A Different Flesh (19 page)

He could not, of course. Chores around the house kept him busy all through the day. Most of his reading time was snatched from sleep. He yawned and did not complain.

His stock of money slowly grew, five sesters here, ten there. Once he made a whole denaire for himself, when Mr. Pickens's cook fell sick just before a family gathering and Charles Gillen loaned Jeremiah to the neighbor for the day. From anyone else, he would have expected two or even three denaires; from Pickens he counted himself lucky to get one.

He did not save every sester he earned: a man needs more than the distant hope of freedom to stay happy. One night he made his way to a dilapidated cabin that housed a widow inclined to be complaisant toward silver, no matter who brought it.

Jeremiah was heading home, feeling pleased with the entire world (except for the mosquitoes), when the moonlight showed a figure coming down the path toward him. It was Harry Stowe. Jeremiah's pleasure evaporated. He was afraid of the overseer, and tried to stay out of his way. Too late to step aside into the bushes—Stowe had seen him.

“Evening, sir,” Jeremiah said amiably as the overseer approached.

Stowe set hands on hips, looked Jeremiah up and down. “Evening, sir,” he echoed, voice mockingly high. There was whiskey on his breath. “I'm tired of your uppity airs—always sucking up to young Caleb. What do you need to read for? You're a stinking slave, and don't you ever forget it.”

“I could never do that, sir, no indeed. But all the same, a man wants to make himself better if he can.”

He never saw the punch that knocked him down. Drunk or sober, Stowe was fast and dangerous. Jeremiah lay in the dirt. He did not try to fight back. Caleb's law descended swiftly and savagely on any slave who dared strike a white man. But fear of punishment was not what held him back now. He knew Stowe would have no trouble taking him, even in a fair fight.

“Man? I don't see any man there,” the overseer said. “All I see's a nigger.” He laughed harshly, swung back his foot. Instead of delivering the kick, though, he turned away and went on toward the widow's.

Jeremiah rubbed the bruise on the side of his jaw, felt around with his tongue to see if Stowe had loosened any of his teeth. No, he decided, but only by luck. He stayed down until the overseer disappeared round a bend in the path. Then he slowly rose, brushing the dust from his trousers.

“Not a man, huh?” he muttered to himself. “Not a man? Well, let that trash talk however he wants, but whose sloppy seconds is he getting tonight?” Feeling a little better, he headed back to the Gillen house.

Summer wore on. The wheat grew tall. The stalks bent, heavy with the weight of grain. Caleb and Sally returned to Portsmouth for school. The sims went into the fields to start cutting the hemp so it could dry on the ground.

The sickness struck them then, abruptly and savagely. Stowe came rushing in from their huts at sunrise one morning to cry to Charles Gillen, “Half the stupid creatures are down and choking and moaning!”

Gillen spilled coffee as he sprang to his feet with an oath. Fear on his face, he followed the overseer out. Jeremiah silently stepped out of the way. He understood his master's alarm. Disease among the sims, especially now when the harvest was just under way, would be a disaster from which the farm might never recover.

Jane Gillen waited anxiously for her husband to return. When he did, his mouth was set in a tight, grim line. “Diphtheria,” he said. “We may lose a good many.” He strode over to the cupboard, uncorked a bottle of rum, took a long pull. He was not normally an intemperate man, but what he had seen left him shaken.

As Jeremiah washed and dried the breakfast dishes, he felt a certain amount of relief, at least as far as his own risk was concerned. Sims were enough like humans for illnesses to pass freely from them to the people around them. But he had had diphtheria as a boy, and did not have to worry about catching it again.

A sadly shrunken work force trooped out to cut the hemp. Charles Gillen set Jeremiah to boiling great kettles of soup, that being the easiest nourishment for the sick sims to get past the membranes clogging their throats. Then Gillen hurried back out to the sim quarters, to do what little doctoring he could.

The first deaths came that evening. One was Rafe, the powerful woodcutter who had replaced Joe. Not all his strength sufficed against the illness that choked the life from him. The tired sims returning from the fields had to labor further to dig graves.

