Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [151]
But he didn’t stop, and it kept on causing her pain even as he howled in frustration—the master howling like a dog!—and pulled away from her.
“Get dressed,” he said.
She pulled her clothing on while he stood and pushed himself back into his trousers, of a sudden pulling her close and wiping himself on her dress.
Her instinct was to draw away from him, but she stood there, intent on getting her way no matter what. And the worst had already taken place.
“Go back to the cabins,” he said.
“You promised,” she said, leaning against the door frame of the pantry.
Finally, with a slight nod of his head, he spoke to her as he might speak to a dog, “Very well. Tell Isaac to drive you to town. You may stay only an hour. Do you know how to tell time?”
She knew she risked everything to say what she said next in the tone in which she said it, but she said it anyway.
“You never taught me, father.”
He shook his head. If smoke might ever appear from a human skull, it might have puffed out of his nostrils just then.
“One hour,” he said. “Now go.”
She bowed her head.
“Thank you.”
“One hour.”
“Yes…master,” she said, waiting until he turned and left the pantry so that she might push her face against the wall and weep a while, feeling as though her head might explode. It hurt when she walked out of the room herself, but she did not care. She walked faster. Outside she ran.
Chapter Seventy
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A Grain of Rice
Ever since the last encounter with her father her thoughts and feelings had become terribly confused, she noticed that her appetite waxed and waned, and some mornings before sunrise she felt a longing to sleep perhaps forever and on other mornings long before the moon had set she jumped up from her pallet, ready for the day that was still hours away.
Now and then Isaac came by to comfort her, especially after sundown when he could decide what he wanted to do on his own.
“What he do to you, Liza? What he do?”
His questions became more than insistent, they reverberated in her mind and made her already wandering imaginings worse than confused.
Isaac meanwhile swung pendulum-like between resignation and rage. And on one particular visit not long after the awful event, he swung further than ever before.
“I kill him,” he said, raising his arms as if grasping a declaration of his deed to come.
And Liza held him in her arms and said she did not want that.
“He is my father,” she said.
“I will cut him,” Isaac said. “I will drag him behind my horse.”
“He is my father. What do we do? What do I do? What do you do? I don’t know what to do!”
Isaac suddenly shoved her aside.
“I will kill him!” he shouted, standing tall in his rage.
“And they will tear you apart,” Liza said.
“Ah, ah, ah, ah!”
The boy charged the wall of the cabin and began banging his head against it.
“Stop!” Liza shouted at him. “Stop now!”
Isaac pulled away from the wall for a moment, blood having sprung from his skull.
“The man owns me, I am his creature, I am his animal! They owned my mama, they owned my papa!”
With a dramatic flourish, he turned back to the wall and resumed banging his skull against it, until exhausted and bloody about the face and neck he stumbled backward and then, regaining his balance, rushed out the door.
“Isaac!”
Liza followed him, terrified that he would race up to the big house and commit mayhem on her father. But he ran directly toward the rice ponds and from there, as far as she could see in the early morning light, into the woods beyond.
Slowly she returned in the direction of the cabins, but when she had almost reached her own, where she and dear Old Dou—long gone, gone now!—had lived through her childhood, she stopped, and here, one might say, at this point, where she felt helpless, hopeless, and on the verge of the sort of illness that had driven Isaac to such useless rage, the goddess touched her gently on the shoulder, and gave her a gentle push in the