Wash (11 page)

“Well, they aren’t going to stay children! Before you know it, they’ll be crossing into our fields, torches in hand, along with the rest, freed by all these old men trying to clean their slate before they meet their maker. It will happen, that much I’m sure of.”

He starts in on his favorite stories about witchcraft and slaughter, about bayonets and infants cut from women’s bellies, but for some reason, on this one particular day, he stops short.

“Or maybe you aren’t worried about it, pushing past seventy the way you are. Maybe this isn’t yours to worry about it, is it?”

“No,” I say, smiling and shaking my head. “No, Quinn, it is not. You got that right.”

Quinn is not always the blind fussing mole that he seems. Sometimes, he can see a little way down the road and a minute into me.

“Yes, I do want to leave everybody with something to do and dammit why shouldn’t I? I came into this world fighting. Always fighting so these children of mine would even have pastures to worry about. I made this place from nothing and then rescued it from the dismal straits you let it fall into while I was off trying to win my last war. And I will leave it to my sons. If they can’t figure out how to hold on to it, then they don’t deserve it. A man who has not had to work and grab and claw usually does not amount to much and sometimes not even then.

“Quinn, you worry too much. Besides what the hell else could I do with Wash at this point? It would be throwing money away to pull him off it now.”

“I say sell him down the river and get another one in here more like a plank. And nothing like that damn Nero either. I told you and told you about him but you wouldn’t listen.”

I cut him off because now he has made me angry.

“Dammit, Quinn, it was you who pushed me into this in the first place, with all your complaining about how we needed cash because the trade on our boats from New Orleans was not going as well as you’d hoped. And it was me who was arrested in Philadelphia for unpaid bills, for Christ’s sake. And then had to sit through that mockery of a trial before you could see your way to sending me some of my own money.

“Let’s not forget, it’s my money sunk into these boats, my place carved out of nothing, my head working all this out instead of being split open by some tomahawk. I’ve made it this far, dammit, without having to take every idea you try to shove down my throat.

“Now I am well aware that as one man I cannot know and see everything. And I am of a generation that’s being left behind as the world moves on, so I try to remain open to your suggestions. You do have a good idea every now and then, Quinn, and I take it.

“I didn’t want any part of this whole scheme when you first brought it to me. And look at me now, counting and recounting the money we’re making off your good idea. But what you don’t seem to understand is that people pay for quality. You could get a dullard in here, but I guarantee you, you will spend more time and trouble covering more folks for less income, and many more chances for things to go wrong.

“You want to do something differently, you are free to do as you see fit. Go get yourself your own stockman and start your own line. Do whatever you want so long as you keep your man and your mess away from my place and my clients because I have my hands full.”

∞

It is mid-September of 1823 and getting brittle with still no rain. Richardson rides through the gate into his yard at dusk. His gray gelding Omega stops right where his stableman Ben stands waiting. Each time he dismounts after this long ride home from judging, the hard shock of his feet hitting the ground jars him more.

Omega stands close to him, large and hot, sweat having turned most of his light coat the color of his black skin underneath, especially on his chest, belly and throat. He’s still catching his breath from cresting that last hill. This rangy honest gelding has been by far the best of Gamma’s get but Richardson wonders how many more miles he has in him.

He rests his hand on the worn smoothness of his saddle seat and the stirrups swing empty. The gelding chews his bit with a jangle and thunk, foam covering his lips. He tries leaning into Richardson, wanting to rub his face, itchy with drying sweat, up against something. Anything. Richardson digs the butt end of his crop into Omega’s shoulder to keep him back and the horse snorts in frustration.

Richardson runs his eyes across the broad stone face of his house then past the cabins to the big barn behind. As always, Chatty has seen him coming and opened the big gate for him, and here’s Ben reaching to take the reins.

But Richardson can’t get the day off him. It had been his turn as magistrate when a negro woman a few towns over decided to carry herself out of this world, taking as many white folks with her as she could. The neighbors had panicked, calling hers an insurrection when they should have known it was more of a quick run to freedom. That’s what his people called it whenever somebody went off like that. Real insurrections were much quieter and slower to build. More deliberate and more impossible.

Judging didn’t used to get to Richardson but for some reason, this case kept running through his mind all the way home. That quiet slender woman sitting so still in his courtroom. Her slitting the husband’s and wife’s throats with a pastry cutter she had sharpened. The two of them dead in their bed. How her low keening had woken the couple’s three small children who had come into the room in the middle of the night to find their parents lying in pools of moonlight and how they had automatically turned to her for comfort.

Her standing there with the blade still in her hand, her dropping it to grab those white children to her, and her holding them tight with blood all over her dress. How the neighbor had found them piled together up in her room in the attic. In her bed. She was holding the sleeping children in her arms, looking out over their heads through the window, watching the sky lighten.

All of it keeps coming back to Richardson, bright jagged images flashing into his mind. The way she sat so still and so straight, staring at the wall behind him, not even bothering to defend herself. The feel of his hand bringing the gavel down, the sound of the gavel landing on smooth wood and the rope hanging from the gallows.

Then writing a check from the state to reimburse the dead couple’s estate for the loss of the woman. Richardson guessed the money would be held in trust for the children because they were still so young. He was trying to hurry and get it handled before too much of a crowd had a chance to gather and watch and then wreak havoc on their way home. He was trying to keep other people’s negroes safer that way.

Riding back home through the dark falling in the woods, he could not stop wondering what had been the thing that tipped her over the edge. What had crossed her mind as her hand wrapped around that pastry cutter, having sat up half the night sharpening its blade against the stone of that big kitchen fireplace where the sound was muffled by the fire popping and crackling? What had it felt like standing over those people’s beds, before and after?

