The Known World (42 page)

“Where do you think they are?” she asked. She had looked in Henry’s big book after Skiffington’s visit and estimated that the three might fetch as much as $1,400, depending upon the potential someone might see in a chubby boy and a woman who could work but might wander off on occasion. “Do you think something has happened to them?”

“No, ma’am,” Moses said. Feeling Skiffington’s eyes on him after he returned to work, he had wondered how long before everyone got over that the three would not be coming back, before they all got on to other business.

He put his arm around her but she said she was tired, and when he did not withdraw, she pulled away. They sat for several more minutes before she said again she was tired and needed Loretta and he got up and left.

She went to bed soon after, but could not sleep and got up around two and stood at the window and imagined the three of them coming up the walk, exhausted and glad to be home. What would Henry say of the mess that had come to this place? If three more left tomorrow and then three more and then three more, there would be no one before long but her and Zeddie and Bennett and Loretta. Would Moses be there? Would he go, too? She found solace in the way Skiffington had arrived so promptly. He took what was happening seriously and there was hope in that. She was tempted to go out to Henry’s grave but did not want to go stumbling in the dark out to the cemetery. Waking everyone on such a personal mission.

There was a gentle knock at the door and a momentary fear seized her that it might be Moses. The door opened and Loretta stood with a candle. “I knowed you would be up and not sleepin,” Loretta said. Would Loretta ever leave her? Which group of three would she be among? Henry had paid $450 for her, the big book had told her that morning. “I can feel when the house ain’t settin right.”

“Even if I can’t sleep, you should be,” Caldonia said.

“You want me to bring you somethin?” Loretta did not know all that went on behind the closed parlor door, but she knew that it was probably not good for either the woman or the man.

“Please find something for me in that satchel of yours, Loretta.”

Within five minutes Loretta returned with a drink and Caldonia drank all of it. She got into bed. Loretta sat on the side of the bed. They did not speak. The man Loretta would eventually marry would want to know why she didn’t take his last name, why she wanted no last name at all. “Is that what marryin you gon be?” she asked him. “Question after question every day for the rest of my life? Huh? Is that it?” The man she would marry was a free man who had spent much of his life on the sea. He had been talking to a man one extraordinarily calm day on the sea, and over that man’s shoulder he had seen two other conversing sailors simply disappear, become nothing in only the time it took to end one sentence to the man and begin another. The sailors were not in the sea and they were nowhere on the ship. “No,” the man would say to Loretta, “I won’t ask you no more questions.”

“I worry,” Caldonia said, the drink making its way through her system.

“Shouldn’t worry,” Loretta said. The captain and the sailors on the ship came to attribute the disappearances to one more mystery in their sea lives. The man Loretta would marry did not have very much heart for the sea after that. When his new bride asked him not to ask her so many questions, it was an easy thing to do.

Caldonia covered her mouth as she yawned. Loretta got up and straightened the covers and took up the candle and before she was out the door Caldonia was sleeping.

The next day Moses worked everyone, even the children, until well after dark. Delphie called out at last that they were all hungry and very tired and Moses should mind what he was doing. “We can’t even see what we be doin,” she said. “All this work just goin to waste cause we gon have to do it right tomorrow.”

Moses relented. He stood in the middle of the field and watched them trudge away. He had the reins of a mule and the mule, seeing everyone else leave, started following them. Absently, Moses went with the mule. He had heard someone say after dinner that day that his family had hated him so much that they would rather be whipped and killed by the patrollers than suffer under him. Just yall wait, he had thought, just yall wait till this whole mess is done.

He put the mule up and went to the house, still in the clothes and the sweat of the fields. Caldonia found his appearance endearing. She herself went and brought him some cheese and bread and coffee and watched him eat until a grin slowly spread across his face. “I needed that,” he said at the end.

