Known World (2004 Pulitzer Prize), The - Edward P. Jones [2]
Caldonia Townsend, his master’s wife, had for the last six days and nights only been catnapping, as her husband made his hard way toward death. The white people’s doctor had come the morning of the first day, as a favor to Caldonia’s mother, who believed in the magic of white people, but that doctor had only pronounced that Moses’s master, Henry Townsend, was going through a bad spell and would recover soon. The ailments of white people and black people were different, and a man who specialized in one was not expected to know much about the other, and that was something he believed Caldonia should know without him telling her. If her husband was dying, the doctor didn’t know anything about it. And he left in the heat of the day, having pocketed 75 cents from Caldonia, 60 cents for looking at Henry and 15 cents for the wear and tear on himself and his buggy and his one-eyed horse.
Henry Townsend—a black man of thirty-one years with thirty-three slaves and more than fifty acres of land that sat him high above many others, white and black, in Manchester County, Virginia—sat up in bed for most of his dying days, eating a watery porridge and looking out his window at land his wife Caldonia kept telling him he would walk and ride over again. But she was young and naively vigorous and had known but one death in her life, that of her father, who had been secretly poisoned by his own wife. On the fourth day on his way to death, Henry found sitting up difficult and lay down. He spent that night trying to reassure his wife. “Nothin hurts,” he said more than once that day, a day in July 1855. “Nothin hurts.”
“Would you tell me if it did?” Caldonia said. It was near about three in the morning, two hours or so after she had dismissed for the evening Loretta, her personal maid, the one who had come with her marriage to Henry.
“I ain’t took on the habit of not tellin you the truth,” Henry said that fourth evening. “I can’t start now.” He had received some education when he was twenty and twenty-one, educated just enough to appreciate a wife like Caldonia, a colored woman born free and who had been educated all her days. Finding a wife had been near the end of a list of things he planned to do with his life. “Why don’t you go on to bed, darlin?” Henry said. “I can feel sleep comin on and you shouldn’t wait for it to get here.” He was in what the slaves who worked in the house called the “sick and gettin well room,” where he had taken himself that first sick day to give Caldonia some peace at night.
“I’m fine right here,” she said. The night had gotten cooler and he was in fresh nightclothes, having sweated through the ones they had put him in at about nine o’clock. “Should I read to you?” Caldonia said, covered in a lace shawl Henry had seen in Richmond. He had paid a white boy to go into the white man’s shop to purchase it for him, because the shop would have no black customers. “A bit of Milton? Or the Bible?” She was curled up in a large horsehair chair that had been pulled up to his bed. On either side of the bed were small tables, each just large enough for a book and a candelabrum that held three candles as thick as a woman’s wrist. The candelabrum on the right side was dark, and the one on the left had only one burning candle. There was no fire in the hearth.
“I been so weary of Milton,” Henry said. “And the Bible suits me better in the day, when there’s sun and I can see what all God gave me.” Two days before he had told his parents to go home, that he was doing better, and he had indeed felt some improvement, but on the next day, after his folks were back at their place, Henry took a turn back to bad. He and his father had not been close for more than ten years, but his father was a man strong enough to put aside disappointment in his son when he knew his flesh and blood was sick. In fact, the only time his father had come to see Henry on the plantation was when the son had been doing poorly. Some seven times in the course of ten