Known World (2004 Pulitzer Prize), The - Edward P. Jones [14]
2
The Wedding Present. Dinner First, Then Breakfast. Prayers Before an Offering.
In the Bible God commanded men to take wives, and John Skiffington obeyed.
He tried always to live humbly and obediently in the shadow of God, but he was afraid that at twenty-six years old he was falling short. He yearned for earthly things, to begin with, and he rendered far more unto Caesar than he knew God would have liked. I am imperfect, he said to God each morning he rose from his bed. I am imperfect, but I am still clay in your hands, ever walking the way you want me to. Mold me and help me to be perfect in your eyes, O Lord.
God had not put it in his mind to take a wife until that autumn afternoon in 1840 in the parlor of Sheriff Gilly Patterson. Skiffington, who had been Patterson’s deputy for two years, had come up at twenty years old with his father to Manchester, to a town and county in the middle of Virginia his father had seen only once as a child and had dreamed about twice as an adult. His father had long been the overseer on the North Carolina plantation owned by his cousin, and it was there that John Skiffington grew uneasily into manhood, grew into it among 10 or so white people and 209 or so slaves, the numbers changing only slightly year by year, owing to birth, owing to sales and purchases, owing to death. The night before John Skiffington’s mother died, his father dreamed that God told him he did not want him and his son having dominion over slaves, and two days later the man and his son left North Carolina, carrying the dead woman in a pine box in a wagon the cousin bestowed on them. Don’t leave your wife in North Carolina, God had said to the father at the end of the dream.
Sheriff Patterson’s two nieces came down from Philadelphia in 1840 for a three-month stay, and he and his wife held one o’clock dinners most Sundays while the young women were there. They would invite folks near and about for small gatherings, and it was on that autumn afternoon that it was John Skiffington and his father’s turn. Patterson’s wife was distant kin to William Robbins’s wife, and Robbins and his wife came as well, though Robbins viewed the Pattersons, to say nothing of the Skiffingtons, as being two or three rungs beneath him and his.
John Skiffington and his father arrived first and John stepped out of a gray day into Mrs. Patterson’s dull blue parlor and saw first thing Winifred Patterson, a product of the Philadelphia School for Girls, an institution with one foot in Quakerism. He was not a shy man and he was bear-large. Winifred was not shy either, an unintended result of being at the Philadelphia School for Girls, and it wasn’t long before he and Winifred—after the arrival of the Robbinses—had retired to a corner of the parlor and begun a conversation that lasted through dinner and into early evening. What surprised him most was why the female sex had not interested him before that Sunday. Where had God been keeping that part of his head and heart?
He saw her often after that, in Mrs. Patterson’s parlor, or in church or on buggy rides accompanied by Mrs. Patterson and Winifred’s younger sister. John became the only regular visitor at the Pattersons’ Sunday dinners, and had to be told a few times by Mrs. Patterson, suppressing a titter, that it was rude and selfish to take Winifred aside before the other dinner guests had a chance to relish the worldliness that the Philadelphia School for Girls had instilled in her. By early January Mrs. Patterson told her husband that things were moving in such a way that it might be best if Mr. Patterson summoned his brother from Philadelphia, that the brother and John Skiffington might want to talk. The brother arrived, the men talked, but Winifred returned to Philadelphia in March, after the second frost that did wonders for gardens that year. Skiffington visited