Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [173]
I swung my feet around and steadied them on the floor next to the bed.
“At least do you who call yourselves Jews,” I said, amazed that I could find my balance. “Slaveholders that you are, you are much more like Pharaohs!”
“Ah, and you, pure heart, have not dabbled with a slave? Not you, no. Who is the hypocrite here? Who wanted to make a purchase of a certain young female!”
“Do not speak of her as though she were an animal, Cousin.”
“You used her as such, did you not?”
I took a step toward him, intending to slap his face, but my knees buckled and I fell back toward the bed.
“You have used her in much worse fashion.”
Ignoring my accusation, he countered with another. “She is a murderer, you know. I have seen the evidence.”
“It was my pistol,” I said.
“Are you saying that you shot Langerhans? I never would have thought you had it in you, Cousin.”
“You have done so much worse,” I said.
“Have I?”
“Bastard!” I reached for him and my breath came up short and the room began to spin.
I tried to regain my balance even as my cousin went about the business of completing the burning of the will.
“I will not let you get away with this,” I said, “I know what that paper contains.”
“Oh, and will you take me to court? On whose behalf?”
“On Isaac’s,” I said. “On the part of your half-brother.”
He opened his hand and the remaining shreds of charred paper drifted to the floor.
“Half no more,” he said.
“What do you say?”
“A sad and unfortunate accident,” he said.
Now I pushed myself from the bed again and stumbled toward him, fists raised.
Deftly, he stepped aside and I went stumbling to the door, where I held myself in tenuous balance.
“What do you say?” I repeated hoarsely, turning myself around.
“Do you want to know the truth, Cousin?”
“Tell me what you did,” I said.
“What I did?”
“Tell me what happened.”
I could scarcely catch a breath, but I hovered there at the doorway, waiting for him to speak while the stink of smoke drifted in through the windows and, in fainter fashion, crept up the stairwell and sneaked into the hall, that insidious odor of the worst things to come.
Chapter Eighty-two
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Fire
Jonathan had known something had gone wrong that night almost immediately after he saw his son Abraham come trundling down the stairs.
“Papa, they are running,” the boy said. “I saw them.”
The boy’s words startled him.
“They are upstairs,” he said.
“I saw them go down the back stairs, sir,” the boy said, a wide smile on his face, this lad who sought approbation from his otherwise-distant father.
“They are in distress,” Jonathan said. “We are all in distress. Come, Abe, let us visit your grandfather together and make our farewells.” At which he led the boy back up to the second floor and the room of his recently deceased father.
Which, except for the corpse, they found empty.
“I told you,” Abe said, “They are running.”
“So be it,” Jonathan said. “The patrollers are riding tonight, as always. They will not get very far.” He kneeled a while at his father’s bedside, and his son followed his lead, dropping to his knees and folding his hands, but, like his father, at a discreet distance from the body and the sheets.
One can only make a wild surmise about what went through the boy’s mind. His childhood lessons from the Bible taught to him by his grandfather spoke of freedom and yet he was surrounded all his young life by slaves. He read little, played games with stones and small knives, loved his horses, and in town he spent time with distant cousins who disdained the slave-holding of his family even as they invited them here and there, dinner to tea to musical nights at the synagogue. Abe—he knew nothing, he was a noisome child and a little citizen to be admired. Given the chance he would have ridden with the patrollers, enjoying the glamor of it all, chasing, catching slaves.
Jonathan had quite a lot on his own mind, almost all of it pertaining to the inheritance. The land, now his, the house, now his, the income, now his, all the slaves now his,