Known World (2004 Pulitzer Prize), The - Edward P. Jones [42]
He was very tired, not having slept at Robbins’s place. When he leaned his head forward and closed his eyes, his neck soon stiffened and he finally had to lean his head back as far as he could and accept what relief came with that. He closed his eyes but there was no sleep, not even the jittery dozing that had come at Robbins’s place.
Not long before Moffett arrived, Elias opened his eyes and saw a boy watching him. When the boy saw him open his eyes, he came closer, asking, “You want some water?”
Elias closed his eyes again and did not answer because he did not want to spare anybody’s neck.
“You want some water?”
He nodded without opening his eyes and he heard the boy leave. When he did not return, Elias thought he had been having fun with him, and he found some peace in that. He soon heard Moffett’s preaching voice, the words indistinct. When he opened his eyes again, the boy was standing before him, a chipped, discarded porcelain cup in one hand and a large piece of hoe cake in the other. “The preacher here,” the boy said with a smile, as if that was the news Elias most needed to hear. “I useta hear him when I was over the other place.” Three days ago Henry had bought Lot Number Four, a group of three slaves, and the boy had been one of them. Elias took the bread in his hands and ate, and in between bites, the boy put the cup to his lips and he drank.
“My name Luke,” he said when there was no more water.
“I know,” Elias said, looking at a fly alight on his hand and edge toward the bread. The boy smiled and turned the cup upside down and shook it. “I know.” The boy stood and ran out and returned quickly with more water. He sat before Elias and since the bread was gone, Elias held the cup in his hands. “You want some more hoe cake?” Luke said. The man shook his head. “I know a song bout Jesus. I can sing it.” Elias shook his head again. Moffett, Sunday after Sunday, had but one theme—that heaven was nearer than anyone realized and that one step away from the righteous path could take heaven away forever. “Hang on,” he liked to say, “just hang on, cause heaven is right over there. See it. See it. Close your eyes and see it.” His ending words were that they should obey their masters and mistresses, for heaven would not be theirs if they disobeyed. “One day I want to sit with yall and eat peaches and cream in heaven. I don’t wanna have to lean over and look way way down and see yall burnin in them fires of hell.” Luke and Elias could not make out his words and so they just listened to the way his words came into the barn and bounced around. The sparrows were no longer flying, just chirping somewhere above their heads. Elias could see them in his mind, arranging the straw and turning around and around on it to make a place smooth enough to be a home to the eggs. At last Luke said, “I was born on Marse Colfax place. . . . You know that?”
Elias said, “I know. I know that.” Dropping the cup into his lap, he leaned his face into his hands and began to cry. On the worst days he had ever had, he had always been able to see himself as one day living free. But now . . .
“Is all right,” Luke said. “I’ll sit with you. Is all right. I’ma sit with you till all them hants leave you alone. I ain’t afraid of no hants.”
Moffett, after the services, sat with Henry and Caldonia in their dining room, eating bread and cheese and a tea that was more honey than anything else. He claimed anything sweet eased his gout. Now and again in their lives Caldonia and Henry would go down to the services with the slaves but generally the sitting with Moffett would pass in their minds as a kind of service, as communion with God. After the meal, Moffett sat with his feet propped on a stool Zeddie the cook had brought in from the back for him. The stool, padded, was used for little else and had become known as the Reverend Moffett stool.
Henry said little, thinking about what he would do with Elias.
“You are away from us this day, Henry,” Moffett said at one point. He had been paid the $1 for conducting the services the moment after he entered the