The Known World (47 page)

For a total of just one dollar every month Caldonia would receive three-fifths the value of any runaway slave who was not caught within two months. Topps stated that a separate policy to protect against “plain old natural death” was 10 cents a head every other month, but Caldonia decided to stay with just the 15 cents policies, “for now.” Fern Elston had stopped listening and left the room long before Maude began to point out that most of the slaves in the cemeteries in Manchester County had died while working, so there was no use insuring for ordinary dying. She also noted that most of the slave chaps who had died of natural causes were too young to be covered. “That is a fact,” Maude said with some authority.

“So,” Topps said as he finalized everything, “there will be no protection at this time on the perishment of your human property.” “Perishment,” or natural death, was a word the people at Atlas used very often, and no one used it more than the widowed Topps, who saw himself as one day ascending to an important position at the home office in Hartford, Connecticut, and looking down over the land and dispensing wisdom learned from years toiling in the wilderness of the uninsured. The word
perishment
had been thought up by a man at the Hartford office to try to convey the fragility of human life, especially that of slaves, and to try to get across to a customer the utter need for Atlas’s policies on those lives, slave or otherwise. The man at the Hartford headquarters, who had never seen an American slave except in newspapers and magazines, was something of a poet and had brought over two books of his poems when he emigrated from Poland. At about the time he came up with the word
perishment,
a publisher in Bridgeport, Connecticut, had agreed to publish the books but felt that one of them was “too suffused with the weave” of Poland. “Forget Poland,” the publisher wrote the poet. “I can’t even find the damn thing on my map.” He promised to publish both books if the perishment poet could reweave the Polish one, and the poet was thinking it over at the time Henry Townsend died. There was no money in either book, the Bridgeport publisher wrote the poet, but there was the promise of glory and remembrance and the adoration of a public hungry for the real truth of America. It was well known, even by a foreigner in an insurance fortress miles away in Hartford, that from his cubbyhole of an office in Bridgeport the publisher was as good as his word.

All of Caldonia’s guests, except her mother, would stay until Sunday, when Elias and Louis went out to search for Moses and Gloria and Clement. Only the former, the man, the former overseer, would be found.

12

S
unday.
B
arnum
K
insey in
M
issouri.
F
inding a
L
ost
L
oved
O
ne.

That morning, Sunday, Skiffington woke with the first real idea of where Moses was. He remembered what Elias had said about the runaway being “world-stupid.” It was as clear as anything and he wondered why God had not put the notion into his head before. Maybe, he thought as he sat on the side of the bed and watched the sun at his feet, he himself had put Mildred Townsend’s place beyond consideration because he had not been able to bring Augustus back to her. And, too, the place was on the way south, the opposite of where a runaway slave might want to be. But God, working in his own time, had now put in his head the notion of where the murderer was. Skiffington had a feeling, based on what he knew about crime and criminals, that Moses was still there, but he sensed that if he did not get to Mildred’s place soon, the escaped slave would be gone. And he also had a feeling, somewhat fainter than the first, that if Moses had killed his own woman and boy and the madwoman Alice, then he might have killed Mildred, simply because killing was now in his blood.

That Sunday, too, he awoke with the same toothache that had claimed him for many days. He had had some relief the day before but now it was back, a throbbing and insistent lump of pain bedded down on the left side of his face. He told himself he could live with it. Monday would be too late to go after the slave Moses and the other two. Still on the side of the bed, he lowered his head and prayed. His wife was downstairs with Minerva and his father. There would be no time for church services today. Ordinarily, he would have gone to get the tooth pulled at the undertaker, who doubled as the town dentist, but the undertaker had been three days in Charleston, caring for a bachelor brother who had no wife or slaves to do the looking after. Skiffington could have gone to the white doctor, but he and the doctor had not spoken in four years. The doctor had complained for a long time to Skiffington that the sheriff’s Shetland sheepdog had been killing the doctor’s chickens. With no sheep to run after, the doctor told Winifred, the dog had been taking it out on his chickens. Skiffington had believed that he had trained the dog well and the doctor should look elsewhere in the neighborhood for the culprit. “Suspect” was the way Skiffington had put it.

