The Known World - Edward P. Jones [117]
“Are you looking for me, Mr. Dickinson?” Fern said.
“I am, ma’am, and yet I ain’t.”
“I am tired, Mr. Dickinson, riddles are not what I want this time of the day.”
“Your husband be owin me $500, and all I want is for him to pay so I can get where I need to be goin.” Ramsey Elston, her husband, had left home the day before, the need to gamble having finally claimed him after so many weeks.
“I assume you have been up to the house and that Mr. Elston is not there. Beyond that, I cannot help you. Pass on,” Fern said to Zeus, and he raised the reins but when the man began to speak, he dropped them again.
“A man would think that the debt of one be the debt of the other when two people are one and the same as man and wife.” The man had not moved. He was more or less catty-corner to the road, though not in any threatening way, and Zeus could have gone through if his mistress had ordered it so. Jebediah’s horse seemed the nervous sort, head forever up and down and tail wagging for all it was worth. The tail had been shortened but only Zeus, who was not around horses very much, noticed that.
“Is that so?” Fern said. Jebediah got down off the horse and came around to her and the horse’s tail stopped wagging and, a few moments later, his head stopping bobbing. “You are quite mistaken, Mr. Dickinson. Whatever Mr. Elston does out in the world is his business. It has nothing to do with me, no more than what you do in the world is my business.” I have been a dutiful wife.
“All I’m sayin, ma’am—”
“I do not care about all that you are saying. His debts are his own. If you are a gambler, and I assume that you are, you would know that.” She wondered when Ramsey had started gambling with black people. She wondered if he still gambled with white people. “Pass on,” she said to Zeus.
He was still there the next day and all the days after that for nearly a week. She came and went—once to Caldonia’s—and he said nothing to her, just raised his hat at her going and raised it again at her coming back. In the night he was still out there, for she could make out a small fire. And there was movement, though that could just as easily have been a bear. The patrollers often came up to him and he pulled out his papers from inside his shirt and they would move on. Fern could see him from her window far up the path. She should not have been able to see him: she had wanted trees planted just before the entrance, trees that would now have been high enough to block him out. But Ramsey had always wanted the view unobstructed.
What he ate Fern did not know, and her slaves could not tell her. Seven days after he was there he knocked at her door. Zeus opened it and told Jebediah his mistress didn’t like folks, slaves and Negro strangers like him, knocking at her front door. “Thas what they made the back door for,” Zeus said. “Then what they make the front door for?” Jebediah asked. Zeus closed the door, gently, as if he didn’t really want to make a fuss. In less than two minutes Fern came to the door, and Zeus, unsmiling, was behind her.
“Miss Elston, my horse be dyin on me, and I don’t own a gun, so I can’t put him outa his misery,” Jebediah said. His hat was in front of his chest and he was holding it with both hands. “If I was strong anough, I could wring her neck, but that would take time and she would suffer and so would I. I have a knife, but thas about the same amount of sufferin for us both.”
“Zeus,” Fern said, “please ask Colley to come here. Tell Colley to bring the rifle and a pistol.” When she married the second and third times, Zeus would be with her. Indeed, as she talked to Anderson Frazier that day in 1881, he was inside the house, occasionally looking through the curtains at the backs of their heads. He brought out lemonade to Anderson after Fern offered him some.
“Yessum,” Zeus said.
“Are you planning to make that place out there your home, Mr. Dickinson?” she asked as they waited.
“Your husband been owin me $500, thas all there is to it.”
She would have sighed but that was not in her nature. Sighing was an indication of surrender,