Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [145]
“Daddy, why are you talking about that now?”
“I loved her I don’t know you ever can know…”
“Daddy?”
Young Isaac backed away as his father turned over on his belly and began to snore. All during the ride into town he thought of that, rather than stopping the carriage and dragging the young master out and beating him to death in the woods.
But after the ride he thought of it again, and brooded.
Chapter Sixty-five
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In My Margins
Mysteries and Family Secrets
Oh, Isaac, what you did not know will when you learn of it kill you!
Run, hurry, hide! But you are a brave young fellow and so you won’t do that, will you?
Chapter Sixty-six
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Stories
And then death seemed to gather all about Isaac, like a cloud, like a cloak. He carried the scheme around with him in his mind, and though it faded out when he worked at day’s end he found it haunting him again, the revenge plot against the master’s son, the master’s son who would one day, sooner, no doubt, than later, become master himself, the revenge against the entire family itself before this happened.
It did not help that as he now reckoned his own father was fading so quickly. In the cabin after sunset he would sit with the older man and gaze into his eyes, and he swore he could see a light flickering, as if his soul were like some candle about to gutter out in the wind.
“Daddy,” he said, “tell me about when you came here.”
“Why you want to know about that?”
The older man shifted on the pallet as though caught up in a dream, except that he was wide awake.
“I just want to know.”
“Doesn’t do you good to know. Back in the old country my father might have been a king. What good that do you here, slave as you are?”
“Was he a king? I did not know that.”
“No, no, son. I was joking. He was…a slave,” the older man said. “The story he told me, hunters took me from him, but living with him I was not free there either. I will be free soon.”
“What do you say?”
“I am going to be free.”
The darkness settled around them, flowing from outside in, as though it were a liquid to be poured, a substance that flowed, on which the lightest objects might float. An ailing angry man, his angry son, the pair of them surrounded by the dark that grew deeper and deeper, it made a picture you scarcely ever see, real life among our people, an aspect of the pose and emotion of all manner of people since our ancestors—everyone’s ancestors!—first came down out of the trees to walk about and forage, oh, never to return to those heights.
After his father fell asleep Isaac left the cabin and wandered over to visit Liza.
The dark had settled over the quarters so deeply and indelibly it seemed impossible that light would ever return. It surprised him to find Liza in her own small cabin, illuminated by a steady-burning fire, holding a book in her hands.
“What you doing?” he said.
She looked up at him, inclined her head toward the fire.
“Reading.”
He knew books, there was a room in the big house full of them, though he had never touched one, let alone opened one. Ever since the doctor began teaching Liza, and it began when she was a little girl, there was always one book or another lying around. He just had never felt the desire to pick one up and start reading. Though he usually liked it when she read to him.
“What’s that one?” he said, pointing to the volume that lay open on the floor of her cabin.
“A good story about a good boy living with bad people. Would you like to hear it?”
Isaac shrugged, held up his hands. (When did the shrug first appear as part of human behavior? Did an animal shrug? Or was it something that happened on the ground, walking away from that exploding volcano? Or much later? When?)
She picked up the book and turned to the front of it. She moved her lips, she sounded, mostly correctly, these words (and it took her a much longer time to do this than it would take you or me, much longer):
“‘Although I am not disposed to maintain that the being born in a workhouse, is in itself the most