was his to begin with, killed him with a shotgun pistol while Mister Henry was gone a week to Pontotoc. Her hands were all rhythm with cob and blade; Pearl could not keep up. Patricia watched her grandmother through the wide doorway (From where she lay she could not see Pearl at the sink), thinking thoughts brought on by the pain, almost but not quite wishing the old woman dead and out of her mother's house (thoughts Patricia would remember with an admittedly illogical guilt when Ma Henry finally did pass). They were thoughts of frustration, of confinement, like wanting to walk up to the old woman (and look her in the eye: Ma Henry was in fact the same height as Patricia now) and asking why'd you have to shoot that nigger man, even though she knew that her mother would slap her into the middle of next week before she'd spoken the last word of it. Pearl had been there, had seen the whole thing and Wallace too, while their father was away in Pontotoc. Mainly though, Patricia thought of Kak, Kak who was only a year older, the daughter of Pearl's sister Kathleen who'd left Houlka, taking her husband and only infant with her to Memphis, getting him a job with a distant cousin and setting her up in the Memphis schools, all while going to college at night, so all that Kak knew of the country she'd heard from Kathleen or her father, or seen only at Christmas and Thanksgiving. Kak, who'd been sent down that summer to live with Pearl and get along with Patricia and George Pat. Kak, who should've ridden Wallace's mules with them, and might have gotten on that old one who'd had enough instead of Patricia, who might have had HER back broken, who should've ridden the mules but couldn't ride, or wasn't supposed to: Patricia wasn't sure which, though she'd seen Pearl ("You'll need to know this soon enough, Patricia.") show Kak the old white sheet behind the other linens in the closet -Not at all, Kak said, how they do this in Memphisshow her how to tear it, how much to tear. So Kak did not ride; she was just standing by the fence, calling let up let up ... The wind raked the cedar across the glass. Beyond the chickenyard and on past the beehives to Wallace's pasture
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