And now, standing in his own yard next to his sweaty horse, turning to hand Omega off to Ben, he wonders whether Ben knows already. But Ben won’t look at him, not even when Richardson pauses, hanging on to the reins a moment too long before laying them, smooth and worn shiny, across Ben’s waiting upfacing palm.

“Did you know her?”

He and Ben stand there in the curve of Omega’s neck, the horse’s warm breath surrounding them. Ben keeps his eyes on the ground, closing his fingers around the soft leather of the reins and nods yes, he knows her. He thinks to himself about Charlotte being Heddy’s wildest girl and here she has finally hit the wall that has been waiting for her all along.

Both men stand there thinking about her people long since come to cut her down and take her home until Omega dips his big gray head to nudge Ben’s shoulder hard, knocking him off balance. Ben leads the gelding past the cabins to the barn where he’ll strip off his tack, walk him cool, rub him down with a twist of straw to loosen the drying sweat and then feed him.

Richardson turns toward the house. He’ll have to tell them about it. He can already hear their questions, fueled to a fever pitch by fear of an insurrection, stoked by that small quiet woman. A part of him wishes he was ignorant enough to believe an insurrection was even a possibility out here. He envies his family their obliviousness.

The smooth leather of his knife sheath lies warm against his hip under his clothes and all he can think about is his hands closing around a drink. He hears Thomas Jefferson saying we’re holding a wolf by the tail but cannot afford to let go and he finally begins to understand why old man Thompson went off to that island to get shut of it all.

Richardson manages to slip up to his study uninterrupted. He shuts the door softly behind him and goes to stand by the window, leaving his candle unlit so he can look down through the trees instead of seeing himself reflected. And so no one will know where he is, for a few minutes at least. A pale harvest moon rises huge and fast, dwarfing his whole place and casting its improbable brightness across the broad floorboards.

Richardson, like Thompson, had carried in his mind the picture that had prevailed just after Independence. There had always been slaves but there had also been plenty of free. There had been free negroes Richardson had respected. Done business with and argued with both.

The Revolution had opened a window and he, like many of his fellow soldiers, had hoped slavery would slip right out of it. It wasn’t only a new country they’d wanted, it was a new world. But that window had closed and slavery had strengthened instead, doubling its grip on all of them.

The liquor has loosened his chest some but there’s still not room to draw a deep breath. And he can’t hide in his study. He must go down to dinner. His family has already gathered and sits waiting. They fall silent when they hear his boots on the stairs. Eager to hear the story he doesn’t want to tell.

The smooth golden brown wood of the long table glows in the candlelight amidst the clatter of serving spoons against platters full of food. Roast chicken marinated in a sweet brown sauce and slow cooked until it falls off the bone, legs splayed out as if drunk and coming off with one tug. Wine glows deep red in its glasses. Family silver from Baltimore lies heavy on creamy linen napkins. Late lilies from his garden stand in clusters, pale and fragrant. Everything is beautiful and orderly but Richardson cannot find the pleasure he usually takes in it.

He looks down the table at his much younger wife anchoring the far end. The flatness in Mary’s eyes grows flatter still when something like this happens and tonight his gaze slides right off hers. She’s already decided what she thinks about the double murder and the hanging without having heard a word from him. An unfortunate matter well handled and over with. No need to discuss it.

Most of their children sit gathered between them, eager to hear more. Livia and Lucius sit opposite each other on his left and right hand. They are his undeniable favorites, along with William. Livia is well past grown while Lucius remains runty at twelve, but they mirror one another, each carrying their father’s long narrow face, pale against dark brows and hair. Sharp brown eyes that don’t miss much. They even flush the same pink, high on each cheek whenever their tempers flare, just like he does.

Diana, Caroline and Cassius bunch together in their late teens and early twenties. They all carry their mother’s rounder features with her chestnut hair that Cassius has started to lose as he works relentlessly to usurp William’s favored position.

Only William, Adele and Augusta carry a real mixture of both parents but William has been posted to manage Memphis, Adele has been married off to a merchant named Singleton to establish the Richardson store in New Orleans, and Augusta rarely comes to the table anymore. She always claims to be reading in her room but she can never come up with any titles when Richardson asks. Little James cannot reach the table yet and Mary Patton won’t ever be able to manage it so Emmaline feeds them in the kitchen.

Richardson’s father’s gaze bears down on his from the portrait on the wall. The force of his father’s ambition has poured over him for as long as he can remember and it has carved him into this particular shape. This drive to acquire and expand will gain momentum as it barrels through the family for generations but the first bull’s eye it found was Richardson.

He has done everything that was expected of him, but as he looks down the long table, feeding his large family from his own land, nothing feels like he thought it would. Here is the life he has worked so hard to provide, and they are taking hold of it just as he had intended, but he worries they do not know what they need to know. His children look at him so brightly he finds himself wanting to pull one or the other aside to make sure they understand fully. All the considerations that must be weighed. The ramifications of this course of action or that one.

Trouble is, he doesn’t know. Not anymore. Not for sure. He feels their unasked questions lurking and finds himself grateful for his wife’s focus on the surface of things. Scenes from the day keep flashing through his mind. He feels a yearning pulling inside him but he does not know what it is for. All he knows is he feels most alone when surrounded by his family.

He drinks to fill the empty space around him and then speaks harshly, trying to take the edge off it. He pours himself drink after drink and watches the level drop in the decanter as the bourbon gradually gives him room to breathe. At the same time that it warms him and allows him to feel his feet on the ground, the liquor distances him from those around the table. Or maybe it magnifies the distance that already exists. He sits there listening to them talk but none of it touches him.