Known World (2004 Pulitzer Prize), The - Edward P. Jones [37]
“Master died master died master died.” She kicked her legs out and pointed at Travis and his horse.
“Dear Lord!” Travis said. “Leave her, boys. Just leave her,” and he rode around the woman, who was still kicking and still chanting. The other two patrollers started moving as well.
Barnum stopped. “You better go on home. I want you to go on home now.” Alice told him again that the master was dead. She did not stop kicking. “I know,” Barnum said, “but you best go home.” The men rode away.
After a time, Alice went down the way the men had come. She shook the dirt of the road from her frock. She wouldn’t get back to her cabin until about two-thirty that morning. What moon there was was now gone. She began to chant after a few yards and was just as loud as she had been in the beginning. On a day before the mule kicked her in the head, an African woman who spoke very little English had told her that some angels were hard of hearing, that it was best to speak real loud when talking to them.
I met a dead man layin’ in Massa lane
Ask that dead man what his name
He raised he bony head and took off his hat
He told me this, he told me that.
Elias finished the doll for Tessie his daughter the night of the day they buried Henry Townsend. He put the whittling knife on the ground beside the tree stump he was sitting on and held the doll for some time in both his hands, feeling empty and restless now that the task was done. Since his marriage to Celeste, it had helped to always have something for his hands to do when he could not shut them down in sleep. His legs never shut down—they kicked and twitched in his sleep and Celeste always threatened to tie them down for the night. “I tell you, husband, you plannin on cripplin me some more with them runnin feet.”
He ran his finger over the face of the doll and then he kissed its forehead. He had wanted it to look like Tessie but he knew he had fallen far short of that. He needed something else now for his hands, and soon. Maybe some carved figure for his oldest son, a horse. He had seen a boat once, that last day with his mother, but he did not think he could do a boat the way the first one lived on in his head, a silent brown giant sailing away under a blue sky. Any boat he would try to carve might turn out like that first comb for Celeste his wife. And besides, where could his boy sail it? Down, down in a well where he could not even see it? He would tell Tessie that the doll had the face of his own mother, for her idea of what her grandmother looked like would probably be the same as his memory of her, and that memory had shredded down to nothing over the thirty years.
Elias stood up and brushed the shavings from his shirt and pants. He was alone in the lane. The silent pledge he had made to Henry once upon a time was now no more. But that did not matter, dead man or no dead man. Elias looked up and found the winking stars in a clear part of the sky that were supposed to have guided him away. How ready he had been, at ease, legs powerful, heart desperate to beat under another moon and sun. He sat down again and put the doll inside his shirt and leaned over to pick up another piece of wood. It was nearing nine-thirty. As he took up the knife, Alice came out of her cabin and danced down the lane and stood before him with her hands on her hips. They had rarely spoken because nothing she said ever made sense. “Whatcha makin now?” she said, surprising him. “Somethin for my boy.” “Well, you just make it good, make it to last,” Alice said. He waited for her to follow up with some nonsense, but she just stood as she had been. Maybe the moon, or the lack of it, determined her ways. “Don’t be late,” Elias said to her. “Don’t be late goin out and about.” “Don’t you be late neither,” she said and danced away. He watched her, and for the first time he was afraid for her. He would begin at the horse’s head, which would be the hardest part. No boat. Why put such a notion in a boy’s head anyway? He put the wood in his