In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance isthe reason the world has people in it. When Paul D had been forced out of 124 into a shed behindit, summer had been hooted offstage and autumn with its bottles of blood and gold had everybody'sattention. Even at night, when there should have been a restful intermission, there was nonebecause the voices of a dying landscape were insistent and loud. Paul D packed newspaper under himself and over, to give his thin blanket some help. But the chilly night was not on his mind.
When he heard the door open behind him he refused to turn and look. "What you want in here?
What you want?" He should have been able to hear her breathing.
"I want you to touch me on the inside part and call me my name." Paul D never worried about hislittle tobacco tin anymore. It was rusted shut. So, while she hoisted her skirts and turned her headover her shoulder the way the turtles had, he just looked at the lard can, silvery in moonlight, andspoke quietly.
"When good people take you in and treat you good, you ought to try to be good back. You don't...
Sethe loves you. Much as her own daughter. You know that."Beloved dropped her skirts as he spoke and looked at him with empty eyes. She took a step hecould not hear and stood close behind him.
"She don't love me like I love her. I don't love nobody but her.""Then what you come in here for?""I want you to touch me on the inside part.""Go on back in that house and get to bed.""You have to touch me. On the inside part. And you have to call me my name."As long as his eyes were locked on the silver of the lard can he was safe. If he trembled like Lot'wife and felt some womanish need to see the nature of the sin behind him; feel a sympathy,(s) perhaps, for the cursing cursed, or want to hold it in his arms out of respect for the connectionbetween them, he too would be lost.
"Call me my name.""No.""Please call it. I'll go if you call it.""Beloved." He said it, but she did not go. She moved closer with a footfall he didn't hear and hedidn't hear the whisper that the flakes of rust made either as they fell away from the seams of histobacco tin. So when the lid gave he didn't know it. What he knew was that when he reached theinside part he was saying, "Red heart. Red heart," over and over again. Softly and then so loud itwoke Denver, then Paul D himself. "Red heart. Red heart. Red heart."TO GO BACK to the original hunger was impossible. Luckily for Denver, looking was foodenough to last. But to be looked at in turn was beyond appetite; it was breaking through her own skin to a place where hunger hadn't been discovered. It didn't have to happen often, becauseBeloved seldom looked right at her, or when she did, Denver could tell that her own face was justthe place those eyes stopped while the mind behind it walked on. But sometimes — at momentsDenver could neither anticipate nor create — Beloved rested cheek on knuckles and looked atDenver with attention.
It was lovely. Not to be stared at, not seen, but being pulled into view by the interested, uncriticaleyes of the other. Having her hair examined as a part of her self, not as material or a style. Havingher lips, nose, chin caressed as they might be if she were a moss rose a gardener paused to admire.
Denver's skin dissolved under that gaze and became soft and bright like the lisle dress that had itsarm around her mother's waist. She floated near but outside her own body, feeling vague andintense at the same time. Needing nothing. Being what there was.
At such times it seemed to be Beloved who needed somethingm wanted something. Deep down inher wide black eyes, back behind the expressionlessness, was a palm held out for a penny whichDenver would gladly give her, if only she knew how or knew enough about her, a knowledge notto be had by the answers to the questions Sethe occasionally put to her: '"You disremembereverything? I never knew my mother neither, but I saw her a couple of times. Did you never seeyours? What kind of whites was they? You don't remember none?"Beloved, scratching the back of her hand, would say she remembered a woman who was hers, andshe remembered being snatched away from her. Other than that, the clearest memory she had, theone she repeated, was the bridge — standing on the bridge looking down. And she knew onewhiteman.
Sethe found that remarkable and more evidence to support her conclusions, which she confided toDenver.
"Where'd you get the dress, them shoes?"Beloved said she took them.
"Who from?"Silence and a faster scratching of her hand. She didn't know; she saw them and just took them.
"Uh huh," said Sethe, and told Denver that she believed Beloved had been locked up by somewhiteman for his own purposes, and never let out the door. That she must have escaped to a bridgeor someplace and rinsed the rest out of her mind. Something like that had happened to Ella exceptit was two men — -a father and son — - and Ella remembered every bit of it. For more than a year,they kept her locked in a room for themselves.
"You couldn't think up," Ella had said, "what them two done to me."Sethe thought it explained Beloved's behavior around Paul D, whom she hated so.
Denver neither believed nor commented on Sethe's speculations, and she lowered her eyes andnever said a word about the cold house. She was certain that Beloved was the white dress that hadknelt with her mother in the keeping room, the true-to-life presence of the baby that had kept hercompany most of her life. And to be looked at by her, however briefly, kept her grateful for therest of the time when she was merely the looker. Besides, she had her own set of questions whi............