The Known World (30 page)

The doctor quarantined the place and it wasn’t long before word spread throughout the region that “A Child’s Dream,” as Belle had christened the plantation, was falling to pieces. The man from the bank, fearing that his employer would make him go out to Counsel’s even with the quarantine, quit his job.

By the time Manfred Carlyle had been home four weeks with his family, more than half of the slaves on Counsel’s plantation had died, some twenty-one human beings, ranging in age from nine months to forty-nine years; that number included one-year-old Becky, who was teething but whose mother had nursed her as often as she could with the hope that the disease would pass on by her child; seventeen-year-old Nancy, who was days from marrying a man she thought she loved, a man with enough muscles for two men; thirty-nine-year-old-Essie, who had just committed adultery for the eighth time; and twenty-nine-year-old Torry, who had a harelip but who had four days before he died swallowed whole two raw chicken gizzards, having been told by a root worker that they would cure his “affliction.” Then, after those slaves perished, Darr’s wife died, and so did three of their children. Ten more slaves died, and that same day the first of Counsel’s children died, the oldest girl, freckle-faced Laura, who played the piano so well. In the three days that followed her death the disease swept up nearly all the rest of them, down to the youngest slave, ten-week-old Paula, whose mother had died in childbirth. Only Counsel remained, as healthy as the rainy evening his mother gave birth to him.

The animals would live, too, managing somehow to get by even with all their caregivers dead. The creditors, weeks and weeks later, would not get much for livestock from a place God had turned his back on. A buyer’s place might be next if he bought a cow or a horse; if God could do that to Counsel Skiffington, one potential buyer noted, then what all would he do to poor me?

In the end, after Counsel had tried to drive the animals away, there was not much more than the land, and even that, more than a year later when creditors and others were brave enough to go on it, would be sold for a little less than 45 percent of what it was worth. Belle was the penultimate person to die, just hours before a slave, fifty-three-year-old Alba, wandered in delirium away from his cabin and sat down to death in front of Carlyle’s airing-out cottage. With Belle’s death, Counsel burned down the mansion. From the first death he had buried no one and all the people in his family, including the bodies of nine servants, were burned along with the building. He then went to the cottage where Carlyle had stayed and Darr’s place, and he burned those structures down. The barns. The smokehouse. The blacksmith shop. Everything was burned to the ground. The cabins of the slaves, many with the bodies of the dead still in them, resisted the fire and most of them stayed up, scorched but ready for more tenants. The mud and cheap brick structures would be standing when the first creditor’s accountant arrived to see what he had to deal with. Eight months later, in Georgia, Counsel would take note of a two-door cabin built for two slave families, and it would come to him that the cabins on his land stayed up because they, like the two-door place, had close to nothing in them. Even God’s mansion would burn easily if there were a piano in the parlor and 300 books in the library from floor to ceiling and wooden furniture that came from England and France and worlds beyond.

The crops would escape the fire and would thrive, tended by no one. The fields had not had such bounty in more than seven years. There would be no harvest in the usual sense, as no one came to reap what the slaves had sown. Had someone counted up what crops the fields had to give, it would have come to more than $325 a slave.

The fire at A Child’s Dream burned for three days. Counsel left that second day, heavy with all the sorrow he would ever know, and went west in the county and then south, avoiding all human beings as best he could. He did not care, but it occurred to him in South Carolina that what he had done was a crime, since much of what he had belonged to others. He continued on, aimless, saddled with the memories of his loved ones and the end of a plantation that even men in Washington, D.C., knew about. He had kin in South Carolina, and Belle had people in Georgia, on the coast, but he decided not to go to those towns. Who could understand what had happened to him? And he had the cousin he had grown up with in Manchester County, Virginia, but he had always had so much more than John Skiffington had and Counsel had never missed a chance to let John know that. He could not see himself standing on John’s doorstep, penniless, even though he sensed that John would have held his arms open wide and given him all he had. So he rode on, not even knowing that he just wanted some peace, and not knowing, until much later, that he wanted back all that he had lost.

