Property (Vintage Contemporaries) (2 page)

She nodded, eyes cast down. Then he pushed back his chair and went out without speaking to me.

“He thinks you are poisoning him,” I said when he was gone, watching her face. Something flickered at the corner of her mouth; was it amusement? “I’ll have more coffee,” I said.

ON THE PRETENSE that she is of some use to me, I had Sarah in my room all morning with the baby she calls Nell, a dark, ugly thing, but quiet enough. He hates the sight of this one. It’s too dark to be his, or so he thinks, though stranger things have happened, and everyone knows a drop of negro blood does sometimes overflow like an inkpot in the child of parents who are passing for white, to the horror of the couple and their other children as well. Somehow Sarah has prevailed upon my husband, with tears and cajoling, I’ve no doubt, to let her keep this baby in the house until it is weaned. At first she had it in the kitchen, but she was up and down the stairs a hundred times a day, which made him so irritable he demanded that I do something about it. I told Sarah to bring a crate from the quarter and put it in the corner of my room, which earned me one of her rare straightforward looks that I take to mean she’s pleased.

It was so hot, I had her fan me. So there we sat, I with my eternal sewing, Sarah plying the fan, and the baby sleeping in her box. She has rigged the box out absurdly with a ticking mattress stuffed with moss and covered by a rag quilt. She even tacked a loop of willow across the middle to hold up a piece of mosquito net. “Is she a princess?” I said when I saw this ridiculous contraption. “If she not itchy, she won’ cry,” Sarah replied. This, I had to admit, was a reasonable assertion. It is one of the annoying things about her; on those occasions when she bothers to speak, she makes sense.

After a while the baby whimpered. Sarah took it up to suckle, holding it in one arm and working the fan with the other. She had pulled her chair up behind mine so I couldn’t watch this process, but I could hear the nuzzling, snuffling sound, mewing a little now and then like a kitten. I don’t understand why she is so determined to suckle this one, as it will be passed down to the quarter as soon as it’s weaned and sold away when it is old enough to work. He won’t get much for her. Ugly, dark little girls aren’t easy to sell. It would be a good joke on him if he had to give her away.

Eventually I grew bored and tried talking to her, a largely hopeless enterprise. “You went down to tend to Leo?” I said.

“I did,” she replied.

“Is he bad?”

“He’ll live.”

“Who did the whipping?”

“I don’ know.”

So much for conversation.

AT DINNER HE was gloomy. The new rollers for the sugar press have come. He spent the morning trying to get them installed and cut his hand badly in the process. It is all Sutter’s fault because he couldn’t use Leo, who has more experience with the press than anyone on the place. He had to call in two boys from the field who didn’t know their right hands from their left and couldn’t hold up their own pants. If Sutter wanted to whip boys near to death, he said, why couldn’t he choose worthless ones like these two and not the only useful negro on the place.

When Sarah brought the potatoes in, he took a spoon from the bowl straight to his mouth and then spat it into his plate. “Are we not possessed of a warming dish in this house!” he cried out. Sarah picked up the bowl, pulled the plate away, and headed for the door. He wiped his mouth vigorously with his napkin, swallowed half a glass of wine. “I swear she puts them in the icehouse.”

I looked at him for a few moments blankly, without comment, as if he was speaking a foreign language. This unnerves him. It’s a trick I learned from Sarah. “Since there are no servants presently available, Mistress Manon,” he said, “I’ll have to prevail on you to serve me some meat.”

I got up, went to the sideboard, and served out a few slices of roast. When I set the plate in front of him, he attacked it like a starving man. Sarah came back in carrying a bowl wrapped in a cloth which sent up a puff of steam when she opened it. He grunted approval as she spooned a portion onto his plate.

I went to my place but couldn’t bring myself to sit down. “I have a headache,” I said. “I’ll have dinner later in my room.” He nodded, then, as I was leaving, he said, “I would like to speak to you in my office before supper.”

“Would four o’clock be convenient?” I said.

“Yes,” he replied through a mouthful of food.

HE PRIDES HIMSEL on being different from his neighbors, but his office looks exactly like every planter’s office in the state: the good carpet, the leather-topped desk, the engravings of racehorses, the Bible with the ribbon marker that never moves, employed as a paperweight, the cabinet stocked with strong drink. I kept him waiting a quarter of an hour to irritate him. When I went in he was sitting at the desk poring over his account books. He does this by the hour, totaling up long lists of supplies and others of debt. Without looking at me, he observed, “Someone is stealing corn.”

