Had I a Hundred Mouths Read Free

up I taught him marbles and we’d shoot em; and I showed a lot of things a father would have shown him—how to aim and shoot a beebee gun, how to whittle a slingshot; and we hunted rabbit once, back of the old road. Until the Klu Klux boys caught us and warned me not to do it again. This hurt me before the boy, because what could I say to the boy, that we couldn’t be friends or that we would have to hide to be friends. And so we slipped out to the cave in the sawmill woods where nobody ever came and we hid in the cave and played jack-knife and I told him stories and answered some of the questions that he was beginning to ask. And Leander grew. Louetta and I had made love oh I guess a million times by that time. We’d never got enough since the first time. We did it back in the woodshed at night and sometimes in the barn in pure daylight. But the hiding was terrible and our feeling of sin was terrible. How could we stop? I guess nobody in the world has ever stopped something like that, once it’s started. But Louetta said she felt doom, said something terrible was going to happen to us, and I worried for fear she would do something to herself, sometimes she was ahurting so. But then we’d want each other again and no suffering God made, I hate to say it, could keep us from that wanting. One day you boys might know that, hope to God you won’t, but one day you might, and guess you will; because nobody’s perfect and we all got flesh on us.
    When Leander was twelve Louetta came one day to where he was, working and helping out on the place, and gave him a red ring for his twelfth birthday that he put on his finger. He loved that ring and kept it there. I don’t know why but I felt Leander was part my boy, that I’d helped make him, I’d held him first of anybody in the world and carried him when he was just borned, so he was that much mine. But the boy had two fathers, one run away, black, and one keeping a secret, white. I loved Leander. The town was afraid of him, though, because he was so light-complected and carried something unusual over him, not like any others. Sometimes I would see Leander watching Louetta when she was in the yard and I saw him gazing at her with such a look, almost as if he knew.
    And now I’m going to tell you something. One night Louetta was sitting in the hot dark on the gallery; a darkest night, black as ink, was over us, the way it is back here when the moon’s away, black as ink. The rest of us had gone up the road to see about old Uncle Ned that was sick. And Louetta saw a shape coming in the dark and she could not see who it was; and before she could call out anybody’s name the figure was on her and tore at her and she could see that it was black and she begged and she fought. This’s what she told me, because when I came home I found Louetta torn and wild and I smelled the smell again and saw that she’d been taken again. And I said was it the red nigger come back and she said black black. I run in the dark to get my shotgun that I kept in the hall in the corner, but then I heard a terrible sound, one I’ll never forget, one of broken well-water, the groan of the deep porch well, and Louetta had thrown herself in the well. And right then the others came back, Mama and you boy’s mothers, Holly and Eva, and I run for the boys to come and help bring up the body of Louetta from the well. When I held the cold body of Louetta how could I show all the feelings I felt before the others, just for a cousin? I tried not to pull that frozen body to my flesh like I had done so many times, my secret to my own damnation, and then I saw that Louetta’s blue hand was clutched as though it held something it would never give up; and when nobody saw me, I broke open Louetta’s hand and there, what she clutched and held on to, to her very death, in all her feelings of shamefulness and her, I’ll bet you, tenderness, and would not