The Known World (44 page)

Something pecked at the door. He heard the flapping of wings and a rooster crowed and Moses wondered who was supposed to be watching the chickens. The rooster pecked again. “Go way,” Moses said. “Go way from that door.” His voice just seemed to encourage the bird and he crowed once more. No, Priscilla hadn’t been such a bad wife. And the boy could have turned out right with just a little more time. A little less fat. The rooster pecked. “You want me to come out there and wring your neck? Thas what you want?” Then the quiet returned.

What all had he ever really asked for in this life, such as it was? He could have done better for the place than Henry Townsend. People would have said, “That Marse Moses, he got somethin magic in him to make that plantation like it is. I did time over to Marse Robbins and Marse So-and-So and Marse Everybody-Else. Did time in all those places and they ain’t got half the magic Marse Moses got. It’s another Eden, the preacher say, and I can’t say no more than that.”

He sat there all that day, dozing and talking to himself, and then he listened to everyone return from the fields, listened to Elias and Celeste and their family next door preparing their supper. The children were loud in their laughter. Well now, you can’t blame them. They just bein little chaps, is all. Who in this world can blame chaps? About eight-thirty Celeste tapped at his door. “I got a little somethin for you to eat, Moses. You open and take this now, Moses.” He could hear her standing on the other side of the door, could see her as full and clear as if she were standing before him, leaning just a little bit to the left because of that bad leg, her hair combed with one of those many combs her husband had made for her. “Moses?” He had witnessed that slave saying to her one day that she should be shot like a lame horse, had seen her cry. Had she cried because of what the slave said or because she had seen him standing there and seen him turn away from her? Where was that slave now? You listen here—just take back every damn word you said to this poor woman. Take it back or this overseer will whip you till you raw. This woman gon be in the family way one day and she don’t need that kinda talk. “Moses, just open this door one little bit and take this here nourishment. You need some nourishment, Moses.”

She went away and came back about an hour later, then a half hour after that. Not long before midnight, he stood up and opened the door and stepped out, stepped right into the food Celeste had finally left at the door. He knelt down to it and ate the bread and the meat and put the corn on the cob in the pocket of the pants Bennett had long ago given him. Once standing again, he thought about the corn some more and the way the pants had felt when he had first worn them and he took the corn out of his pocket and knelt again and set it on the empty metal pan. He hoped she would not hold his leaving the corn against him. He stood up and thought he saw Alice coming out of her cabin, singing.
I met a dead man layin in Massa lane. Ask that dead man what his name. . . .
Now that was a song a man could plow a field with all day long.
He raised he bony head and took off his hat. He told me this, he told me that. . . .
Just the proper rhythm. Up this row and down another.

Loretta was at the parlor window when he went out to the road. She did not wonder what he was doing or where he was going, but she did set the pistol on the table beside her. Morning would be time enough for her to put it back in the cabinet.

He went the way he had seen Alice go one of those times he had followed her. And when he reached a fork in the road, he took the way he thought she would go. It was a clear way, that road, one that would allow him to see the patrollers long before they would see him. He thought that was one of the most important things. He did not know enough about the world to know he was going south. He could have found his way around Caldonia’s plantation with no eyes and even no hands to touch familiar trees, but where he was walking now was not that place. The other three roads had bends and turns in them and he didn’t think Alice would have ever taken them. Why, he asked himself after he was well on the road, why would that dead man have his hat on in that road like that? It just didn’t make any sense at all. It was a good song to work by, but that was all it was good for.

He had left the door ajar and Elias used both hands to push it open all the way the next morning. Elias hunched his shoulders to the little gathering when he came out. People were still coming out of their cabins and Elias used that time to take the empty pan to his cabin and then he walked up to the house and asked Bennett if he had seen Moses, told him the overseer hadn’t come to work that day or the day before.

