Song Yet Sung by James McBride Page A

sound of footsteps to crash through the marsh behind her.
    But they did not come.
    Instead a kind of foggy unconsciousness took hold, and after a few minutes her body shut down. She slept where she sat, legs sprawled, her back against the tree, unsure if anything she had seen or done was real. She slept hard, but this time she did not dream. In her sleep she heard the lap and flow of the river, the cry of the herons and whippoorwills, the burping of the frogs, the bird calls of the orioles, the buzzing of the beetles and night crawlers that took over the swamp at night. In her sleep she sounded the forest, and in sounding the forest, in taking its pulse, she felt its fear, its cries for mercy, felt its harboring for its terrible future when it would one day be gone and in its place would be concrete and mortar, and she knew then, if she had ever been uncertain about it before, that the old woman with no name was right. She was two-headed. Beyond two-headed. She was two-minded. And she had to keep running. Keep living. Until the land, or God, told her why.
    It ain’t the song, but the singer of it, the woman had said.
    She awoke still seated at the bottom of the oak with her back to it. She heard the bird call of a belted kingfisher. She looked up and followed the sound of the bird and saw just above her head, tethered firmly to a low-hanging branch, a large woolen potato sack tied oddly with a rope that bore five knots in it. She rose, climbed the tree easily, and retrieved the sack. Inside were two dead muskrats, several ears of corn, a flint, a man’s jacket, and a crude pair of shoes. All left there, she was sure, by the father of the child she had met. She cracked open the corn and chewed it gratefully.
    She had met the Woolman.

big linus
    F our miles from where Liz sat, at Sitchmas Cove, near the town of New Market, Big Linus peered across the wooded cove at a sole cabin that sat by itself behind a ragged jetty. The sun was just settling past the treetops of the cove, shining directly into the woods where he stood, less than five hundred yards from the cabin. Linus’s huge head could clearly be seen by any ready eye.
    Louie Hughes, a slave, stood on the pier in front of his master’s house and peered into the woods across the cove. Staring intently, Louie saw what appeared to be a small tree moving. He set his basket of oysters down and squinted across the cove, peering at the woods on the other side. Then he spoke to his wife, who was loading oysters next to him.
    â€”Sarah, is that Woolman out there?
    Sarah, a stout, well-proportioned woman wearing a head wrap, her hands gritty and slick with fish oil, sat on the pier dangling her legs over the edge into the water, shucking oysters into a woven basket. She glanced at the master and missus seated at the door of the cabin, both busily grinding grain by hand, then back to her worn fingers. She never looked into the cove.
    â€”I don’t see nothing, she said.
    Louie watched Big Linus’s head slowly sink down into the bushes out of sight.
    â€”Damn ghost, is what I saw, he said. Must be.
    Sarah sighed and blew through her cheeks.
    â€”Surely you did, she said.
    Louie frowned. He knew what was going on now.
    â€”Marse’s gonna start counting these oysters, we keep coming up short.
    â€”Who said we short? Sarah said.
    â€”You been feeding that Woolman, or whoever that nigger is out there, ain’t ya?
    Sarah looked at him sideways smirking, her hands still shucking oysters.
    â€”I’m just asking, he said.
    He strained to see across the cove into the woods again, then remarked to his wife, That’s a lotta nigger to feed there, if that is the Woolman.
    â€”Ain’t no Woolman there, she said.
    â€”Maybe it’s the one that run off from Patty Cannon’s house. They say he’s under the power of a colored witch.
    â€”That’s just your cousin roasting ear worms, gossiping ’bout nothing.
    Louie’s