“Why do you work so hard when you are the one in charge?” she asked. She took the tray from his lap and set it on the tiny table beside his chair. She pulled the perfumed handkerchief from under her sleeve and dabbed at the corners of his mouth and he was uncomfortable with an act that was so far removed from sex, but when she was done and had folded the handkerchief and placed it atop the tray, he was sorry the act was over. “I know overseers who sit on their horses and look over everyone else.”

“Wouldn’t know how to do it any other way,” he said and realized very soon how inadequate was the answer. But his inability to explain was also endearing. Her talking brought more of the same discomfort, and he was afraid that in not knowing the right answer, he might somehow give a wrong answer. “I was sick on my back last year, and I musta hurt more from the not workin than the sick. My wife say it’s in the blood.” He did not pause at the mention of Priscilla, but it came back to her that the three were missing, and for the first time, with the words “my wife,” she had a momentary thought that he might be involved. He held his hands out before him as if they could do a better job of explaining than his words. She took his hands in hers and felt the hardness of aged leather. They were smaller than those of Henry, who used to massage his hands with horse liniment.

She patted his hands and put one on each of his knees. “I been workin since I was three years old, just draggin that cotton sack along,” he said, speaking in a way he had not spoken since the first days with Priscilla, “maybe even before that if I could member back that far,” and he looked down at his lap. “The body commences to turn to the work the way you bend a tree and make it grow whichever way you got a mind to. It don’t know no better. You know, Missus, there’s horses that you can work and work and they keep on workin till they drop dead. Your average mule won’t really do that, but your average horse will. The mule be smarter.” She was afraid that he would share more and she stood up and hoped that that would bring it to an end, but he went on to tell her that certain work songs made the work a little easier but that there were others, depending upon the time of day, that dragged a body down, so “you just gotta be careful with your songs and your hummin and whatnot.” Henry sang as she curled up in his arms. Moses noticed she was standing and stood. He was quiet and she kissed him, for no other reason than that he was now silent. When she withdrew, he realized he should go. He wanted sex because he needed to be able to walk through that back door again without knocking.

Skiffington came the following day to tell Caldonia that no one in the county had seen Alice and Priscilla and Jamie. He had found her going in after being in the garden and they talked on the verandah, a light sheen of sweat about her face.

”It’s a mystery,” he said, “and the law doesn’t like these kinds of mysteries.”

“I don’t either,” Caldonia said. “Do you think they could just have escaped from the county?”

He held his hat down at his side and thought of Travis and Oden selling Augustus. He did not believe they would sell three more Negroes so soon after Augustus and after he had warned them. And, too, he had a strong sense that whatever had happened, Moses was involved. “I am beginning to see that as a possibility,” he said, raising his hat and running his hand along the brim. When she was younger, Minerva had put on one of his hats and he and Winifred had laughed, and so had his father. She was still nine. “They have escaped or—and you have to see this as being possible—they are dead somewhere.”

“Why not just hiding out?”

He brushed at the brim. “I have had my people look in every spot in this county, and unless they have taken to living in tree trunks or beneath the earth, then . . .”

She wondered if the three slaves would have been covered under policies from Atlas Life, Casualty and Assurance. Payment for escaped slaves.

“I have to go see Mildred Townsend,” he said. “I will say you said howdy if that is fine by you.”

“Yes. Yes,” Caldonia said. “Please tell her I will be out tomorrow. And you have heard nothing about Augustus?” He shook his head. “It might be the same people grabbed my three that grabbed Augustus.”

“I have considered that,” he said, “but those rascals are long gone. It would be months before they could come back through. He went south. If yours escaped, they went north unless the stars and the sun confused them, and they went in another direction.” He put on his hat. “I’ll be going, Caldonia. Want to ask a few things of your servants before I do, though.”

“Yes,” she said. “Have a good day, sheriff.”

“And you, Caldonia.” She went inside.