Elias came back from the house and told everyone that it looked like Moses had run away. Some people went to work, others went back to their cabins. Gloria and Clement slipped away amid the confusion of the morning. Bennett came down about eight that morning and told Elias to get everyone out to the fields and then he went into town to find the sheriff to tell him that the Townsend plantation had a runaway overseer on their hands. It would be late that day, after Skiffington had come and gone, that anyone would notice Gloria and Clement were not about. They would never be seen again.

“Don’t tell them a thing,” Celeste said to Elias after Bennett had gone. “Don’t send them to no fields. Don’t send them nowhere. If she want them workin so much, let her come out here and do it herself.”

They were in their cabin, their children playing just outside the door. The doll he had made for his daughter rested in the center of her little pallet, next to their sleeping youngest, Ellwood.

“Don’t do her work for her, Elias. Please, don’t do it.” He went to her and took her in his arms. It was a good day outside where their babies were playing; it was the kind of day made for running away. A good strong man without a family could run all the way to freedom and stand on the other side, his arms high above his head, and cuss out the patrollers and the masters and the sheriff, just cuss them out all day and get up the next day and do it again before getting on with the life God meant for him. Yes, a good strong man could do. He kissed the top of Celeste’s head.

Their children had been joined by others and one child screamed playfully, “Stop pushin me down. That hurt.” “I told you I was comin,” a child said. “I told you I was comin so look out the way.”

”Everything’ll be all right,” Elias said, and as soon as he had said that, she took herself from his arms. “Now, Celeste, you listen to me.” He was thinking: When they bring Moses back, Moses will see how the world went on without him. Elias took his wife’s hand. It was not much, a day or even a week of good work to throw in the overseer’s face; it was not worth a baby’s life or his wife’s sorrow, but it was what he had.

“It ain’t right,” Celeste said. “It just ain’t right to go and do what they bought you for. Why make it easy?”

“Now watch and see how far this here rock goes,” a girl outside shouted. “See. See.” “Oh, that ain’t nothin,” a boy challenged. “I can make mine go clean over there.” “You just showin off, is all.” “Cause I got somethin to show off about.”

Elias said, “Is this here thing gon grow up to be somethin bad tween me and you, honey?” Their son ran in and put his arms around Elias’s waist. “Come watch me run,” Grant said. Elias said, “Just answer me about if this here thing gon grow up bad tween me and you?”

Celeste was near tears. She looked through the tears at the boy. “Come watch me run, Daddy,” the boy said. Elias saw her shake her head no. She was thinking, Not now, Grant, when she shook her head, but Elias thought she was saying no to that thing growing up bad between them, and so he was relieved. “I gotta go work,” Elias told his son. “I watch you later, son.” He felt himself in charge of the place now, and that meant his family, certainly not the children, would not have to slave away. “Well, I’ll watch for a minute,” he told the boy, “but a minute all I got.” He said to Celeste, “You just rest up.”

He left the cabin and she followed him to the door. Grant ran off and back and his father clapped and their daughter Tessie came forward with the other children and they all shouted to Elias that they could do it all so much better. The boy said no, no, not better than me. Elias told the children that they were not to come to the fields that day and he led the adults away. Grant came to Celeste and swung her arm about as if it were a rope hanging from a tree and then returned to the other children.

She limped out to the lane and looked back to make sure Ellwood was still sleeping. The children ran by, then ran back the other way. It was like Sunday. The rooster that had been pecking at Moses’s door scurried to the side when the children ran his way and it would have run into her place but she shooed him away. “You get along home,” she said. She was thinking that such a lovely day could only mean that they would kill poor Moses when they found him. The God of that Bible, being who he was, never gave a slave a good day without wanting something big in return.

Skiffington knew the moment he saw Bennett that the man had come about the overseer. What crime had he committed now? The sheriff had just come out of the general store and saw Bennett riding up in the wagon. He noticed that Bennett rode mostly with his eyes not on the road before him but down on the mule’s head and harness. William Robbins had come by the jail the evening before, inquiring of him—and Counsel—about their progress on finding Caldonia’s three slaves and Augustus Townsend. Robbins had brought Louis, but his son did no more than stand near the door as the white man let the sheriff and his deputy know that escaping slaves jeopardized practically everything they all had. “Bill,” Skiffington had said, “you’re not telling me anything I haven’t thought about a thousand times.”

