Would there be a little space, she wondered, a little time, some way to hold off eventfulness, topush busyness into the corners of the room and just stand there a minute or two, naked fromshoulder blade to waist, relieved of the weight of her breasts, smelling the stolen milk again andthe pleasure of baking bread? Maybe this one time she could stop dead still in the middle of acooking meal — not even leave the stove — and feel the hurt her back ought to. Trust things andremember things because the last of the Sweet Home men was there to catch her if she sank?
The stove didn't shudder as it adjusted to its heat. Denver wasn't stirring in the next room. Thepulse of red light hadn't come back and Paul D had not trembled since 1856 and then for eighty-three days in a row. Locked up and chained down, his hands shook so bad he couldn't smoke oreven scratch properly. Now he was trembling again but in the legs this time. It took him a while torealize that his legs were not shaking because of worry, but because the floorboards were and thegrinding, shoving floor was only part of it. The house itself was pitching. Sethe slid to the floorand struggled to get back into her dress. While down on all fours, as though she were holding herhouse down on the ground, Denver burst from the keeping room, terror in her eyes, a vague smileon her lips.
"God damn it! Hush up!" Paul D was shouting, falling, reaching for anchor. "Leave the placealone! Get the hell out!" A table rushed toward him and he grabbed its leg. Somehow he managedto stand at an angle and, holding the table by two legs, he bashed it about, wrecking everything,screaming back at the screaming house. "Youwant to fight, come on! God damn it! She got enough without you. She got enough!"The quaking slowed to an occasional lurch, but Paul D did not stop whipping the table around untileverything was rock quiet. Sweating and breathing hard, he leaned against the wall in the space thesideboard left. Sethe was still crouched next to the stove, clutching her salvaged shoes to her chest.
The three of them, Sethe, Denver, and Paul D, breathed to the same beat, like one tired person.
Another breathing was just as tired.
“我那时候有奶水，”她说，“我怀着丹芙，可还有奶水给小女儿。直到我把她和霍华德、巴格勒先送走的时候，我还一直奶着她呢。
”
她用擀面杖把面团擀开。
“人们没看见我就闻得着。所以他一见我就看到了我裙子前襟的奶渍。我一点办法都没有。我只知道我得为我的小女儿生奶水。没人会像我那样奶她。没人会像我那样，总是尽快喂上她，或是等她吃饱了、可自己还不知道的时候就马上拿开。谁都不知道她只有躺在我的腿上才能打嗝，你要是把她扛在肩膀上她就不行了。除了我谁也不知道，除了我谁也没有给她的奶水。我跟大车上的女人们说了。跟她们说用布蘸上糖水让她咂，这样几天后我赶到那里时，她就不会忘了我。奶水到的时候，我也就跟着到了。
”
“男人可不懂那么多，”保罗•D说着，把烟口袋又揣回马甲兜里，“可他们知道，一个吃奶的娃娃不能离开娘太久。
”
“那他们也知道你乳房涨满时把你的孩子送走是什么滋味。
”
“我们刚才在谈一棵树，塞丝。
”
“我离开你以后，那两个家伙去了我那儿，抢走了我的奶水。他们就是为那个来的。把我按倒，吸走了我的奶水。我向加纳太太告了他们。她长着那个包，不能讲话，可她眼里流了泪。那些家伙发现我告了他们。
‘学校老师’让一个家伙划开我的后背，伤口愈合时就成了一棵树。它还在那儿长着呢。
”
“他们用皮鞭抽你了？
”
“还抢走了我的奶水。
”
“你怀着孩子他们还打你？
”
“还抢走了我的奶水!”
