He would not sleep in the cabin. He slept the first week on the ground outside its door with his back against the wall, and when the rain came he slept under the gin house. Anil said to leave him be, and she left him be. The work he did was frightening: he cleared the cane break on the north line in nine days alone, work that would have taken four men a month. He put the sill back under the west end of the gallery by lifting the corner of the house with his shoulder while Anil drove the block in, and Anil sat down afterward and had to be helped up. He never rested, and he never hurried, and he never once looked at anybody straight on.
The others were afraid of him at first, and then they were not afraid so much as careful, the way you are careful around a hurt animal you have been feeding. Little Siri, who was six and had not yet learned what everybody else knew about the world, took to following him at a distance of about 20 feet, and narrating her day at him. He never answered. He also never once moved away from her.
Cressy was the one who tried. She was 22 and quick, and had no fear in her at all, which frightened Zilpa more than anything on that place. She would carry his food down to the row herself and set it beside him and sit on her heels and talk. You got a name?
She said the fourth night. I don't mean Goliath. That's a white man's joke. Everybody got a name their mama gave them. Nothing.
“My mama named me Lucretia and everybody called me Cressy, which I hate.” She waited. “You want me to guess? I’m going to guess one a night till I hit it.”
Peter. Nothing. Reuben, Aaron, Hardy, Titus. She grinned. I got 200 names.
You going to be tired of me before I'm tired of you. Eight nights she did that. And on the eighth night she said, Isaac. And something happened in the giant's face. Not a change exactly, a sort of settling, the way water settles, and Cressy stopped grinning because she understood that she had not gotten close.
She had gotten near, and that near was worse.
And on the ninth night, Zilpa brought his supper down herself. She had not been to the end of the row in 11 years. She came down the row with a tin plate, and she did not look at the cabin door, and she set the plate on the block beside him, and stood there with her arms crossed. “Cressy says you don't eat the greens,” she said. You eat the greens.
You that size, you need the iron.“ ”Nothing.“ ”I know what you doing,“ Zilpa said. ”You think you the first man come in here? Shut up. I seen four. Two of them opened up in a year and two of them died shut.
It ain't strength. Whatever it is, it ain't that. She waited. You hear me?
He looked at the plate. She had cooked greens in the pot liquor with a piece of fat, and beside them she had put an ashcake, a plain thing, cornmeal, and water, and a pinch of salt, laid straight on the hearth in the ashes, and turned once which was slave food and old food. And nobody in the big house had eaten one in 30 years.
and she had done to it the thing she always did, which was to score it three times across the top with her thumbnail before it went in the fire, because that was how her own mother had marked hers. He picked it up and turned it over and saw the three lines. And for Renfruit, watching from the dark window of the dining room 70 ft away, saw the biggest man she had ever seen in her life, put down an ashcake, and put both hands flat on the block, and lower his head, and shake. great silent heaves that went through his shoulders and did not make one sound, not one, because whatever had been done to him had gone all the way down to the place where sound comes from.
Zilpa did not touch him. She stood there a long time. Then she said quietly, “All right.” And she went back up to the kitchen and she was crying and she did not know why. and she told herself it was because she was 58 and tired and because the man was pitiful and because sometimes a thing just comes over you. She did not know.
That was the horror of it and Orura stood at the window and made herself look at it. Zilpa did not know. She had stood 4 ft from her son and had not known him because the last time she had seen his face it had been 11 years old and unbroken. And because she had been told he was dead and had believed it and had spent 11 years making it true inside herself, which is work, which is the hardest work a person ever does, and it had cost her everything, and she had finished it, and he would not tell her. That was the part Orura could not make sense of for weeks until the night in late August when she came down for water and found him sitting on the kitchen steps in the dark with his ruined hand open on his knee.
And she sat down on the step above him, an old woman in a shawl.