Candle in the Darkness - Lynn N. Austin [13]
I was still sick every morning for several weeks, even with Eli and Massa Jesus by my side. Sometimes I had nosebleeds, which the doctor said were caused by fright. I once overheard my teachers whispering about my mother’s “condition,” but they seemed to take pity on me, declaring me a “sensitive” child. They never made me read or recite aloud.
While I can’t say I enjoyed school, I did learn to tolerate it. The best part was the long carriage ride with Eli twice a day. He drove a different route to school after that first day—one that wouldn’t take us past the slave market again. And at the end of each day I’d find him waiting for me outside the school, smiling as though he hadn’t seen me in a hundred years. He sat high on the driver’s seat as we rode up and down the hills, looking stiff in his fancy topcoat and hat, and mumbling under his breath all the way to the school each morning and all the way home again in the afternoon.
“Who are you talking to, Eli?” I finally asked him one morning.
“Sometime I talking to Massa Jesus, but today I talking to these here horses.”
“To the horses? Can they understand what you say?”
“Sure can, Missy.”
“And do the horses talk back to you, too?”
“Sure do.”
“What do they say?”
“Well, for one thing they say, ‘We sure glad our Missy a little thing. We glad we not toting that big old Missus Greeley up these hills all day long.’ ” I giggled. Mrs. Greeley, my very stout headmistress, was even bigger around than Esther.
“What else do the horses say?”
It became a game for us after that. Every day I would ask Eli what the horses were talking about, and every day he would tell me something different. “Today they say ‘I wonder when this rain ever gonna stop? We be up to our hocks in mud.’ ”
Or, “Today them horses say ‘Why you cracking that whip over our head, Mr. Eli? Don’t you know Little Missy ain’t in no hurry to get to that old school?’ ”
I laughed with delight at all his horse conversations. Before long, my nosebleeds stopped. Gradually my fear subsided, too.
One Saturday morning, when I didn’t have to go to school, I heard Eli mumbling to himself as he raked the leaves outside in our yard. “Who are you talking to now?” I asked. “The horses can’t hear you—they’re in the carriage house.”
“I know, Little Missy. I talking to Massa Jesus.”
I was dying to ask the question that had been bothering me for some time. “Is He the same Jesus the minister talks to when we pray in church?”
“He the same. There only one Jesus I know about.”
I couldn’t imagine how Eli could talk to Him while raking leaves in the backyard. “Don’t you have to be in church or kneeling down to talk to Jesus?”
“Nope. If He your friend, you can talk to Him anytime, anywhere.” He piled the leaves beside the curb and bent to light a match to them. I inhaled the wonderful fragrance of burning leaves, even though the smoke burned my eyes when the wind shifted my way.
“What do you talk to Jesus about?” I asked, swinging back and forth on the open gate while I watched him work.
He stood, leaning against the rake for a moment. “Well . . . I tell Him all the things I worried about.”
His answer perplexed me. Why would Eli have any worries? He certainly didn’t have ships to fret about, like Daddy did. “What kind of things?” I finally asked.
“Oh, like whether Little Missy be getting along all right in that school of hers, and whether Grady feeling homesick wherever he at. Whether he scared or missing his mama.”
I knew how badly I missed Grady, but it had never occurred to me that Grady might be missing all of us, too.
“And sometimes I talk to Jesus about my own son,” Eli continued. “I ask Him take good care him for me.”
I recalled what Esther had said that terrible morning, how their son had been sold to Hilltop, my grandfather’s plantation. “Do you miss your son, Eli?