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"Sit down with me, son," his father said.
"No," Ira said.
His father walked down the steps, his silhouette blocking out the sun. He touched Ira under each eye with his thumb. "There's nothing to cry about," he said.
"Who is she?" Ira said.
"A woman I see sometimes." He took his son's hand and led him back up to the gallery. They sat together on a swing that was suspended on chains from an overhead beam. It was spring and the willows and cypresses along the riverbanks were filled with wind and green with new leaf.
"Your mother has the consumption. That means we can't have the normal life of a husband and wife. I just hope God and you both forgive my weakness," his father said.
"She's a nigger. She was sitting on top of you," the boy said. His father had been stroking his head. But now he took his hand away and looked at the river and a hawk that hung motionlessly in the wind above the trees.
"Will you be telling your mother about this?" he asked.
"I hate you," Ira said.
"You tear my heart out, son."
"I hate you. I hate you. I hate you," Ira said.
Then he was running out of the yard and down the street in his short pants, running through mud puddles, past the grinning faces of whores and teamsters and drunk Irishmen, his legs and face splattered with water that was black and oily and smelled like sewage and felt like leeches on his skin.
BACK at Angola Plantation, Ira refused to eat, fought with his British schoolmaster, and attacked a mulatto dressmaker at the dirt crossroads in front of the plantation store.
She was a statuesque, coffee-colored woman who wore petticoats and carried a parasol. She had been waiting for a carriage, fanning herself, her chin pointed upward, when Ira had gathered up a handful of rocks, sharp ones, and began pelting her in the back.
The store clerk had to pick him up like a sack of meal and carry him across the pommel of his saddle to Ira's house.
His mother sat with him in the kitchen, her eyes and cheeks bright with the fever that never left her body. The light was failing outside, the clouds like purple smoke above the bluffs on the river. Ira could hear the pendulum swinging on the clock in the dining room, the soft chimes echoing off the walls.
"What frightens you so?" his mother said, stroking his head.
"I'm not afraid of anything," he replied.
"Something happened in Baton Rouge, didn't it? Something you're trying to hide from your mother."
He clenched his hands in his lap and looked at the floor.
"Is that why you hit the sewing woman with rocks? A well-dressed mulatto woman?" she said.
He scraped a scab on his hand with his thumbnail. His mother lifted his chin with her finger. Her black hair was pulled back like wire against her scalp, her dark eyes burning.
"You have my looks and my skin. If you don't inherit my family's bad lungs, you'll always be young," she said.
"He let her sit on him. He put her-"
"What?" his mother said, her face contorting.
"He had her breast in his mouth. They were naked. On a bed in Nigger Town."
"Get control of yourself. Now, start over. You can trust me, Ira. But you have to tell me the truth."
She made him go through every detail, describing the woman, the positions on the bed, the words his father had spoken to him outside the cottage.
"What is her name?" she asked.
"I don't know," he said, shaking his head.
