Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [139]
“You do not want this now.”
“Do not tell me what I want.”
He sat up, preparing to stand.
“Wait, please,” she said. “I have something to tell you.”
“And what might that be?”
“I have lain with him.”
“You have trapped him then?”
“Yes,” Liza said, “but he has trapped me as well.”
Now Jonathan pulled himself to his feet and stared into her eyes.
“How has this puny New Yorker trapped you?”
“He has given me a disease.”
“What?”
The lie lay smoothly on her tongue and it gave her pleasure to say it.
“Yes, from the first time I went with him. Do you want to see the evidence, do you want to see my soiled rags.”
“No, no, no, no,” he said in disgust. “So, he has ruined you?”
“Yes, and it is terribly painful upon occasion,” she said.
He dropped his gaze and turned aside.
“If you are lying—”
“I am not lying, I am suffering.”
“Can the doctor cure you?”
“Yes, he is treating me now, but it will take a while.”
“I will not go near your filth,” her father said, “but you will tell me the moment he has made the cure and we will, I promise you, have at it again.”
He brushed past her and hurried out of the cabin.
Liza threw herself down on the pallet, crying and moaning until she was hoarse.
Chapter Sixty-two
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A Palimpsest
Not long now, massa,” Isaac said, another week or so later, holding up a handful of the rich and plumped kernels from the stalks at our feet, stalks that held their heads high, strong, in spite of the weight of the burgeoning kernels.
“Good, good, Isaac,” I said. “The time is coming near, and that’s good.”
I rode back from the rice fields in a daze and a dream, my mind going black in bright daylight with the hope and expectation of seeing Liza before the sun rose again on the next day. Who knew a man could live like this? No one I knew in New York ever expressed such a heart condition as mine.
***
Mute at dinner—retiring early to my room—reading (Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe!), dreaming into the dark—that was my round after returning from the fields. I felt as much a slave to my condition as the dark people who went home to their cabins and took some feeble pleasures before sleep and the next day’s round of hard labor. What did it matter that I could leave the plantation? That I might return to New York? Or perhaps even travel to London and Paris? A chain wrapped itself round my heart, and I could not stir myself to think about anything else except Liza.
One night at dinner Rebecca brought up what under different circumstances for me might have seemed an innocuous matter. She mentioned that several of the women she was teaching talked now and then about witchcraft and how to make spells to bind a man to you. She joked that she would put a spell on Jonathan, and he put back to her that he would turn her in as a witch.
“A Jewess witch,” he said. “That would make our dear Gentile neighbors rather suspicious. Accused by her own husband, for putting a spell on him.”
Rebecca rose to the height of her powers and said,
“I put a spell on the rice.”
“Please, now,” my uncle said, “this is foolish talk.”
Jonathan enjoyed it.
“Do you know the slave goddess, the one they pound drums to and sometimes make their sacrifices to in the woods at night? I spoke to her and asked if she would make the kernels big and plump.”
“No, no,” said my aunt, “this is not a joking matter. Jonathan, I do not like you to joke that way. It is against our God.”
“Oh,” Jonathan said, “who or what is our God? A clump of rules. We never see Him.”
“He is everywhere,” my aunt said.
Jonathan would not relent.
“Is he there, Mother, when I make my water?”
“Please!” she said.
“Or when—”
“Enough,” my uncle broke in. “I am weary. I am not feeling well. All this taxes me, in my soul.”
“These men and their souls,” my aunt said. She looked over at Rebecca. “I should not expect more from them, but I always do. And it always hurts. This is the life they give us.” She looked directly at me. “Even you, who seem so polite and gentle for a man. Who