He walked his horse to the fields and looked for a long time until he found Moses among the other slaves. Moses saw him after a time but did not acknowledge him and kept on working. Skiffington got on his horse. He was beginning to feel that matters were getting beyond his control and that if he did not soon corral it all, he and all he had built up would be lost. Augustus. Three slaves very possibly murdered. That was how it started with Gilly Patterson, a failure to corral and then William Robbins’s loss of confidence in him. He had once asked God if wanting Robbins’s confidence in him put him in a bad light with God, and the answer came back no.

He saw a child returning from a privy to the fields and asked her if she knew the three missing slaves and she said she did. Tessie, Celeste and Elias’s girl, seemed to take a while to answer and he thought she was thinking of some kind of untruth when she was really wondering why he would ask that when the answer was as easy as telling him her name. He also asked who lived in the cabin next to Moses and she told him Elias and Celeste and their children. He told her to go tell Elias he wanted to see him. She told him Elias was her father. “Tell your daddy to come here.” Elias had nothing much to say but five days later he did, and his wife begged him to keep it to himself but he said he couldn’t hold it in. Had it been anyone else, he would have held his tongue, he told Celeste. “Try to hold it then for me,” she said back.

Skiffington knocked at Mildred’s door and heard the dog bark. She invited him in but he knew he had no good news and so did not want to take up too much of her time. He said, “I am always in a hurry to get, and this is another one of those days.”

”My husband still gone,” she said.

“Yes, Mildred. I can say no more than that.”

“I thank you for the trip.”

He spent the night at William Robbins’s place and blamed his angry stomach the next morning on the tough chicken—unusual for the Robbins table—they fed him for supper. Had they somehow riled up the bird before they wrung the neck? Angered up the meat?

At supper, Robbins had said, “John, I want to set a five-hundred-dollar bounty on the head of that speculator that took Augustus Townsend. I will pay that to whoever brings him to me or to you. Do I need to say it doesn’t matter if he is dead when they bring him?”

“I think when a man sees that five-hundred-dollar number, he will think ‘dead’ without the poster saying it.”

“Good,” Robbins said and ate heartily of the chicken, of the corn, of everything on the table, and as Skiffington put his face in the bowl of water the next morning, he was grateful that Robbins had not asked about the three slaves. But that would not have been Robbins’s way—he gave a man a while to prove if he could do the job. The slaves had been gone not a week.

On his way back to town, he stopped at Caldonia’s plantation and went to the fields and sat on his horse until Moses knew that he was there. The courteous thing would have been to let the mistress of the plantation know he was about but he did not think Caldonia would mind. He stayed so long he had time to bring out his Bible and read from it, still sitting on his horse. His stomach calmed down.

That evening Caldonia allowed Moses to make love to her for the first time since the three slaves went missing. He had wanted a night with her in her bed and he told her that, but she just lay in his arms on the floor afterward and said nothing. Then he asked, “When you gonna free me?”

”What?”

“I say when you gonna free me?” She withdrew from him and stood up. “I thought you was supposed to free me.” He could not be her husband without first being free, not a proper husband anyway with authority over everyone and everything. There were free colored women married to slaves, but they did not have land and slaves.

“Please, Moses . . .” Neither word of mouth nor the newspaper said how many times the Bristol white woman had been whipped for lying with her slave. Had the white woman been forced by the slave, forced over and over again? Would that have mitigated the punishment? He forced me down and had his way with me, your honorable honor of the court, shouldn’t that be worth five fewer lashings? And, too, your honorable court, am I not still white? “Please, Moses, I don’t want to talk about this.” Freeing him had been on her mind but she had never put a day and a time to it.

“I want some free papers,” he said, and then added, “Missus.” He got up and put himself together. She herself was already buttoned up. He thought there was more to ask about, but Loretta knocked at the door and came in after Caldonia said, “Yes.” Moses left in a quiet rage.

Celeste told Elias about six the next morning that she was not feeling all that well. She was some six months pregnant. “A little digestion trouble maybe,” she said. “You know how your babies get about this time: wantin to see the world fore we know it’s time.”

”I’ll tell Moses you can’t work.”

“Maybe I can make it,” Celeste said.