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McGuffey’s Reader
boyhood. He mourned their passing long and passionately. Hardly a day went by that he did not capture small, squealing DeeDee after he returned home from work and drive the two miles down Highway 29 along the Atlanta and West Point tracks to where the old white house stood beside the road, its fallow fields sliding away into the fading sun. He kept the house roofed, painted, and squared. It was his fancy to keep fires laid in the whitewashed fireplaces, ready for the match. He paid the tenants, who stayed on working the only land they had ever known, to keep the hedges trimmed and the swept yard tidy, and he himself attended to the grape and scuppernong arbors and the field of daffodil bulbs that made a blazing yellow splendor beside the highway every spring.
    John Winship worked hard and well at his profession, and he doted on small DeeDee, but it was Claudia who filled his whole heart, taking up the empty spaces where John and Daisy Winship had dwelled for so long. She was his life, his pretty, chiming wife; her Irish whimsy lit his dour Scot’s temperament to frequent playfulness, and when she became pregnant with thebaby who was to be John Micah Winship II and bear the name back into the homeplace, joy and fullness made his fair, freckled skin and the odd, light-struck gray eyes over the slanted cheekbones incandescent and arresting. He was, with his angles and sharpness, his ash-fair hair and brows and lashes, plain and almost sunless in repose. When joy or any other strong emotion took him, he drew the eye like wildfire. In those months of Claudia’s second pregnancy, people often looked after him on the street, and looked away and back again, uncertain why their eyes kept returning to this unprepossessing man. At first glance, he appeared almost hookworm-wan. But in those days John Winship shimmered with his own fire. When Claudia died in the bleached November dawn, the fire went out, and the ashes lay on his face and his heart and home for the rest of his life.
    At the grief-stricken old family doctor’s suggestion, he engaged a wet nurse, a widow from nearby Lightning, who came with her own tiny son to keep the new white baby alive and stayed on to run the house and nurture tiny Micah … for he had not had the heart to call this child who had brought his wife to death by her name, and simply called her Micah, as they had planned to call the son she was supposed to have been. He did not bother with a middle name. Rusky Cromie loved pattering little DeeDee as quickly, if not as fully, as she did the new child, and cheerfully took her to her great, formless bosom along with baby Mike and her own infant. The latter she renamed J.W., out of a profound and not-at-all-awestruck admiration for John Winship, telling her compatriots in the Little Bethel African Methodist Church that any man who took on so after his dead wife so was most assuredly no tomcat, and moreover, that any man who worked such long, grueling hours both in nearby Atlanta and later in his own closed study to provide for his small, motherless daughterswould be a good example for her son in his formative childhood years.
    “Better than he own daddy, rest his soul, ‘cause that man ain’t never spent no more time than he could he’p at home with me. Fo’ he died I reckon he knowed more about the inside of Gene Coggins’s poolroom than he do his home or his church.”
    And so the three children, two small white girls and a huge-eyed, unsmiling black boy, grew from babyhood into childhood and beyond in that great, white shrine to a woman long dead.

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    B Y THE TIME M ICAH W INSHIP COULD REASON, ALL THREE children in the house on Pomeroy Street knew without having been directly told at whose hands Claudia Winship had died. John Winship and Rusky Cromie would have dutifully denied her culpability at once had she mentioned it, but Mike never did. A greater truth than theirs prevailed. The terrible knowledge gradually sank like a