The Known World - Edward P. Jones [104]
Now, as the fire from the wagon died out, Travis turned around and wiped both hands on his pants and took up the reins. He had taught the horse to bob his head once at the words “Good morning.” “Good mornin,” he said to the horse and he bobbed once. The horse had also been taught to bob twice at “Good afternoon,” and with “Good evening” or “Good night,” it would bob three times. Travis said “Good mornin” again but felt the need for far more and he continued saying it and the horse continued bobbing his head. Then, as if “Good mornin” was not enough, he went through again and again all the greetings of a day and a night and the horse kept bobbing until, at last, the animal, exhausted, confused, lowered its head and did not respond anymore. Travis stood for a long while and rubbed the horse’s forehead. He had, as well, taught the horse to take him home. It helped when the road was a straight one, straight as the crows flew. Otherwise, the horse sometimes went down a road that was not toward home. Travis mounted. “Take me home,” he told the horse, who had just been through one of the longest days of his life. The horse took him home.
7
Job. Mongrels. Parting Shots.
Somewhere between the town of Tunck near the Waal River, the Netherlands, and Johnston County, North Carolina—where Counsel Skiffington, cousin to Sheriff John Skiffington, and his people had done well for three generations—Saskia Wilhelm, a newlywed, contracted smallpox, though she was never to be ill from it a day in her life. Married three months, she and her husband, Thorbecke, who also contracted the disease, took two months to get across Europe to England. Thorbecke was not a good man, would not make a good husband and father, something Saskia’s father told her for the eleventh time a month before she ran away with Thorbecke. The love she had for Thorbecke, however; was a fevered one. Her mother told her it would burn itself out if she gave it time, but Saskia disappeared with Thorbecke and the love only grew. After what happened to her with him, in Europe, in America, she would never love another human being in the same way.
The young man knew that along the Waal River he had a reputation worth nothing and during the trip across Europe he vowed, not to Saskia but to himself, that he would do better and one day return to Tunck and all the other towns along the Waal and have everyone say to his face how wrong they had been about him. He vowed this in France, but was sent away because of various misdeeds, and he vowed it in England, but was sent away from there as well. His punishment would not be prison, the English decided, but the pain of never being able to enjoy England again. Thorbecke made the vow again on the ship to New York, where he and Saskia settled more than five years before Henry Townsend died. Thorbecke would live to be seventy-three, but he never returned to the Waal, and neither did Saskia, who lived to be seventy-one. They died in places four thousand miles apart. She had no children when she died. Nothing had ever come along to tell her, as her mother and father might have told her, that there was a love beyond Thorbecke.
Saskia had a sense of her mistake midway on the journey to America. She could have returned to her people in Tunck, but she still felt for him and thought all along the way that she would never be forgiven, might even be told just to return to her husband. At first, Thorbecke worked as a fisherman along the Hudson River, but the captain and his crew got the notion that Thorbecke was bad luck and he was sent on his way. He went to peddling in New York City after that, clothes, trinkets, fruits and vegetables. He failed again, as he had a viperous temper and drove away customers. Soon he began to live on just what Saskia was making as a maid with the wealthy in the city. One of those families was the one in the photograph that Calvin Newman owned. The frozen dog in the picture was named Otto, after Saskia’s own dog back in Tunck.
She did not make much as a maid. Room and board were part