Bennett made to get out of the wagon, but Skiffington told him to tell whatever it was from the seat. Bennett looked momentarily forlorn, as if his message would lose its urgency if he had to tell from the wagon. And as Skiffington watched him ride away, he saw that the man was not used to riding a wagon, just in the way he let the mule ride all over the road. No doubt, he thought as he continued to watch Bennett go away, if he knew nothing about driving a mule, he knew nothing about riding a horse.

Someone walking on the other side of the street called out good morning and Skiffington raised his hat out of habit. He and Winifred and his father and Minerva should have been in Pennsylvania long ago. He should have been an American citizen doing well in Pennsylvania, where Benjamin Franklin had lived. He should have been on the bank of a nice river, showing his son how to make a living just from God’s bounty. And Minerva should have been out, out with some Pennsylvania Negro, out so that he would not think about her in a way a father should not think about a daughter. Out and about, Minerva should be, so that he would not think, as he had the day before, that once, just once, would not hurt anyone, would not disturb anything that mattered. Shhh . . . Don’t tell Winifred, and don’t tell God. Shhh . . . He saw that Bennett had stopped for something crossing the road. He seemed to be standing there for a long time and Skiffington wondered what could take so long to cross a road. Just once . . . Is that what Eve said to Adam, or did Adam say that to her? And if it was just once, would God allow him to see Pennsylvania?

Bennett started up again and Skiffington went down the steps to the road, the dust rising almost imperceptibly as he set both feet down. A good rain would do us all some good. He looked over his shoulder. The door to the jail was open just a bit, but it did not matter because he had no prisoners that day. Someone else bid him good morning and he raised his hat again. He went left, headed for the boardinghouse, to get Counsel and tell him that he and the patrollers were failing with the primary reasons they had been hired. Four slaves from one plantation. Who could live with that? And one of those slaves had murdered the other three. But four were still gone, four had disappeared from the books. He stopped in the street and realized that the boardinghouse was in the other direction. And if he moved to Pennsylvania and Winifred gave him a daughter, and not a son, would he think of her the way he had been thinking of Minerva?

He turned around and headed down the way he had come. Slaves, Minerva, and now Counsel coming in later and later, sleeping up with that boardinghouse woman like he was a young dog who had never known a woman in his life. Everything was coming apart. “How you this morning, John?” His only job was to pull it all back together again, make it whole and right the same way God had given it to him. “John, tell Winifred Mrs. Harris so appreciated what she did for her. Tell her that for me, will you?” Go and stutter no more, for I have led you out of the stuttering valley into this place I will give you and all your generations. Count them. . . . Sit here by the road and count them like leaves on a tree. . . .

Three days later Skiffington was standing in nearly the same spot as the morning Bennett came to tell him about Moses running off. “Mr. Sheriff,” Bennett said, “Missus want me to tell you that her Clement and her Gloria done gone, too. Just up and went away. She want me to come tell you that.” Bennett again had trouble maneuvering the wagon around. “Why don’t you just ride a horse like every other man?” Skiffington asked him, counting up the numbers of missing slaves. “Well, sir,” Bennett said, considering the reins in his hands, “a horse ain’t nearly as smart as a mule, the way I hear it.”

Just as Bennett managed to turn the wagon around, Counsel rode up the other way and Skiffington lit into him about what a lazy man he was becoming. Counsel said nothing but got off his horse and tied him to the post and went into the jail. Skiffington followed him, all the while calling him a lazy deputy, so loud that even after they were in the jail, people along the street could hear the sheriff, which was not like their sheriff, and the mule and Bennett could hear him as they rode out of town.

That was Tuesday.

11

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adavers and
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peaks of
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ortality.