Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [143]
So strange—he told Liza a long time afterward—how happy he felt. Just plain happy, happy, happy! Staring down at that still-born child, he wanted to take wing and fly.
The girl remained a bit feverish, and he walked her to her cabin and put her to bed. Still, he felt as though he had learned something he could not yet quite put into thoughts in his mind. But he felt nonetheless quite happy. In that same mood the next morning he went to his duties in the stables, beginning his work day—even now, after all that had happened the night before—still in darkness. He worked first on the horses, his daily duties taking him deep into the barns where such heady odors arose from the manure piles that now and then he felt somehow drunk on the fumes. As he walked from the barns to the big house his gait wavered, his arms tingled, and his head went around and around in confusion, so he might as well have been drunk.
Then it came to him. He had thought up a simple plan. Here is how he enacted it in his mind. An old Yoruba man they called Walla-Walla oversaw the business of the stables, having taken over the job after Isaac’s father years ago, around the time Isaac’s mother died in giving birth to him, collapsed into a daily bucket of dangerous brew. Isaac, a hard worker who always finished the day’s duties before the end of the day, would easily elude his surveillance, sauntering from the stables toward the big house with a large bridle slung over his shoulder, as though he had business with it just ahead.
Once at the house, he would gain entry by the back door, where perhaps Liza herself might be working—though not today, so the plan would not work today—and yet he longed to strike out now, now, because of the immediacy of the event that brought his blood to a boil and kept him sizzling in his veins through the day—yes, then she would open the door to him, and with a pat on the shoulder he would slip past her into the dining room and the sitting room beyond where he would find the master in conversation with the missus, and he would throw down the bridle at the master’s feet, pull him from his chair, and knock him to the floor. He would keep one foot on the big man’s chest and study his face, and study it, as if to see if there were some resemblance. The Jewish man’s eyes would cry out for mercy. Mercy! Mercy? Out would come the knife Isaac’s father had given up to him long ago for trimming rope in the barn and—this seemed like justice, as much as he could imagine it, justice!—with one swift thrust he would stick the master in the throat, and gouge at him until he lost so much blood he could not survive.
And he would do the same to the missus.
And why not?
She lived with the man who fathered the child, she raised the child who grew to the man who did all of them such misery and wrong. The thought of the missus, in a white dress covered all in blood, twisted in his belly and he stood tall, breathing deeply, waiting for the nausea to pass.
He would next mount the stairs to the wing of the house where the young master’s family lived, and slaughter them, like birds in a coop. He was sweating now, and licking his lips, even as the faintest wave of nausea still crawled up and down his chest and belly. But he would slaughter them, yes.
And then he would wait for the son. The hot blood pooling at his feet might cool, and the light fade at the end of the day. But he would wait. And after a while the young master would come in the door, call out to his parents in greeting, and step into the parlor. Isaac would take him around the neck with one arm and gouge out his eyes and then slit his throat and leave him for dead on the bloody floor.
Oh, what a thing it would be next! He would call all the people together, and they would celebrate, light fires