白胖的面圈在平底锅上排列成行。塞丝又一次用沾湿的食指碰了碰炉子。她打开烤箱门，把一锅面饼插进去。她刚刚起身离开烤箱的热气，就感觉到背后的保罗•D和托在她乳房下的双手。她站直身子，知道———却感觉不到———他正把脸埋进苦樱桃树的枝杈里。
几乎在不知不觉之间，他已经成为那种一进屋就能使女人哭泣的男人。有他相陪伴，当着他的面，她们就哭得出来。他的举止中有某种神圣的东西。女人们见了他就想流泪———向他诉说胸口和膝头的创伤。坚强的和智慧的女人见了他，将只有她们彼此间才说的事讲给他听：更年期早过了，她们内心的欲望却忽然间变得旺盛、贪婪起来，比十五岁的时候更狂野，让她们羞愧，也让她们悲哀；她们偷偷地渴望死去———以求得解脱———对她们来说睡去比任何醒着的日子都珍贵。
年轻姑娘则羞怯地凑近他坦白心事，或者向他描述在梦中尾随她们的不速之客穿着多么漂亮的衣裳。所以，虽然他不明白究竟是怎么一回事，但当丹芙独对炉火垂泪时，他并不感到惊讶。一刻钟之后，她的妈妈向他说完被掠走的奶水后同样啜泣的时候，他也不感到惊讶。他在她背后俯下身去，身体形成一道爱怜的弧线，手掌托起她的乳房。他用脸颊揉擦着她的后背，用这种方式感受她的悲伤，它的根，它巨大的主干和繁茂的枝杈。他把手指挪到裙子的挂钩上，不用看到眼泪，也不用听到一声叹息，便知道它们已汹涌而至。当裙子的上身褪下来围住她的臀部时，他看到她后背变成的雕塑，简直就像一个铁匠心爱得不愿示人的工艺品。他百感交集，一时说不出话来：
“噢，主啊，姑娘。
”直到每一道隆起、每一片树叶都被他的嘴唇犁遍，他才平静下来，而这一切塞丝丝毫感觉不到，因为她背上的皮肤已死去多年了。她只知道，她双乳的负担终于落在了另一个人的手中。
是否有一小块空间，一小段时光，她纳闷，有可能远离坎坷，把劳碌抛向屋角，只是赤裸上身站上片刻，卸下乳房的重荷，重新闻到被掠走的奶水，感受烤面包的乐趣？也许就是这回，在做饭的时候，她能够僵止不动———甚至不离开炉子———感受她的后背本该感受到的疼痛。难道在她沉沦的时候，有最后一个“甜蜜之家”的男人来拉她一把，她就该信任，就该重新记起吗？
炉子在适应自己的高温时没有抖动。隔壁的丹芙没有动静。红光的搏动没有回来。而自打1856年起，一连串抖了整整八十三天以后，保罗•D就一直没再哆嗦过。那时，手铐和脚镣加身，他的手抖得那么厉害，以至于不能抽烟，甚至不能正常地抓痒。此刻，他又一次哆嗦起来，不过这次是腿上。他过了一会儿才搞明白，他的双腿不是因为焦虑在颤抖，而是随着地板在抖动，并且转动和滑移的地板又仅仅是其中的一部分。是这栋房子整个在颠簸。塞丝滑倒在地，挣扎 着穿衣服。她四肢匍匐着地，像要把她的房子按在地上。这时，丹芙从起居室里冲出来，满眼恐惧，嘴唇上却挂着一丝隐约的微笑。
“该死的!停下来!”保罗•D一面吼着，一面跌跌撞撞地去抓扶手。
“别在这儿捣蛋!滚出去!”一张桌子向他扑来，他抓住了桌腿。他勉强站成了一个角度，举起桌子四处乱砸一气，毁坏每一样东西，冲着尖叫的房子尖叫。
“想打架吗？来吧!妈的!没有你她已经够受的了。她受够了!”
地震减弱为余震，但保罗•D并未停止四处乱舞桌子，直到一切都死一般寂静。他靠在墙上碗柜腾出的地方，大汗淋漓，喘着粗气。塞丝仍旧蜷缩在炉子旁，将抢救出来的两只鞋子抱在胸前。他们三个人，塞丝、丹芙和保罗•D，用同一个节拍呼吸，宛若同一个筋疲力尽的人。另一个的呼吸也同样筋疲力尽。
Chapter 5
It was gone. Denver wandered through the silence to the stove. She ashed over the fire and pulledthe pan of biscuits from the oven. The jelly cupboard was on its back, its contents lying in a heapin the corner of the bottom shelf. She took out a jar, and, looking around for a plate, found half ofone by the door. These things she carried out to the porch steps, where she sat down.
The two of them had gone up there. Stepping lightly, easy-footed, they had climbed the whitestairs, leaving her down below. She pried the wire from the top of the jar and then the lid. Under it was cloth and under that a thin cake of wax. She removed it all and coaxed the jelly onto one halfof the half a plate. She took a biscuit and pulled off its black top. Smoke curled from the soft whiteinsides. She missed her brothers. Buglar and Howard would be twenty two and twenty-three now.
