In the garden he picked a tomato and ate it sitting on the ground next to a big pepper plant. The calendar said it was fall but it might as well be summer. The sky was speckled with tiny white clouds like little checkmarks. From another yard, not far off, came the thunk of an ax. “Rooster,” a woman’s voice called, “come here and help me mend that winder shade.” The smell of frying pork from far off, sweet smoke. He dried the tomato juice off his hands by rubbing them hard together, picked a pepper, shucked the flaky white seeds and ate that. Then he picked a few late runner beans, shelled them out into his palm and ate them. Then a small summer squash, the ring of yellow blossom a ruff around one end. I could eat myself around the world, garden to garden.
In the wash shed he cranked water into a tin basin and scrubbed his face and hands. In the piece of mirror propped on a piece of shelf he studied his face. There were deep lines running down his cheeks. He liked that; before prison he’d been a fat-faced boy, now he looked like a man who had seen trouble and lived through it. He patted his hair, mulling its length. Before he was arrested he wore his hair brushed out and squared off with a part razored on the left side, but afterwards, in the convict life, he had his hair cut short. Now, out in the world again, he’d let it grow some, and over here in Atlanta he’d gone to Mr. Eulis’s and while “Laudate Dominum” played on the Victrola had him chop a part into it. He’d tried a mustache, but it looked like a black caterpillar on his lip so he shaved it off. Minnie May had a razor right here in the house, left over from the last man who lived here, and he used that, glad to come that near to having his own. He took time lathering his face, leaned in close to the mirror, examining his creased cheek, the little dents up near his ears, the stubby chin. Sometimes he’d wash the lather off and start over just for the feel of it. Minnie May often heated water in a kettle and carried it out to him; he loved it when she did that.
He took his time shaving, no rush at the moment, pausing to study his face as it reappeared out of the lather.
“What’s going on in there?” he asked it. “You ever gon own up?” He touched the thin puffed scars on his left cheekbone. “I reckon not. No telling what you might have to own up
He carefully washed his face and carefully patted it dry and stared at himself in the mirror. “We’ll keep you awhile longer,” he said. He washed the razor, dried it on the towel, folded it and put it in his pocket.
Back in the house he shucked his clothes and slid into bed next to the sleeping Minnie May. She slept on her back, making a soft purring noise, a snore with a tiny bubbling sound at the end of it. He nestled against her and she automatically turned away but he pressed on until she turned toward him. She wore a loose gray slip washed to a softness like fresh ginned cotton. Softer than that. He slid his hand up behind and pushed the slip up her smooth body that was almost as dark as his, so smooth he felt the rough chafe of his own fingers against it and was almost ashamed to touch her. He could smell her now, smell the spicy odor of her and the fresh sweat and the verbena spice oil she poured over herself and wiped off with a cloth, smell the barley soap and the shelled butterbeans and the okra she itched from and he could smell under these other, unplotted mysteries, deeper reeks and perfumes. He contorted his body until he could put his nose close to her lower back and he inhaled the rich odor of her woman smell and sniffed all the way to her girl smell, even, so it seemed, to her original baby smell, a faint residue of it like a thin sprinkling of garden rain.
