Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [172]
I listened and listened to her catalog of doom, while my heart leaped out into the terrible forever, sick with regret because Liza was on the run without me. It made me even more sick than I was to think of that, but then how if she had not left me behind could she run far enough and fast enough to escape the patrols?
“Precious Sally,” I said, upright again and holding steadier than a moment before, “has my cousin read his father’s will?”
“The what, suh?” she said.
The what, I said to myself, the what, indeed!
“I am going to try and evict myself from this bed,” I said. “Precious Sally, can you meanwhile go down to the barns and see if Isaac has returned?”
“Yes, massa Nate,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said, and lay back, listening to her feet, the sound of her walking along the hall, then descending the stairs. How was it that I had found myself back here again after all our plans for running? Oh, yes, I arrived on the horse, tied there no doubt by young Charles from New Jersey. But where had he gone? Was he off and running again? Some moments passed—or was it minutes? Certainly not an hour went by while I lay there, my mind hoping all the best for the young boy and my soul hoping to rush along at the speed of a horse to catch Liza so that I might run with her even further. My legs, however, would not move.
I lay there in that bed, even more helpless than before, despising myself for collapsing under the weight of the illness—that Visitor, as the slaves called it—unable to help Liza. I must have dreamed, because I recall a fleeting image of Liza, and of that same female creature, brown-skinned, with bountiful breasts, whom I had seen rising out of the swamp.
***
A commotion arose outside my window, horses whinnied, and wheels spat up stones along the drive. A strong odor of smoke and burning drifted in the window and into, as I imagined, all the halls and rooms of the house.
“Precious Sally?”
I cried out, finding the strength in my belly if not in my lungs.
Shouts down below. Heavy footsteps in the hall. Suddenly as though from a blast of wind in a sudden storm, the door burst open and in came my cousin Jonathan in torn coat and filthy trousers, swept along by the odor of smoke and burning.
“Well, hello, Cousin. I hear you are not feeling so well. While you were ailing things have moved along. I have been led off on a wild goose chase and that bitch is on the run! And there is this!” he said, holding up a sheaf of smoldering paper.
“What are you doing?” I said to him in challenge.
“What am I doing?” He waved the paper in front of me, bringing it almost within my reach, and so I could smell the stink of the whiskey upon him even stronger than the odor of the fire. “I am making the future. I will not be bound by the past. My late father, now, turns out to have been a man quite haunted by the days gone by, the days when he was a thin gentleman with a thick lust for love among the cabins.” He barked out a monstrous laugh. “Like father, like son, do we say? Except that the son did not know this important fact about the father! The son believed that he was the sole heir of this already God-forsaken enterprise! But the father, the father was skulking about the cabins, making other heirs!”
Again, he waved the paper in front of me, as though he were an attorney arguing a case of law and I was the jury.
I felt all of a sudden absolutely ice-cold lucid and hauled myself upright on the bed.
“And you? You hypocrite! You dare to judge him?”
Jonathan laughed a wild and reckless caw-caw-cawing of a laugh.
“Who will judge him if not me? Cousin, are you Jews in New York mere pale imitations of the Gentiles? Do you sit around and say to yourselves, ‘Well, sirs, man cannot judge. Only God can judge?’ Here, in this deep place of rice and water, of ocean and woods, oh, yes, here, we make our own judgments about ourselves