She stood in front of the window, telephone in hand.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
He looked past her, through the big window with its single cracked pane; over the grassy yard, and the yards and houses beyond, where there had been plowed fields not so long ago, stretching to the even older woods on the horizon -- a view that telescoped both space and time so that the oldest things were the farthest away, like the light from the most distant stars.
Before the subdivision were the plowed fields, a sea of green with its billows and swells frozen in the summer heat, a sea of money that had sent the sons of its masters to academies and colleges, distant towns and remote cities, finally returning in their dotage to sip coffee in the morning, whiskey in the evening, and to shoot birds on the weekend. For some, the sea of green had financed local investment, mills and feed stores, real estate and banking -- men whose interests narrowed as their influence grew, inverted pyramids of power and humanity, an expanding cone whose core became more empty as it widened, until at its farthest reaches there was nothing in the center at all. And the sea of green, of cotton, of money, the ocean of white that washed the boundaries of the woods beyond, had given little more than food and shelter to the men and women and children who worked the land, who were brought across the ocean to work the land, whose ancestors and descendants were at home in Ghana and Pauldoe -- in homes with packed-dirt floors, in churches where spirits were raised as earthly hopes were suppressed, and who had finally left the land, drifting away to Athens, or Atlanta, or up North. And before the big plowed fields, there was the forest where the aboriginal people had hunted and tended their fields and built their towns, guided by the daily and seasonal needs of survival, whose children played at being hunters and prey; and their time had come and gone, leaving the bones of a hundred generations in the soil, under the fields and roads and towns where deer had grazed and bears had walked and bison had gathered.
She spoke again, and she was Africa and Europe and America, a black-white-and-red vessel holding the blood of Granny Yarky, who was listed in the census of 1790 as “Yarico, Indian,” the blood of a Georgia governor for whom the blending of races was as agreeable as whiskey and water, and the blood of a hundred generations of hunters and farmers and townspeople in Africa, whose time had come and gone and come again. The cracked windowpane above her head was a stylized hieroglyph written on the sky, a cryptic symbol of the macrocosm, a halo.
“We’re going to be late,” she said.
“Yes,” he said, “but it will be all right.”