Then, one mild Monday morning after Skiffington had gone off to the jail, the doctor stepped out into his backyard and saw the dog walking casually toward his chicken coop. The dog turned and, almost mesmerized, looked for the longest into the doctor’s eyes, long enough for the doctor to call to his slave for his pistol. He shot the dog four times, twice in the head and twice in the body. Then he had his slave pick up the corpse and throw it into Skiffington’s yard.

Skiffington now dressed and left the house without a meal. He didn’t tell Winifred about the toothache because she would have fussed some more. He found Counsel in the jail cleaning his gun, and the sight of his cousin working away on a Sunday angered him. He had told him about being in the jail on Sunday when there wasn’t a prisoner but Counsel was hardheaded. Counsel was whistling a tune and Skiffington, stepping two feet into the office, thought the words that went with the tune were probably dirty ones.

“Best get ready,” Skiffington said. “We goin.”

“Where?”

“Out to get that runaway Moses.” He was moving as gingerly as he could because movement upset the mess on the side of his face. He was not looking forward to the long ride, the bouncing about, but he had a sworn duty and he did not want to trust Counsel or the patrollers out there with a murderer. No doubt Augustus and Mildred had guns. He took his rifle from the rack.

By ten-thirty they were well out of the town of Manchester. It was a very hot day and they moved into what his father Carl often called “the teeth of the sun.” Counsel was chewing tobacco, a habit he had picked up in Alabama, and now and again, he would spit ahead into the dusty road to see how far the spit would skip. They didn’t talk much, and when they did, it was mostly Counsel just saying something to break the silence between them. And when he wasn’t talking or spitting into the road, he was whistling the tune which surely had dirty words to go with it.

Skiffington did say, about halfway to William Robbins’s plantation, that Counsel should try to drop the tobacco habit. He talked through clenched teeth to keep as little air as possible from getting in and knocking against the ornery nerves of the tooth.

“I’ve never seen anything wrong with it,” Counsel said, making still one more note in his mental book about the shit way his cousin saw the world. “Just a little habit that God don’t mind.”

“If you pile up enough habits,” Skiffington said, “you soon have enough for a real sin. Then you have trouble.”

The unsparing sun put a greater burden on the men and their horses and they arrived at Robbins’s about twelve-thirty, a little later than Skiffington had wanted. Robbins was not there but Mrs. Robbins and Patience her daughter made them at home. Mrs. Robbins had a dinner prepared for them. Skiffington wanted only soup, lukewarm and as close to a broth as the cook could manage. Patience said as they ate, “John, you and Counsel should just rest up here today and go out tomorrow.” Patience reminded Counsel of Belle, his wife, when she was young.

Four years and one month from that day, William Robbins would suffer a stroke. This was at a time when his wife had already turned beastly sour because she lived in a house with a man who could not love her anymore. Not satisfied with the reports about her father’s condition that she received second- and thirdhand, Dora would decide she could not wait any longer and went to her father’s plantation after he had been in his sickbed for three weeks. Her brother, Louis, told her not to go, but she had more of her father in her than he did. Neither child had ever been to the plantation before.

Patience said to Skiffington, “Stay on here through the night, John. The rest will do you both some good. And your tooth’ll thank you for the rest.”

Dabbing at his mustache with his napkin, Skiffington said to Patience, “I wish I could stay, Miss Patience, but my business will not wait.” He complimented her and Mrs. Robbins on the soup and finished the whole bowl.

That day four years later, Dora would knock on the front door of her father’s mansion and Patience, the half-sister she had never met, would open it. Behind Patience was her mother. “I would like to see Mr. Robbins, please,” Dora said, not contracting the “I would” into “I’d,” something Fern Elston would have been proud of. Dora had not ridden out on a horse and was in a green dress her father had bought in Charlottesville. She had brought herself in a carriage. Her bonnet was yellow, and the untied strings at either side of the bonnet hung down two inches or so, reminding Patience of a sunburnt face she had not seen in the mirror for many years.

