Song of Solomon Read Online Free

into fantasy. She had the distinct impression that his lips were pulling from her a thread of light. It was as though she were a cauldron issuing spinning gold. Like the miller’s daughter—the one who sat at night in a straw-filled room, thrilled with the secret power Rumpelstiltskin had given her: to see golden thread stream from her very own shuttle. And that was the other part of her pleasure, a pleasure she hated to give up. So when Freddie the janitor, who liked to pretend he was a friend of the family and not just their flunky as well as their tenant, brought his rent to the doctor’s house late one day and looked in the window past the evergreen, the terror that sprang to Ruth’s eyes came from the quick realization that she was to lose fully half of what made her daily life bearable. Freddie, however, interpreted her look as simple shame, but that didn’t stop him from grinning.
    “Have mercy. I be damn.”
    He fought the evergreen for a better look, hampered more by his laughter than by the branches. Ruth jumped up as quickly as she could and covered her breast, dropping her son on the floor and confirming for him what he had begun to suspect—that these were strange and wrong.
    Before either mother or son could speak, rearrange themselves properly, or even exchange looks, Freddie had run around the house, climbed the porch steps, and was calling them between gulps of laughter.
    “Miss Rufie. Miss Rufie. Where you? Where you all at?” He opened the door to the green room as though it were his now.
    “I be damn, Miss Rufie. When the last time I seen that? I don’t even know the last time I seen that. I mean, ain’t nothing wrong with it. I mean, old folks swear by it. It’s just, you know, you don’t see it up here much….” But his eyes were on the boy. Appreciative eyes that communicated some complicity she was excluded from. Freddie looked the boy up and down, taking in the steady but secretive eyes and the startling contrast between Ruth’s lemony skin and the boy’s black skin. “Used to be a lot of womenfolk nurse they kids a long time down South. Lot of ’em. But you don’t see it much no more. I knew a family—the mother wasn’t too quick, though—nursed hers till the boy, I reckon, was near ‘bout thirteen. But that’s a bit much, ain’t it?” All the time he chattered, he rubbed his chin and looked at the boy. Finally he stopped, and gave a long low chuckle. He’d found the phrase he’d been searching for. “A milkman. That’s what you got here, Miss Rufie. A natural milkman if ever I seen one. Look out, womens. Here he come. Huh!”
    Freddie carried his discovery not only into the homes in Ruth’s neighborhood, but to Southside, where he lived and where Macon Dead owned rent houses. So Ruth kept close to home and had no afternoon guests for the better part of two months, to keep from hearing that her son had been rechristened with a name he was never able to shake and that did nothing to improve either one’s relationship with his father.
             
    Macon Dead never knew how it came about—how his only son acquired the nickname that stuck in spite of his own refusal to use it or acknowledge it. It was a matter that concerned him a good deal, for the giving of names in his family was always surrounded by what he believed to be monumental foolishness. No one mentioned to him the incident out of which the nickname grew because he was a difficult man to approach—a hard man, with a manner so cool it discouraged casual or spontaneous conversation. Only Freddie the janitor took liberties with Macon Dead, liberties he purchased with the services he rendered, and Freddie was the last person on earth to tell him. So Macon Dead neither heard of nor visualized Ruth’s sudden terror, her awkward jump from the rocking chair, the boy’s fall broken by the tiny footstool, or Freddie’s amused, admiring summation of the situation.
    Without knowing any of the details,