"I didn't plan on telling you that.""I didn't plan on hearing it.""I can't take it back, but I can leave it alone," Paul D said.
He wants to tell me, she thought. Hewants me to ask him about what it was like for him — about how offended the tongue is, helddown by iron, how the need to spit is so deep you cry for it. She already knew about it, had seen ittime after time in the place before Sweet Home. Men, boys, little girls, women. The wildness thatshot up into the eye the moment the lips were yanked back. Days after it was taken out, goose fatwas rubbed on the corners of the mouth but nothing to soothe the tongue or take the wildness outof the eye. Sethe looked up into Paul D's eyes to see if there was any trace left in them.
"People I saw as a child," she said, "who'd had the bit always looked wild after that. Whatever theyused it on them for, it couldn't have worked, because it put a wildness where before there wasn'tany. When I look at you, I don't see it. There ain't no wildness in your eye nowhere.""There's a way to put it there and there's a way to take it out. I know em both and I haven't figuredout yet which is worse." He sat down beside her. Sethe looked at him. In that unlit daylight hisface, bronzed and reduced to its bones, smoothed her heart down. "You want to tell me about it?"she asked him.
"I don't know. I never have talked about it. Not to a soul. Sang it sometimes, but I never told asoul.""Go ahead. I can hear it.""Maybe. Maybe you can hear it. I just ain't sure I can say it. Say it right, I mean, because it wasn'tthe bit — that wasn't it." "What then?" Sethe asked.
"The roosters," he said. "Walking past the roosters looking at them look at me."
Sethe smiled. "In that pine?"