Except for Dora being darker and younger, the two women were identical. Negroes would say that on the day God made Patience, he knew he wanted to make another just like her. God really didn’t want to wait for the day Robbins and Philomena would conceive Dora, so he made her right then because he knew he wouldn’t be in that same state of mind when Dora came along years later. So he made Dora and put her in the left pocket of his shirt, to be brought out when she was ready to be conceived. Being in the left pocket was necessary, Negroes said, because heaven with all those happy people could sometimes get rowdy, especially on Saturday nights.

“I have come to see Mr. Robbins,” Dora said. Patience opened the door wider. She knew almost immediately that standing before her was the only other person who loved William Robbins the way she did. She had been carrying the weight of his illness alone, and as she stood there, she felt the burden grow less and less. The servants had helped her but not because they loved her father. And her mother had stopped loving him and would not lift a finger to help.

Patience would turn to her mother and say, “Please, sweetheart, go to the East,” the daughter’s name for that part of the mansion where her mother now lived, where the mother and daughter had played hide-and-go-seek when Patience was a child. “Go to the East and I will come for you before long. Please do this for me.” Her mother left, and Patience said to Dora, “Come. Please, come.” And as a servant closed the door, both women took up their skirts and went to the West.

“Yes, John,” Mrs. Robbins said to Skiffington, “please, stay the night. Sunday is for rest.”

“I wish I could.”

After the dinner, a servant made up a horseradish poultice and Skiffington and that slave fixed it to his jaw and he and Counsel were back on the road by two-thirty.

The poultice worked for a good hour but its powers seemed to fail as the sun got lower to the horizon. “Don’t trust nigger medicine,” Counsel said. “I didn’t,” Skiffington hissed. “Just be quiet about it now.”

There was a little more than four hours before sunset when they neared on Mildred Townsend’s place. They waited many yards away, Skiffington believing he might hear something of Moses. “We might as well go on in and take him,” Counsel said. Skiffington said, “Just sit and listen.” In the end, Mildred’s dog came out to the road and barked at them and Skiffington decided to finish the job. They rode up to the house and Mildred opened her door and pointed her rifle at them.

“Come to tell me what I already know bout my husband, sheriff?” she said. “Come to tell me what God done already said.” The dog was peering from around the side of the house and every time Mildred would say something, the dog would get bold and bark twice, then wait for more words from Mildred. Finally, the dog went and stood beside Mildred.

Her rifle told Skiffington once and for all that Moses was there.

“Mildred, you know why we are here.”

“I know no such thing, Sheriff Skiffington.”

“Surrender the property,” he said, leaning on his pommel. “Just surrender the property and all of this will be over, Mildred.” He could not remember if he had ever spoken her name before and for a moment he questioned the entire day because he thought he had gotten her name wrong. Was her name really Mildred? “Just surrender him on up.”

“No more.”

“Listen to what I’m saying to you, Mildred.” He tried to remember her husband’s name, to make some connection, but he could not remember the man’s name. “I want you to surrender the property.”

“No more. No more men from here. No more men from anywhere. Not one more.”

“You just do what the sheriff says,” Counsel said. “Surrender the goddamn property, like he said.”

Skiffington turned to him. “How many times have I told you not to take the name of the Lord in vain? How many times, Counsel?” He had opened his mouth too much and the air came in and pounded the tooth’s nerves.

Counsel said nothing; he thought it was just like John not to know when he was working on his side.

Skiffington turned back to Mildred. “I have not come all this way to be denied.” The nerves all about the tooth pounded back, and Skiffington forced his words through a nearly closed mouth. “I have not come all this way to be denied by a . . . by a nigger. Do you hear me, Mildred? No nigger will stand between me and my duty.” He closed his mouth completely to collect himself, and a minute later he spoke again. “I have a right to do what is right, and no nigger can stand and oppose that right.” He had always tried to be civil, so why was she making him uncivil? Counsel did not move but kept his eyes on Mildred. “I have a duty to uphold,” Skiffington said. “That’s all there is to it.”