That night Joy went out in a blustery wind and rain, and did not come home until late. The heavy steps that always left stealthily came inside along with hers. Doors creaked sharply. There were little hissing sounds like whispers. Maybe it was the wind.
April raised up on an elbow. Listened. Leaned toward Joy’s room and listened. Crawling out of bed on his long thin arms, he crept across the floor and strained his ear against the wall between his room and the room where Joy slept.
He crouched and listened but he made no sound. It was not the wind that he heard.
Suddenly, something inside him seemed to break. Something in his head or his breast. With a yell he beat on the door, and tried to break it down. Then he lost his balance and fell back on the floor where he lay and raved and cursed himself and Joy and God.
During the days that followed, April’s darkened room was filled with his wild delirium. Joy sat by him for hours at a time, brushing the flies away, wiping off his face with a cool wet cloth, trying to hush him, to lower his fever with the root teas Uncle Isaac brewed for him. Outside in the heat, the trees slept, the moss on them hung limp, the tree ferns were brown and lifeless.
Whenever Joy flung herself down on Breeze’s straw mattress in the corner to rest, Uncle Bill took her place, watching, waiting for some change to come. His big rough hands, blue at the nails and knuckles, squeezed each other distressfully, or stroked April’s restless fingers trying to stop their plucking, plucking, at the cover. Coaxing them to stand still. His old ears constantly listened at the window for the marsh birds to tell him if the tide came in or went out and his eyes were dim with pity and sorrow and love for April, who tossed on the bed, mumbling, raving.
Sometimes April thought the mules were loose in the fields and trampling the cotton, and cried out to stop them! Once he thought he had swallowed Joy’s fine diamond ring and it was cutting his chest to pieces. He babbled of boll-weevils and poison and ginning the cotton.
Uncle Bill tried to hold the weak nerveless hands, to steady them and keep them quiet. Over and over he prayed to God to have mercy on April, to give him back his right senses, not to let him die out of his mind, and at last his prayer was heard.
The night was sultry, the cabin parching hot. Joy had broken down, panic-stricken, and she knelt on the floor with her head on Uncle Bill’s knee. She burst into a storm of weeping that drowned out April’s raving, but Uncle Bill put his arms around her and took her into another room and made her go to bed. She must sleep. He’d wake her if he needed anything. Breeze would sleep with one eye open and jump up the minute Uncle Bill called him. Zeda and Jake were both coming at the first turn of the night after midnight. Joy must not fret and wear herself out. She’d poison her breast-milk and make her baby sick.