Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [120]
His eyes were soft as a cow’s. A small nervous pulse beat in the thin hollow of his throat. Paris read in his gaze a plea to be understood, to be approved. ‘I wonder why it is we think children are optimistic,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe I was very optimistic when I was a child, rather the contrary. Most of the future was dread.’ As it is now, he thought. He was back in the dread of childhood now, with Owen’s blacks soon to examine.
‘Eh?’ Owen appeared involved for some moments in some painful effort of memory. ‘Well, no,’ he said, ‘perhaps you are right. All the same, do I look a man to buy a dying negro? I wasn’t born yesterday, I told them. It takes more than a naked savage to get the better of Timothy Owen. I purchased nine in the end, six men and three women. I have got them in the barracoon behind. Would you like to look them over now or should we go in and crack a bottle first?’
‘We should see to the business first,’ Paris said. ‘Don’t you think so, Simmonds?’
The mate was visibly divided. But after some seconds of pause he said, ‘Yes, let us get it done.’
‘The rum will still be there,’ Owen said. ‘I am glad to see you go armed, gentlemen. I never go near a captive negro without a pistol loaded and ready and someone to cover me. We’d better have these fellows along too, I think.’ He went over and kicked lightly at the sleeping men, gesturing to them when they sat up that they should follow.
They skirted the fence and passed behind the house where an acre or so of forest had been cleared. A tethered goat raised its beard at them. A full-bodied woman in a blue cotton shift was hanging clothes on the line; she did not look towards them as they passed. The barracoon stood over against the broken edges of the forest. As they approached, a vulture which had been perched on the ridge-pole raised a wattled head to regard them, then flapped indignantly away. Through a lattice-work of rafters and rush matting Paris made out the forms of the negroes inside the barracoon.
‘I made considerable efforts to have a vegetable garden here at one time,’ Owen said, with the same rapidity of speech, at once eager and distracted. He indicated a level patch of ground, as bare as the rest but marked out with a stone border. ‘I planted water melons, pompions, guinea peas. And sallet – you can have no idea how much I long for a bit of sallet, it is highly beneficial for the blood in this climate. But the damn crabs came up out of the river and devoured everything in a single night. When I looked at it in the morning it was as bare as you see it now. I never thought to make a fence against crabs, you see. There was a fence, but it was not proof against those devils, they got underneath. I never had the heart to try again. Nowadays, any time I encounter a crab, I put an end to its life.’
A smell of excrement and wood smoke came over to them from the barracoon. ‘My mind was all on larger beasts,’ Owen said. ‘I never thought of anything getting underneath. Well, gentlemen, here they are, and a finer set of slaves you would have to travel far to see. Through here.’
It was intensely hot within the shrouded enclosure of the shed. The fires on which their food had been cooked were still smouldering; the smoke was acrid, Paris felt it stinging his eyes. He peered through the miasmic interior. All nine of the slaves, men and women alike, were shackled in a line to a long metal bar that