“Are you sure there’s no mistake in your figures?” I asked.

He looked up. “Will you sit down?” he said, gesturing to a chair. I was so surprised by his civil tone that I did as he asked, and busied myself arranging my skirts until he should be moved to reveal the motive of his summons.

“Three of Joel Borden’s negroes ran away on Sunday,” he began. “Last night one of them broke into Duplantier’s smokehouse. The houseboy saw him and raised the alarm, but they didn’t catch him. Duplantier says he was carrying a pistol, though where he got it no one knows. Borden isn’t missing any firearms.”

“I see,” I said.

“So they’re coming this way.”

“Yes,” I agreed.

“They’ll probably try to pass through the bottomland and get to the boat landing. I’m joining the patrol at dark. I’ve got two sentries I can trust here; they’ll be moving around all night. I’ll lock the house and put the dogs in the kitchen.”

“Delphine is afraid of the dogs.”

“Well, she’ll just have to be afraid,” he said impatiently. “She’ll be a heap more scared if one of these bucks comes through the window with a pistol.”

“That’s true,” I said.

“I want you and Sarah to stay in your room, lock the door, and don’t come out for anything until I come back.”

I kept my eyes down. “Wouldn’t it be better for Sarah to stay in the kitchen with Delphine?”

“Don’t worry about Delphine. She’ll have Walter and Rose with her.”

Walter is a mad child and Rose a flighty girl. Neither would be of much use in a crisis. “And Sarah will be safer with me,” I observed.

“You’ll be safer together,” he corrected me, scowling at my impertinence, then neatly changing the subject. “It’s all Borden’s fault. He doesn’t half-feed his negroes and his overseer is the meanest man on earth. The ham they got from Duplantier was probably the first decent food they’d had in a year.”

“Is Joel here or in town?”

“He came up quick enough when he heard about it. Now he’s grumbling that he’ll be out two thousand dollars if we kill them. Not one man on the patrol is going to risk his life to save one of these damned runaways. If we can find them, they’ll be better off dead than dragged back to Borden’s overseer, and I’ve no doubt they know it.”

“Then they must be desperate.”

He gave me a long look, trying to detect any mockery in this remark. Evidently he found none and his inspection shifted from my mood to my person, where he found cause for a suspicion of extravagance. “Is that a new dress?” he asked.

“No,” I replied. “I retrimmed it with some lace Aunt Lelia sent.”

His eyes swept over my figure in that rapacious way I find so unsettling. “You’ve changed the neck.”

He couldn’t be dismissed as an unobservant man. “Yes,” I said. “The styles have changed.”

“I wonder how you know when you have so little society.”

“I copied it from a paper my aunt sent with the lace.”

“It’s very becoming,” he said.

There was a time when I was moved by compliments, but that time is long behind us, as we both know. Still he manages to work up some feeling about what he imagines is my ingratitude. “I’m sorry to vex you by remarking on your appearance, Manon,” he said. “You are free to leave, if you’ve no business of your own to discuss with me.”

I stood up. What business might that be? I wondered. Perhaps he’d care to have a look at
my
accounts: on one side my grievances, on the other my resolutions, all in perfect balance. I allowed my eyes to rest upon his face. He brought his hand to his mustache, smoothing down one side of it, a nervous habit of his. It’s always the right side, never the left. Looking at him makes my spine stiffen; I could feel the straightness of it, the elongation of my neck as I turned away. There was the rustling sound of my skirt sweeping against the carpet as I left the room, terminating thereby another lively interview with my husband.

MY MOTHER ALWAYS slept with a servant in the room, a practice I disdain in my own house. I had Sarah bring up a pallet and put it next to her baby’s box. At first I thought I would place the screen so that I wouldn’t have to see her sleeping, then I decided to block off an area for the chamber pot, as I was even less inclined to witness her at that activity. “I hope you don’t snore,” I said, as she was struggling with the screen.

It was hot in the room and I was vexed by the stupid business, the unnecessary panic, the stamping and bellowing of the men who had already descended upon our dining room, where they were displaying their rifles to each other and gulping down his best whiskey. Their voices washed in under the door, droning and raucous by turns. There was much bandying about of Joel Borden’s name. They consider him a fop and a dandy, too interested in the next gala party to attend to his own crops. He is in the city more than at his own house, and the result is that his negroes are loose in the countryside.