“Look, Rama! That was my tree. It was the center of the land, a kind of father of the land. And Burton killed it.”
He smiled at her, and the calm he knew came upon him. He pointed to the dead and naked tree beside the porch. “Look, Rama! That was my tree. It was the center of the land, a kind of father of the land. And Burton killed it.” He stopped and stroked his beard and turned the ends under, as his father had done. His eyes drooped with pain and tightened with resistance to the pain. “Look on the ridge where the pines are, Rama,” he said. “There’s a circle in the grove, and a great rock in the circle. The rock killed Elizabeth. And on the hill over there are the graves of Benjy and Elizabeth.” She stared at him uncomprehendingly. “The land is struck,” he went on. “The land is not dead, but it is sinking under a force too strong for it. And I am staying to protect the land.”
“What does all this mean to me?” she asked. “to me or to the child?”
“Why,” he said, “I don’t know. It might help, to give the child to you. It seems to me a thing that might help the land.”
She brushed her hair back nervously, smoothed it beside the part. “Do you mean you’re sacrificing the child? Is that it, Joseph?”
“I don’t know what name to give it,” he said. “I am trying to help the land, and so there’s no danger that I shall take the child again.”
She stood up then, and backed away from him slowly. “Good-bye to you, Joseph,” she said. “I am going in the morning, and I am glad, for I shall always be afraid of you now. I shall always be afraid.” Her lips trembled, and her eyes filled with tears. “Poor lonely man!” She hurried away toward her house, but Joseph smiled gravely up at the pine grove.
“Now we are one,” he thought, “and now we are alone; we will be working together.” A wind blew down from the hills and raised a choking cloud of dust into the air.