About three months after he left his plantation, Counsel came to Chattahoochee, Georgia, south of Columbus, thinking that he was far enough away from the coast where some of Belle’s relatives lived. He had ridden nearly every day except for a two-week stretch in Estill, South Carolina, where a rough cold had put him on his back. It was like no other cold he had ever had and he suspected that it was more, that the smallpox he was not even trying to outrun had finally caught up with him. He had brought some money from North Carolina and that afforded a place in a back room at an old couple’s boardinghouse. He paid for a week’s stay, thinking that by the end of that week, he would be dead. The old woman may have suspected what was in mind because she told him, on the third day as she fed him, that no one had ever died in her house and he would not be the first. He recovered and left their place in the night, taking the horse and the saddle that he had given them.

In Chattahoochee, a month after leaving Estill, illness found him again, just as he had hired himself to a man with a large-sized farm. The man had no slaves, only free Negroes he hired when he needed them. Counsel found himself strangely uncomfortable around blacks who toiled but were not slaves, people who came and went as they pleased. He said nothing, needing the money to be able to push on. He worked three days and then collapsed on the fourth day. “I am dying and there is nothing to be done,” he said to the Negroes and the white farmer as they carried him from the field. “Then we’ll find a place for you out yonder,” the white man said, pointing to a cemetery that Counsel had passed by his first day there. He stayed in the room in the white man’s house and was attended to mostly by Matilda, the black woman who cooked and cleaned for them. If she knew how to talk, she never said a word to him, not even good morning, not even good night. He began to recover, slowly, and day by day he cursed God for playing with him. “Make up your mind,” he said to God. “I don’t mind dying. I just want you to make up your mind.”

Late one night, three weeks after he took ill, he waited until all were asleep in the house and took money from a desk in the man’s parlor and saddled one of the man’s horses and left. He wanted to go to Alabama and eventually make it to California. He knew nothing about California, only that it was very far from North Carolina. In November, in Carthage, Mississippi, he bought a pistol to replace the one he had not been able to find in the dark in the Estill farmhouse. That 1840 Allen pepperbox had belonged to his father and all through Alabama he had thought he might go back to the farmer and return the money so he would not have to be without his father’s pistol. But so much more that had been his father’s had been burned up in North Carolina and he realized, nearing Carthage, how foolish it was to dwell on a mere gun.

Outside of Merryville, Louisiana, in Beauregard Parish, he came to a wide expanse of land that seemed without end, parched grass and soil widening with cracks that were a foot or more in some places. The trees seemed not to have grown up out of the ground but to have been placed on the land, like a piece of furniture in a room. His horse, on his own, began to move slowly and Counsel felt the animal might at any moment decide to turn around and head back. He would have abided by that decision. Then, little by little, the land greened and cypress after cypress appeared and the horse moved ahead with more confidence. Counsel saw pelicans and thought he could smell the sea. But he still saw no sign of human beings.

The green land began to even out and at last he could see a house and a smaller structure in the distance, a place he might reach in two hours or so depending upon how fast his horse would go. He took his time, thinking what he saw was some trick of a tiring mind, and he came to the house in about an hour. But after riding for that hour, he was back in a desolate place again. The land seemed incapable of growing anything but sorrow, yet, as Counsel looked about, he could see that some effort had been made to farm. And in a few spots he saw some success, though he did not make out what was growing. The crops were about three feet high. The house was leaning to the right, and the barnlike building next to it was leaning to the left.

A mule came out of the barn and looked away from where Counsel and his horse were and then looked at Counsel and moseyed out to him. The mule nudged the horse in the nose and the horse nudged back.

Counsel had seen the smoke from the chimney about a half hour earlier and he dismounted and went up to the door. Before knocking, he took one last look about. Everything seemed better from the porch; it was a place that might well sustain a man and his family, if sustain was just all he ever wanted. Pelts and game, squirrel and rabbit and somewhat larger animals Counsel had never seen before, hung from the ceiling of the porch from end to end.

