124 was so full of strong feeling perhaps she was oblivious to the loss of anything at all. There wasa time when she scanned the fields every morning and every evening for her boys. When she stoodat the open window, unmindful of flies, her head cocked to her left shoulder, her eyes searching to the right for them. Cloud shadow on the road, an old woman, a wandering goat untethered andgnawing bramble — each one looked at first like Howard — no, Buglar. Little by little she stoppedand their thirteen-year-old faces faded completely into their baby ones, which came to her only insleep. When her dreams roamed outside 124, anywhere they wished, she saw them sometimes inbeautiful trees, their little legs barely visible in the leaves.
Sometimes they ran along the railroad track laughing, too loud, apparently, to hear her becausethey never did turn around. When she woke the house crowded in on her: there was the door wherethe soda crackers were lined up in a row; the white stairs her baby girl loved to climb; the cornerwhere Baby Suggs mended shoes, a pile of which were still in the cold room; the exact place onthe stove where Denver burned her fingers. And of course the spite of the house itself. There wasno room for any other thing or body until Paul D arrived and broke up the place, making room,shifting it, moving it over to someplace else, then standing in the place he had made.
So, kneeling in the keeping room the morning after Paul D came, she was distracted by the twoorange squares that signaled how barren 124 really was.
He was responsible for that. Emotions sped to the surface in his company. Things became whatthey were: drabness looked drab; heat was hot. Windows suddenly had view. And wouldn't youknow he'd be a singing man.