Esther nodded. ‘My daddy told me that you came by today,’ she said. ‘I just got home from work myself.’
Ben smiled softly. ‘Me, too.’ He looked down at the green cuttings which she held in her hand. ‘Planting something?’
‘A rosebush,’ Esther said. ‘For Doreen, I guess.’ She hoed slowly at the unbroken earth, easily turning the wet ground. ‘Sort of like she’s buried here.’
Ben kept his eyes on the cuttings. ‘I like roses,’ he said. ‘I have a few bushes in my backyard. Red. What color will those be?’
‘Red,’ Esther said. She continued to dig at the ground, inching the blade deeper and deeper with each stroke.
‘My daddy planted them,’ Ben told her, ‘the red roses in the backyard. Most of the time you think it’s the woman. But I’m not sure flowers meant much to her.’
Esther leaned the hoe against the wobbly, chicken-wire fence that bordered the yard. ‘I don’t know if Doreen liked them,’ she said. Then she took the small spade that had been lying on the fencepost beside her and knelt down. ‘Could have been, she did,’ she said as she began to shape the small hole. ‘Could have been, she didn’t.’
Ben eased himself down beside her. ‘Need some help?’ he asked almost lightly.
Suddenly the spade stopped, and Esther looked at him insistently. ‘Why are you here?’
‘What?’
‘Did you come to tell me something?’
‘Nothing in particular,’ Ben said.
‘Just to talk, something like that?’
‘I guess,’ Ben said. He stood up immediately. ‘I didn’t mean to bother you.’
For a moment, Esther lingered on the ground, then she rose slowly and faced him. ‘You just can’t come over here like this,’ she said. ‘It worries people. It gets them to thinking.’
‘Thinking what?’
‘About what you’re up to.’
Something in him seemed to break a little. ‘Nobody has to be afraid of me, Esther,’ he said.
‘They think I’m letting you know things,’ Esther told him. ‘About the demonstrations and all. They believe you’re over here spying on us. They don’t believe you’re trying to find out about Doreen. Nobody believes that.’
Ben looked at her pointedly. ‘Do you?’
She did not answer.
‘Do you, Esther?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’
He started to take her shoulders in his hands, but stopped himself. He felt a deep longing sweep over him, dense, demanding, barely controllable. ‘I don’t mean any harm,’ he said helplessly.
‘It can’t look right, though,’ Esther said. ‘It just can’t look right.’
Ben could feel his longing giving way grudgingly, as if it were being driven from him like a hungry animal from the fire.
‘I won’t come again,’ he said, ‘unless it’s about Doreen.’ He nodded gently. ‘Good night, ma’am.’
He started to turn, but she reached out quickly and touched his arm.
‘Wait.’
He turned toward her.
‘What do you think about all this?’ she asked bluntly.
‘All what?’
‘All this trouble we’re having,’ Esther said. ‘All this business in the streets.’
‘I’m sorry about it.’
‘But us, the Negroes,’ Esther asked insistently. ‘What do you, yourself, think about us?’
He realized suddenly that he had never been asked, and for a moment he couldn’t find an answer. But he remembered how as a little boy he’d first noticed that the Negroes always took seats in the back of the trolley. He’d once asked his mother about it, and she’d only said, ‘ ‘’Cause they like it.’ But his father shot back, ‘No, they don’t. Nobody d like having to do that.’ Having to do that? It was the first and last exchange he’d ever heard about the matter, and yet in all the years that followed, he’d never glanced toward the back of a trolley to see the dark faces staring toward him without thinking of what his father said.
Now he looked at Esther. ‘Well, I think that people ought to have a chance to do something, or be something, that makes sense to them,’ he said. ‘I think everybody ought to have that chance.’ He could feel the hard, insistent quality of the belief rising in him. ‘Nobody should have to give them that in the first place. But if it comes down to it, they should just up and take it.’
She watched him with an odd intensity. ‘Good night, then,’ she said.
He drove directly home and slumped down in the little swing on his front porch. The long day’s rain had cooled the air and filled it with an aromatic lushness. He could smell the rich sweetness of the flowers which grew across the street in Mr Jeffries’ yard.