“I always feel so futile, laying a sim to rest,” Gillen told Jane as they ate a late supper that Jeremiah had made. “With a man, there's always the hope of heaven to give consolation. But no churchman I've ever heard of can say for certain whether sims have souls.”

Jeremiah doubted it. He thought of sims as nothing more than animals that happened to walk on two legs and have hands. That made them more useful than, say, horses, but not much smarter. He rejected any resemblance between their status and his own; he at least knew he was a slave and planned to do something about it one day. His hoard had reached nearly ninety denaires.

The next day, even fewer of the sims could work. Charles Gillen rode over to the Pickens farm to see if he could borrow some, but the diphtheria was there ahead of him. Mr. Pickens was down with it too, and not doing well.

Gillen bit his lip at the small amount of hemp cut so far. Jeremiah had had just enough practice ciphering over the farm accounts to understand why: the cash Gillen raised from selling the hemp was what let him buy the goods his acres could not produce.

After supper that evening, Gillen took Jeremiah aside. “Don't bother with breakfast tomorrow, or with more soup for the sims,” he said. “Jane will take care of all that for a while.”

“Mrs. Gillen, sir?” Jeremiah stared at his master. He groped for the only explanation he could think of. “You don't care for what I've been making? You tell me what you want, and I'll see you get it.”

A gentleman to the core, Gillen replied quickly, “No, no, Jeremiah, it's nothing like that, I assure you. You've done very well.” Then he stopped cold, his cheeks reddening, plainly embarrassed to continue.

“You've gone and sold me.” Jeremiah blurted out the first—and worst—fear that came to his mind. Every slave dreaded the announcement that would turn his life upside down. And Charles Gillen was on the whole an easygoing master; any number of tales Jeremiah had heard convinced him of that.

“I have not sold you, Jeremiah. Your place is here.” Again Gillen's reply was swift and firm; again he had trouble going on.

“Well, what is it, then?” Jeremiah demanded. His master's hesitations set them in oddly reversed roles, the slave probing and seeking, Gillen trying to evade the way Jeremiah did when caught at something he knew was wrong. Having the moral high ground was a new and heady feeling.

He did not enjoy it long. Brought up short, Gillen had no choice but to answer, “I'm sending you out to the fields tomorrow, Jeremiah, to help cut hemp.”

With sick misery, the slave realized he would rather have been sold. “But that's sim work, Mr. Gillen,” he protested.

“I know it is, and I feel badly for it. But so many of the sims are down with the sickness, and you are strong and healthy. The hemp must be cut. It does not care what hand swings the sickle. And I will not think less of you for working in the fields—rather the contrary, because you will have helped me at a time of great need. When the day comes that you approach me to ask to buy your freedom, be sure I shall not forget.”

Had he promised Jeremiah manumission as soon as the hemp-cutting was done, he would have gained a willing worker. As it was, though, the slave again protested, “Don't send me out to do sim work, sir.”

“And why not?” Gillen's voice had acquired a dangerous edge.

“Because—” Jeremiah knew he was faltering and cursed himself for it, but could not do anything about it. Charles Gillen was a decent man, as decent as a slave owner could be, but he was also a white man. He knew himself the equal of his fellow farmers and townsmen; his son dreamed of being censor of the Federated Commonwealths one day. He was immeasurably far above both blacks and sims.

Jeremiah also felt the gulf between himself and his master, of course. Even gaining his freedom would not erase all of it—certainly not in Gillen's eyes. But Jeremiah also saw another gulf, one with him at the top looking down on the sims below.

From Charles Gillen's lofty perch, that one was invisible. But it was immensely important to Jeremiah. Even a slave could feel superior to the subhuman natives of America, could pride himself on things he could do that they would never be capable of. Learning his letters was something of that sort, a reminder that, even if his body was owned, his spirit could still roam free.

And now Gillen, without understanding at all what he was doing, was shoving him down with the sims, as if there were no difference between him and them. Harry Stowe would see no difference either, indeed would relish getting his hands on Jeremiah. He had made that quite clear.

That was bad enough, but the white men already looked down on Jeremiah. He had some status, though, among the blacks of the neighborhood. It would disappear the instant he went out to the fields. Even the stupid sims would laugh their gape-mouthed, empty-headed laughs at him, and think him no better than themselves. He would never be able to trust his authority over them again.

