The Known World - Edward P. Jones [115]
He holstered his gun and all the thundering stopped for the first time since the entrance to the forest. A few flies appeared immediately above the horse. “What is it that you want of me?” Counsel asked God. He sat down, less than four feet from the horse, and more flies, bigger than any he had known in North Carolina, came to the horse in a black cloud. He took off his hat and tried to wave them away, but more came as if the waving had been a signal for them to come. “What do you want me to do?” he asked God. “Tell me what it is.” He looked up and was surprised that the buzzards were circling so soon. He shot at one but missed and no sooner had the sound of the shot gone away than the buzzards began to land. Maybe it was not Texas where he should be; maybe it was still full of niggers and people no one could identify because they weren’t in books, and still full of white women gone bad and white men letting them go bad. “You tell me what to do and I will do it,” he said to God. “Isn’t that how it has always worked? You say, I do. You say and I do.” He thought of the men in the large family Bible in the destroyed library who talked the way he was talking now. Sometimes God heard and acted, took pity on his creations, and sometimes he heard and ignored the creations talking to him. His daughters had liked the stories in the Bible, the Bible with their names and the days of their births written large and in ink the general store man had said would last for generations. “First,” the man said, “the ink will note your children’s birthdays, and then it will note their marriage days. The ink will outlast you, Mr. Skiffington.” Counsel went on talking to God, and the buzzards came down and joined the flies, all of them feasting on the horse and ignoring the man who still had some life in him.
8
Namesakes. Scheherazade. Waiting for the End of the World.
From the day Fern Elston arrived when Henry Townsend died to the day she closed down her extended stay with Caldonia was a little more than five weeks, though she had returned home for periods of no more than a day or two. She lived some eight miles from Caldonia. Fern, like Maude, Caldonia’s mother, and her brother Calvin, thought she could be of greater comfort and use to Caldonia if she were with her under the same roof, day by day. Fern knew how death and the mourning that followed could set a life adrift and how important it was for family and friends to guide a soul back to shore, back home. At the beginning of the fourth week, Fern could see that Caldonia had stood up in her boat, had placed her hand on the captain’s shoulder to steady him and reassure all on board and was making up her mind about where it would be best to come ashore. “She had come from good people so I never feared for her,” Fern told Frazier Anderson, the Canadian pamphlet writer that August day in 1881. “And you had been her teacher,” Anderson added. She responded, ignoring the compliment, “I have been given credit when I should not have. And there have been times when I was denied the credit due me. But that is the fate of many a teacher, the good and the bad.”
Maude was the first to return home. She might have stayed on longer but she knew that all the talk of legacy would have hardened Caldonia against what she was saying. And Maude was anxious to get back to her lover, the one she had taken after her husband’s murder. That lover, Clarke, a slave, had been left in charge of her place, and she trusted him perhaps as much as she trusted her own children. Clarke had taught himself to read and write, and Maude’s trust flowed from the fact that he had, only weeks before the death of her husband, Tilmon Newman, come and told her what he was now able to do. She had not been left to find out on her own, to come upon him unexpectedly with his head in a book and Clarke hurriedly trying to explain it away by turning the book upside down and pretending he did not really know what he was doing. That had happened to a white couple, acquaintances of Maude’s in Amelia County. It