She looked so fragile, standing poised in the brazen sunlight, that it was on January's tongue to ask her if she had a place to stay. But if she were a runaway, he thought, she wouldn't tell him. And if she were a runaway it was better that he didn't know. Still he felt a pang of worry for her, as she darted away like a small rusty damselfly into the dark beyond the gate.

He shrugged his coat back on, shifting his wide shoulders beneath it, shirt gummy with sweat. As he donned his hat again, tucked his bag under his arm and crossed Agnes Pellicot's yard, he thought of his own room behind his mother's house, his own bed, and a few hours' sleep without the stink of death in his nostrils, without the whimpers of the dying in his ears.

Mostly the runaways went back home. They had nowhere else to go. Their families and their friends were all on the home place, wherever the home place was, like the villages in Africa from which their parents and grandparents had come. He remembered someone-his father?telling him about how in old times there'd been whole villages of escaped Africans in the ciprfere, the cypress swamps that lay behind the line of river plantations. They'd raised their own food, hunted, and set scouts, hidden from the eyes of the whites. But that was long gone even in his childhood.

Still, at Bellefleur where he'd been born, there were a couple of the hands who ran off two or three times a year, to live in the woods for a few days or a week. They never went far.

Maybe that was because they knew they wouldn't get more than a beating. A beating was worth it, as far as they were concerned. It was the price they were willing to pay for earth and peace and silence of heart. Try as he would, January could not recall whether his father had been one of them.

He let himself out the gate.