The Known World - Edward P. Jones [105]
It was there that Manfred Carlyle fell in love with her. By the time they met, a little less than three years before Henry died, love was not something Saskia cared about. She welcomed him each time he came, told him all that he wanted to hear, and though he forgot during the course of it that he was paying for the words, she did not. He came to her often, forever desperate to be near her. “I made the trip here in less time than I thought I would,” he said once, his face sweaty and red from the ride. “Then I will prepare your reward,” Saskia said.
Carlyle was twenty years her senior, and he was one of Counsel Skiffington’s creditors. John Skiffington’s cousin allowed Carlyle to “air out” at his plantation from all the whiskey and sex at the brothel. Counsel had always been pleased to accommodate a man he owed money to and he told his overseer, Cameron Darr, to stay by Carlyle and make him happy. In a little cottage at the northeast corner of Counsel’s plantation, Carlyle would air out, sleeping for some fourteen hours a day. On what would be his last visit, Darr made him happy by drinking with him. After the three days of airing out, Carlyle went the twenty miles to his own place, to his family who were gray things after his colorful time with Saskia. Like Thorbecke and Saskia, Carlyle, too, would not suffer a day from smallpox, and his family and his slaves were spared as well. On that last trip from Counsel’s plantation, someone stole his horse while he peed down at a riverbank. “That shoulda told me somethin,” he told a friend months later, back at the brothel.
Counsel Skiffington had suffered through three years of failed crops and then, in the fourth year, the year Saskia arrived in Johnston County, he began to prosper again. He considered it a good year if each slave produced $250 worth of crops but for those three terrible years, he got only $65 from each slave. The times had been so hard that the house servants, people with flawless skin and hands that had not known any blisters that mattered, were sent into the fields to work with the hope that more hands could wring more from the land. Carlyle was one of four creditors, only one of them a bank, and the creditors were kind to him during those years, though the bank sent a man out every other month to check on the health of the plantation. In that fourth year, the year of recovery, the profit from each slave was $300, and the bank man stopped coming. Counsel was on his way to an even better fifth year when, in the middle of a quiet night, Darr the overseer woke with a cough so loud that it woke Counsel’s wife, Belle, in their mansion a quarter of a mile away. Her husband slept on, being the kind of man—as Belle noted once in a letter to her cousin-in-law Winifred Skiffington—who could sleep through Jesus knocking on the door. Darr’s coughing woke the four Skiffington children, too, but Belle and two of the children’s slaves managed to get them back to sleep. She told the servants to return to bed and she did the same, but found sleep elusive even after the overseer’s coughing abated about an hour later.
There was no more coughing from Darr after that first night, but one slave after another began to fall ill with headaches, chills, nausea and an overwhelming pain in their backs and limbs. “They are not pretendin,” the overseer told Counsel. “I would know pretendin and this ain’t it.” Darr, a man with five children, had very little beyond the life he had on the plantation, and he had so liked hearing Carlyle talk of all the places he had been and all the women who gave him heaven and how he settled at last on Saskia. Darr was not a drinking