Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [36]
“Amen,” said my cousin as he climbed back up onto the bench. “Are you having a fine old theological discussion?”
“In part, yes,” I said, allowing myself a smile.
“Father’s always good for that around the dinner table,” he said. “A place I expect where you hope soon to sit.”
And with that he gave the whip a twist and we began moving again, taking the narrow road along the river for a short while and turning onto a path that took us back into the trees.
It was dark when we reached the house, though because of the wonderful array of lamps that illuminated it from within it seemed like something out of a dream, a construction of slender pillars and balconies with a wide porch running around like a girdle, the entire structure raised up on wide brick posts and a set of broad stairs leading up to the main floor—the entire building at first glimpse seemed almost like a confection for a party table. Jonathan handed over the carriage to the same tan-complected young man who had driven us back from town while Rebecca and I climbed the steps to the entrance. The same slave girl met us at the door, and it gave me a tiny jolt, as if lightning had struck my chest, to see her again, especially when for an instant she fixed her eyes, a pale green shade, firmly on me—the stranger—and then looked past me at Rebecca.
“Missy,” she said.
Jonathan came bounding up the steps, ignoring the girl.
“Come in, come along,” he said, “the parents are waiting.”
“Hello! Shalom!” came a hearty shout from the dining room and we walked in to find my uncle and aunt sitting already at the table.
“Where have you been?” said my uncle, whom I knew immediately by the set of his eyes and jaw, though his resemblance to my father ended there because of the rolls of fat in which these familiar features were embedded. “We thought the patrollers had gotten you.”
“Please, dear, don’t you joke about such things,” said the gray-haired woman—my aunt, I had already decided—whose size, or lack of it, was all the more noticeable because of my uncle’s girth.
“We gave our honored cousin a tour,” Jonathan said. “Through the woods to the brickyard and the creek.”
“It is a goodly property,” my uncle said. He patted his belly. “Like me, I’d say.”
The others laughed, and I gave up a smile. My father, a rather goodly shaped man himself, had warned me about his brother’s weight. But still when my uncle stood to introduce me all around I found that I could not keep my eyes off the globe of his belly.
“Goodly, sir,” I said. “I especially enjoyed the woods and the creek-side.”
“I told him how I used to fish there as a boy,” Jonathan said.
“Yes, you grew up in Paradise, did you not?” his father said. “But now.” He touched a hand to the shoulder of the gray-haired woman. “Your Aunt Florence.”
I bowed toward her and she bestowed a toothy smile upon me.
We took our places around the table.
At this point a tall young boy trundled into the room, looking partly like a youthful Jonathan and partly not.
“My son, your second cousin Abraham,” Jonathan said.
I nodded to the fidgety boy, who was as it turned out the only child of a first marriage made by my cousin Jonathan to a Jewish woman who had returned to the Antilles years ago. The boy’s eyes darted left to right, right to left, as though he expected at any moment to be overtaken by some adversary.
“You’re a Yankee,” he said.
“A Yankee Doodle Dandy,” I said.
“You don’t look different from the rest of us.”
“Did you expect me to have horns?”
“Michelangelo’s statue of Moses has horns,” the boy said.
“You have seen it?”
“I have seen drawings only. Papa says though he will send me to Europe for my tour when I’m older and I will see the original.”
“My father is sending me also,” I said. “Perhaps we could travel together.”
“You are too old,” the boy said.
“Abraham,” his stepmother said, “mind your manners. Please excuse him, Nathaniel. He