Although they had been polite to her during the quiet time and gave her the whole top of the bed,she remembered how it was before: the pleasure they had sitting clustered on the white stairs —she between the knees of Howard or Buglar — while they made up die-witch! stories with provenways of killing her dead. And Baby Suggs telling her things in the keeping room. She smelled likebark in the day and leaves at night, for Denver would not sleep in her old room after her brothersran away.
Now her mother was upstairs with the man who had gotten rid of the only other company she had.
Denver dipped a bit of bread into the jelly. Slowly, methodically, miserably she ate it.
NOT QUITE in hurry, but losing no time, Sethe and Paul D climbed the white stairs. Overwhelmedasmu(a) ch by the downright luck of finding her house and her in it as by the certaintyof giving her his sex, Paul D dropped twenty-five years from his recent memory. A stair stepbefore him was Baby Suggs' replacement, the new girl they dreamed of at night and fucked cowsfor at dawn while waiting for her to choose. Merely kissing the wrought iron on her back hadshook the house, had made it necessary for him to beat it to pieces. Now he would do more.
She led him to the top of the stairs, where light came straight from the sky because the second-story windows of that house had been placed in the pitched ceiling and not the walls. There weretwo rooms and she took him into one of them, hoping he wouldn't mind the fact that she was notprepared; that though she could remember desire, she had forgotten how it worked; the clutch andhelplessness that resided in the hands; how blindness was altered so that what leapt to the eye wereplaces to lie down, and all else — door knobs, straps, hooks, the sadness that crouched in corners,and the passing of time — was interference.
It was over before they could get their clothes off. Half-dressed and short of breath, they lay sideby side resentful of one another and the skylight above them. His dreaming of her had been toolong and too long ago. Her deprivation had been not having any dreams of her own at all. Nowthey were sorry and too shy to make talk.
Sethe lay on her back, her head turned from him. Out of the corner of his eye, Paul D saw the floatof her breasts and disliked it, the spread-away, flat roundness of them that he could definitely livewithout, never mind that downstairs he had held them as though they were the most expensive partof himself. And the wrought-iron maze he had explored in the kitchen like a gold miner pawingthrough pay dirt was in fact a revolting clump of scars. Not a tree, as she said. Maybe shaped likeone, but nothing like any tree he knew because trees were inviting; things you could trust and benear; talk to if you wanted to as he frequently did since way back when he took the midday meal inthe fields of Sweet Home. Always in the same place if he could, and choosing the place had beenhard because Sweet Home had more pretty trees than any farm around. His choice he calledBrother, and sat under it, alone sometimes, sometimes with Halle or the other Pauls, but moreoften with Sixo, who was gentle then and still speaking English. Indigo with a flame-red tongue,Sixo experimented with night-cooked potatoes, trying to pin down exactly when to put smoking hot rocks in a hole, potatoes on top, and cover the whole thing with twigs so that by the time theybroke for the meal, hitched the animals, left the field and got to Brother, the potatoes would be atthe peak of perfection. He might get up in the middle of the night, go all the way out there, start theearth-over by starlight; or he would make the stones less hot and put the next day's potatoes onthem right after the meal. He never got it right, but they ate those undercooked, overcooked, dried-out or raw potatoes anyway, laughing, spitting and giving him advice.
Time never worked the way Sixo thought, so of course he never got it right. Once he plotted downto the minute a thirty-mile trip to see a woman. He left on a Saturday when the moon was in theplace he wanted it to be, arrived at her cabin before church on Sunday and had just enough time tosay good morning before he had to start back again so he'd make the field call on time Mondaymorning. He had walked for seventeen hours, sat down for one, turned around and walkedseventeen more. Halle and the Pauls spent the whole day covering Sixo's fatigue from Mr. Garner.
They ate no potatoes that day, sweet or white. Sprawled near Brother, his flame-red tongue hiddenfrom them, his indigo face closed, Sixo slept through dinnerlike a corpse. Now there was a man, and that was a tree. Himself lying in the bed and the "tree"lying next to him didn't compare. Paul D looked through the window above his feet and folded hishands behind his head. An elbow grazed Sethe's shoulder. The touch of cloth on her skin startledher. She had forgotten he had not taken off his shirt. Dog, she thought, and then remembered thatshe had not allowed him the time for taking it off. Nor herself time to take off her petticoat, andconsidering she had begun undressing before she saw him on the porch, that her shoes andstockings were already in her hand and she had never put them back on; that he had looked at herwet bare feet and asked to join her; that when she rose to cook he had undressed her further;considering how quickly they had started getting naked, you'd think by now they would be. Butmaybe a man was nothing but a man, which is what Baby Suggs always said. They encouragedyou to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely that was,they studied your scars and tribulations, after which they did what he had done: ran her childrenout and tore up the house.
