Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [134]
“It’s so funny, Isaac,” she said. “I read the words, and it gives me such a fine feeling beyond them. It is something we should do all the time.”
“I hope to do better at my reading,” Isaac said.
“You should,” Liza said. “I swear, it’s how we get free even if we’re still chained to this place.”
“Yes, yes,” Isaac said. “I will try it, because I do feel chained. Even by these Hebrews I feel chained like their old ancestors, just like the Israelites in Egypt.”
Liza stood at the cutting board, preparing vegetables for the meal.
“You been reading, you been reading your Bible.”
“I have,” Isaac said. “I surely have.”
“The religion in the Bible?”
“Yes?”
“It’s only one kind of freedom. These novels the doctor’s been giving me.”
“The ones you talking about?”
“And other ones,” Liza said. “Lots of others.”
“They ain’t about religion.”
“Some are, some aren’t. But they all make me free in my mind in so many more different kinds of ways than the Bible makes me free. Brother, I am beginning to love them more than I can say in words.”
“That’s what you were saying.”
Liza giggled.
“In words, yes. Now that’s a joke!”
That was when he came into the kitchen.
“What are you doing here?” he said to Isaac.
The whiskey fumes spread out on his breath like morning mist.
“Fetching some water to Liza,” he said.
“Get out. Fetch something else somewhere else. Get to the barns!”
“Massa,” Isaac said, retreating out the door.
Jonathan moved toward her and Liza retreated—unfortunately—toward the pantry.
“You whore!” he shouted at her, shoving her through the open door. “Fornicating with that boy,” he said.
She shook her head.
“Fornicator,” he said, swatting her with the back of his hand.
Fear roared through her blood and she tried to squeeze past him but he shoved her back inside the pantry and pulled the door closed behind him.
“No, please,” she said, in a voice that reminded her, even as her fear rose in her blood, of how she spoke in dreams.
He batted her with his fist and she stumbled back against the shelves. Sacks of sugar and grain slipped down around her feet. In a nightmare of motion he pulled at his trousers, pushed her down, and planted himself on top of her, hip to hip. As he began to fumble at her with his fingers, she writhed in desperation, unable to free herself from his weight. He took himself in hand in preparation for coming into her, and she slapped at his face.
He grabbed her wrist, and they fought for a moment, her blood still racing, before she felt herself giving way beneath the heavy press of him. Her blood turned to tears, now coursing through her body like rain-water.
Chapter Fifty-nine
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Dawn
When the first light comes up she is lying there asleep, her skin turned off-gold in the early news of dawn, her breasts like dark puddings, her nipples like raisins. Her braids undone, her hair become a tangle of clots and burrs, her eyes moving beneath her eyelids, as if she might be watching a music show in the privacy of her dreams. And her chest moves up and down with her breath, though she breathes so silently I can’t hear even a whisper of the stuff that gives her life.
She seems so close and yet so distant from me, she in her slumbering state, me in my wakefulness.
Or is it me who is dreaming and she who, in another plane, is awake and wondering about me as I wonder about her?
Our God is a dour God, somber and distant in these latter days. Nonetheless I pray to him, of whom I have never asked much before, that He might make this moment last, make it so. This brown-skinned girl with gold-flecked eyes and hair like vines and limbs like those of a goddess carved of sandstone—here is Eden, here is Paradise—and all the rest an afterthought, the moody preoccupations of men too stony to unbend to the call of the moment.
I now shocked myself, because for the first time in months I thought of Halevi, who before this journey had been my constant companion, at least in thought. If he were here, I decided, we might argue this.
But my company now is not a philosopher, but a slave