Known World (2004 Pulitzer Prize), The - Edward P. Jones [9]
The fall that year, 1834, just dropped away one day and suddenly it was winter. Mildred and Augustus came every Sunday even when it turned cold and then even colder than that. They built a fire on no-man’s-land and ate with few words. Robbins had told them not to take the boy beyond where his overseer could see them from the entrance to his property. The winter visits were short ones because the boy often complained of the cold. Sometimes Henry did not show up, even if the cold was bearable for a visit of a few minutes. Mildred and Augustus would wait hour after hour, huddled in the wagon under quilts and blankets, or walking hopefully up and down the road, for Robbins had forbidden them to come onto his land except when Augustus was making a payment on the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month. They would hope some slave would venture out, going to or from the mansion, so they could holler to him or her to go get their boy Henry. But even when they managed to see someone and tell them about Henry, they would wait in vain for the boy to show up.
“I just forgot,” Henry would say the next time they saw him. Augustus had often been chastised as a boy but though Henry was his son, he was not yet his property and so beyond his reach.
“Try harder to remember, son. To know the right way,” Augustus said, only to have Henry do right the next Sunday or two and then not show up the one after that.
Then, in mid-February, after they had waited two hours beyond when he was supposed to appear on the road, Augustus grabbed the boy when he shuffled up and shook him, then he pushed him to the ground. Henry covered his face and began to cry. “Augustus!” Mildred shouted and helped her son up. “Everything’s good,” she said to him as she cradled him in her arms. “Everything’s good.”
Augustus turned and walked across the road to the wagon. The wagon had a thick burlap covering, something he had come up with not long after the first cold visit. The mother and her child soon followed him across the road and the three settled into the wagon under the covering and around the stones Augustus and Mildred had boiled. They were quite large stones, which they would boil for many hours at home on Sunday mornings before setting out to see Henry. Then, just before they left home, the stones were wrapped in blankets and placed in the center of the wagon. When the stones stopped giving warmth and the boy began complaining of the cold, they knew it was time to go.
That Sunday Augustus pushed Henry, the three of them ate, once again, in silence.
The next Sunday Robbins was waiting. “I heard you did something to my boy, to my property,” he said before Augustus and Mildred were down from the wagon.
“No, Mr. Robbins. I did nothin,” Augustus said, having forgotten the push.
“We wouldn’t,” Mildred said. “We wouldn’t hurt him for the world. He our son.”
Robbins looked at her as if she had told him the day was Wednesday. “I won’t have you touching my boy, my property.” His horse, Sir Guilderham, was idling two or so paces behind his master. And just as the horse began to wander away, Robbins turned and picked up the reins, mounted. “No more visits for a month,” he said, picking one piece of lint from the horse’s ear.
“Please, Mr. Robbins,” Mildred said. Freedom had allowed her not to call him master anymore. “We come all this way.”
“I don’t care,” Robbins said. “It’ll take all of a month for him to heal from what you did, Augustus.”
Robbins set off. Henry had not told his parents that he had become Robbins