All that passed through his mind in a matter of seconds, along with the realization that none of it would make sense to Gillen, certainly not when measured against the denaires the farmer was losing every day. “It just wouldn't be right, sir,” was the weak best Jeremiah could do.

He knew it was not good enough even before he saw Gillen's face cloud with anger. “How would it not be right? It pains me to have to remind you, Jeremiah, but you are my slave, my personal chattel. How I employ you, especially in this emergency, is my affair and mine alone. Now I tell you that you shall report to the field gang tomorrow at sunrise or your back will be striped and then you will report anyway. Do you follow me?”

“Yes, sir,” Jeremiah said. He did not dare look at Gillen, for fear his expression would earn him the whipping on the spot.

“Well, good.” Having got his way, Gillen was prepared to be magnanimous. He patted Jeremiah on the shoulder. “It will be only for a few days, a couple of weeks at most. Then everything will be back the way it was.”

“Yes, sir,” Jeremiah said again, but he knew better. Nothing would ever be the same, not between him and other blacks, not between him and the sims, and not between him and Gillen either. One reason Gillen was a bearable master was that he treated Jeremiah like a person. Now the thin veil of politeness was ripped aside. At need, Gillen could use Jeremiah like any other beast of burden, and at need he would. It was as simple as that.

When Jeremiah lifted the loose board in his room, he found his little flask of spirits was empty. “I might have known,” he muttered under his breath. “It's been that kind of day.” He blew out his candle.

He was already awake when Stowe blasted away on the horn to summon the sims—and him—to labor. He had been awake most of the night; he was too full of mortification and swallowed rage to sleep. His stomach had tied itself into a tight, painful knot.

His eyes felt as though someone had thrown sand in them. He rubbed at them as he pulled on breeches, shoes, and shirt and went out to the waiting overseer.

Stowe was doling out hardtack and bacon to the sims still well enough to work. “Well, well,” he said, smiling broadly as Jeremiah came up. “What a pleasure to see our new field hand, and just in time for breakfast, too. Get in line and wait your turn.”

The overseer watched for any sign of resistance, but Jeremiah silently took his place. The hardtack was a jawbreaker, and the bacon, heavily salted so it would keep almost forever, brought tears to his eyes. If his belly had churned before, it snarled now. He gulped down two dippers of water. They did not help.

The sims' big yellow teeth effortlessly disposed of the hardtack biscuits. The salt in the bacon did not faze them either. Jeremiah's presence seemed to bother them a good deal more. They kept staring at him, then quickly looking away whenever his eyes met theirs. The low-voiced calls and hoots they gave each other held a questioning note.

Those calls, though, could convey only emotion, not real meaning. For that, the sims had to use the hand signs men had given them. Their fingers flashed, most often in the gesture equivalent to a question mark. Finally, one worked up the nerve to approach Jeremiah and sign,
Why you here
?

“To work,” he said shortly. He spoke instead of signing, to emphasize to the sim that, despite his present humiliation, he was still a man.

Harry Stowe, who missed very little, noted the exchange. Grinning, he sabotaged Jeremiah's effort to keep his place by signing,
He work with you, he work like you, he one of you till job done. No different
. “Isn't that right?” he added aloud, for Jeremiah's benefit.

The slave felt his face grow hot. He bit his lip, but did not reply.

Stowe's message disturbed even the sims. One directed hesitant signs at the overseer:
“He man, not sim. Why work like sim?”

“He's a slave. He does what he's told, just like you'd better. If the master tells him to work like a sim, he works like a sim, and that's all there is to it. Enough dawdling, now—let's get on with it.”

The overseer distributed scythes and sickles to his charges, carefully counting them so the sims could not hold any back to use against their owners—or against each other, in fights over food or females. Jeremiah wished he had a pair of gloves; his hands were too soft for the work he was about to do.

He knew better than to ask for any.

As he started down a row of hemp plants, he saw the sims to either side quickly move past him. It was not just that they were stronger, though few men could match the subhumans for strength. They were also more skilled, which was really galling. Bend, slash, stoop, spread, rise, step, bend … they had a rhythm the black man lacked.