new fact about everybody's life.
Anil, who was 60 and had driven for the Renfruits since before Orura married into the name, came out from the barn, wiping his hands, and stopped dead. Cressy, 22, came around the corner of the kitchen with a basket of shelled corn on her hip, and did not put it down for a full minute. Little Siri hid behind her mother. Toby, who had come to Tallow Creek only that spring and had still not been told why, stood in the door of his cabin and watched with the flat blank face of a man who had learned to have no opinions. And in the kitchen door stood Zilpa.
She was 58 and looked older, and she cooked for the house, and had cooked for the house since she was a girl. Her hands were burned white across the backs from 40 years of iron. She stood in the doorway with a dish towel and she looked up at the enormous man standing in her yard in the rain and Orura Renfruit found that she had stopped breathing. Zilpa's face did not change. She looked at him for perhaps 3 seconds, no longer than she'd look at a peddler, and then she turned around and went back to her stove, and the sound of the skillet came out into the yard, and that was all.
Orura let out her breath so hard it hurt. “Anil,” she said. “The end cabin.” Anil's head came up. “Ma’am, the end cabin? That’s—”
That's He stopped himself. 60 years had taught him where the wall was. Yes. Cressy set the basket down. It was a small thing, and the whole place felt it.
The cabin at the end of the row had been shut since the fall of 1838. Nobody had been put in it. Nobody had asked to be put in it. The roof was sound, and the chimney drew, and there was no reason on God's earth for it to sit empty on a place where four grown people slept in one room, and yet it had sat empty, because Zilpa had lived in it with her boy. And when the boy died, she had moved up to the loft over the kitchen, and had never once walked past the end of the row again.
She went the long way around, through the garden, even in the rain. 11 years.
That evening the neighbor came. Charles Fenwick of Ivywild owned 900 acres and 41 people and a new brick house with a fanlight over the door, and he rode over on a bay gelding because he had heard by 3:00, the way everyone had heard by 3:00. He did not dismount. He sat looking at the giant, who was splitting stovewood by the kitchen with a maul that had been the heaviest tool on the place, and now looked like a toy. “Orura,” Fenwick said, “you have bought Kettleman's killer.”
“I have bought a man for seven cents.” You have bought a thing that cannot be sold. That is a different transaction. He shifted in the saddle. Do you know why Ruel could not move him?