She needed to get up from there, go downstairs and piece it all back together. This house he toldher to leave as though a house was a little thing — a shirtwaist or a sewing basket you could walkoff from or give away any old time. She who had never had one but this one; she who left a dirtfloor to come to this one; she who had to bring a fistful of salsify into Mrs. Garner's kitchen everyday just to be able to work in it, feel like some part of it was hers, because she wanted to love thework she did, to take the ugly out of it, and the only way she could feel at home on Sweet Homewas if she picked some pretty growing thing and took it with her. The day she forgot was the daybutter wouldn't come or the brine in the barrel blistered her arms.
At least it seemed so. A few yellow flowers on the table, some myrtle tied around the handle of theflatiron holding the door open for a breeze calmed her, and when Mrs. Garner and she sat down tosort bristle, or make ink, she felt fine. Fine. Not scared of the men beyond. The five who slept inquarters near her, but never came in the night. Just touched their raggedy hats when they saw herand stared. And if she brought food to them in the fields, bacon and bread wrapped in a piece of clean sheeting, they never took it from her hands. They stood back and waited for her to put it onthe ground (at the foot of a tree) and leave. Either they did not want to take anything from her, ordid not want her to see them eat. Twice or three times she lingered. Hidden behind honeysuckleshe watched them. How different they were without her, how they laughed and played and urinatedand sang. All but Sixo, who laughed once — at the very end. Halle, of course, was the nicest. BabySuggs' eighth and last child, who rented himself out all over the county to buy her away fromthere. But he too, as it turned out, was nothing but a man.
"A man ain't nothing but a man," said Baby Suggs. "But a son? Well now, that's somebody."It made sense for a lot of reasons because in all of Baby's life, as well as Sethe's own, men andwomen were moved around like checkers. Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn'trun off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged,won, stolen or seized. So Baby's eight children had six fathers. What she called the nastiness of lifewas the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because thepieces included her children. Halle she was able to keep the longest. Twenty years. A lifetime.
Given to her, no doubt, to make up for hearing that her two girls, neither of whom had their adultteeth, were sold and gone and she had not been able to wave goodbye. To make up for couplingwith a straw boss for four months in exchange for keeping her third child, a boy, with her — onlyto have him traded for lumber in the spring of the next year and to find herself pregnant by the manwho promised not to and did. That child she could not love and the rest she would not. "God takewhat He would," she said. And He did, and He did, and He did and then gave her Halle who gaveher freedom when it didn't mean a thing. Sethe had the amazing luck of six whole years ofmarriage to that "somebody" son who had fathered every one of her children. A blessing she wasreckless enough to take for granted, lean on, as though Sweet Home really was one. As though ahandful of myrtle stuck in the handle of pressing iron propped against the door in awhitewoman's kitchen could make it hers. As tho(a) ugh mint sprig in the mouth changed the breath aswell as its odor. A bigger fool never lived.
它走了。丹芙穿过死寂，晃到炉边。她用柴灰盖住炉火，从烤箱里抽出那锅烤饼。盛果酱的碗橱仰躺在地上，里面的东西在底格的一角挤作一团。她拿出一个罐子，然后四处去寻盘子，只在门旁边找到半个。她拿着这些东西，在门廊的台阶上坐下。
他们两个上去了。步履轻快、不慌不忙地，他们爬上了白楼梯，把她扔在下面。她撬开罐子的封口和盖子。盖子下边是布，再下边是薄薄的一层蜡。她一一揭掉，慢慢地把果酱倒在半拉盘子里。她拿起一块烤饼，揭掉黑黑的焦皮。又白又软的饼里冒出袅袅热气。
她思念哥哥们。巴格勒和霍华德现在该有二十二和二十三了。虽说在她听不见声音的那阵子他们待她很是彬彬有礼，还把整个上铺让给她，她记得的却仍是那以前的光景：他们乐融融地团坐在白楼梯上———她夹在巴格勒或者霍华德的膝盖中间———那时他们编了好多“杀巫婆!”故事，想出种种确凿的方法来杀死巫婆。她还想起贝比•萨格斯在起居室对她讲的事。奶奶白天闻起来像树皮，晚上闻起来像树叶———自打哥哥们出走以后，丹芙就不在自己原来的屋里过夜了。