The door was ajar. He knocked once and a woman opened the door wide, looked at him as if she were deciding whether he deserved her smile. She didn’t smile but turned to someone in the room and said, “It’s somebody.” Counsel found the woman attractive, especially after she moved her head and he saw the way her neck rose up to meet her hair. The beauty was fading and it was doing so at a fast pace. “Who somebody?” a man said.

A boy about twelve years old came to the door and told Counsel to come in. He called the woman “Ma” and told her to close the damn door after Counsel came in and she did so. A man was at a table in an area that passed for the kitchen. The floor was hard-packed earth. The room smelled heavily of smoke and the humidity hung thick. The house was much bigger than it appeared from the outside, but it was not a house of rooms but one giant one and each area seemed to have a function as rooms in a normal house would. Beds far to the right, stove and table in the back to the left, and near the front of the place was a living area where two girls smaller than the boy were playing on the floor with corncob dolls. Counsel could tell by the way one girl was talking that it was not friendly play.

The man was eating at the table and said to Counsel, “I’m Hiram Jinkins.”

Counsel told him who he was and that he was passing through and would appreciate a place to stay for the night, maybe a little something to eat. Jinkins pointed to a chair across the table from him and indicated that Counsel should sit. The chair had one leg shorter than the others and Counsel found it necessary to balance himself the whole time. He had the feeling that the man would not want him to move elsewhere. The only other empty chair was next to the man and the boy sat in that one soon after Counsel sat down.

“That Meg,” Hiram said, pointing to the woman who came up and took away the empty metal pan that Hiram had been eating from. “And this here Hiram number four,” and nodded sideways to the boy. Counsel said good day to them both. “You say you ain’t ate?” Hiram the man said. “That’s right,” Counsel said. “Well . . . ,” and the woman soon returned with the same metal pan, now brimming with a stew that shared the pan with congealed grease. It had generous portions of meat. Counsel was too hungry to ask what the meat was. The woman set a spoon beside the pan. “Biscuits, too,” the boy said to his mother. “Don’t forget the goddamn biscuits.” Meg brought biscuits and Counsel ate. The girls were still playing in a far part of the room and the one girl with the mean talk had quieted.

“Where you from?” the boy said. “You Louisiana stock?” While he looked to be about twelve, his voice was husky and in a dark room he might have gone for a man.

“Georgia,” Counsel said, trying to remember all he could about the Estill farm.

The room was darkening as evening came on and Meg and the girls went about the place, lighting candles and two lanterns. The boy saw one of the girls with a lantern. He turned quickly in his chair and said, “Save the damn lanterns. You know better. Save the damn lanterns.”

“Where he say?” the man asked the boy softly.

“Georgia. Where your damn ears?”

The man touched both his earlobes at once and said, “Where they always been.”

“Well, act like it. He said Georgia clear as the damn day and you didn’t even hear him. You closer to him than I am and you still didn’t hear him.” For the very first time ever, Counsel missed the evenings with his family, Laura playing the piano, Belle reading to the younger children. Make up your mind, God, that’s all I ask.

“You can go eat shit, boy,” the man said. “Pick up your goddamn spoon and eat shit.”

“I’m doing anough of that already.”

Hiram, the man, said, “What you do in Georgia, Mr. Skiffington? I can tell you know your way round books. I can tell that.”

“How can you tell that?” Hiram, the boy, said. “How can you tell anything bout him when all he did was say his name and Georgia and come in here and eat our food? How can you say that, Pa?”

“Easy nough,” the man said. Out of the corner of his eye Counsel could see Meg standing at the window. There was a draft from somewhere and the candle in that part of the room wavered and now and again, with the intermittent light, she seemed to disappear. The girls were talking but he had no idea where in the huge room they were. “What you do in Georgia?” the man said again.

“I did some farming. I even had a little store, sold some dry goods and whatnot.”

“A man of everything,” Hiram, the man, said. “I like men of everything.”