She pray there a long time—half out loud, half to herself. I look at her kneeling down there, little like a little old girl. I see her making some kind o’ jecking motion there, but I feel she crying ’cause this her last night here, and ’cause she got to go and leave ever’thing behind. I look at the fire.
She pray there ever so long, and then she start to get up. But she can’t make it by herself. I go to help her, and when I put my hand on her shoulder, she say, “Lou? Lou?”
I say, “What’s the matter, Fe?”
“Lou?” she say. “Lou?”
I feel her shaking in my hand with all her might. Shaking, shaking, shaking—like a person with the chill. Then I hear her take a long breath, longest I ever heard anybody take before. Then she ease back on the bed—calm, calm, calm.
“Sleep on, Fe,” I tell her. “When you get up there, tell ’em all I ain’t far behind.”
ALSO BY ERNEST J. GAINES
CATHERINE CARMIER
Catherine Carmier is a compelling love story set in a deceptively bucolic Louisiana countryside, where blacks, Cajuns, and whites maintain an uneasy coexistence. After living in San Francisco for ten years, Jackson returns home to his benefactor, Aunt Charlotte. Surrounded by family and old friends, he discovers that his bonds to them have been irreparably rent by his absence. In the midst of his alienation from those around him, he falls in love with Catherine Carmier, setting the stage for conflicts and confrontations that are complex, tortuous, and universal in their implications.
Fiction/978-0-679-73891-6
IN MY FATHER’S HOUSE
In My Father’s House is a compelling novel of a man brought to reckon with his buried past. In St. Adrienne, a small rural black community in Louisiana, Reverend Phillip Martin—a respected minister and civil rights leader, devoted husband and father, a man of strength and rectitude—comes face to face with the sins of his youth in the person of Robert X, a young, unkempt, vaguely sinister stranger who arrives in town for a mysterious meeting with the Reverend.
Fiction/978-0-679-72791-0
ALSO AVAILABLE
A Gathering of Old Men, 978-0-679-73890-9
A Lesson Before Dying, 978-0-375-70270-9
Mozart and Leadbelly, 978-1-4000-9645-9
Of Love and Dust, 978-0-679-75248-6
VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
Available from your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com
Bloodline: Five Stories Page 23
