The Known World - Edward P. Jones [124]
“I know your boy Jamie is a large size, do you think he could be the culprit?” She gave a laugh to ease him in case he was hurt by her accusation.
“My boy? Jamie? Thievin? Well, he likes to eat and I can’t say he don’t, but he know I’d skin him alive if I caught him touchin what ain’t hisn.” With each word he had been taking his eyes from the spot at the center of the settee and moving toward her. He remembered the first time he saw her—a woman too thin to make any man a good wife.
“I see. It might be a good idea to increase the portion of molasses to a pint and a half,” she said.
“Yessum, I’ll start it this Saturday.”
“Good. I’ll see you tomorrow.” She opened her eyes and raised up.
Moses stood and said, “Good night, Missus.”
He washed before he came the next evening, stood at the well and poured water over himself and scrubbed with his hands as Priscilla his wife watched, laughed. “Just gonna get all that dirt all over you again tomorrow.”
“You just hush up,” Moses said. He dried himself with the shirt he had worn into the field and put it back on.
“Can’t go up to the house and let Loretta see how you been slavin in that field all day.” Because Moses was not a good husband to her or much of a father to their child, Priscilla thought it not at all impossible that Loretta might be why he was going to the house so much. He was an overseer, after all, and though he was a field hand, he was a man of some power and any woman, even a woman of the house, might find it tempting to sway her hips in his direction. “No, we can’t let Loretta see what we really is, day in, day out. Gotta clean some a that stink off first.”
He slapped her. It was not a hard hit but she went to her knees nevertheless because the slap came with years of abuse and rejection. “Why you gotta treat me this way, Moses? Why you can’t do right by me?”
“I do all the right I can do,” he said.
Tessie, Celeste and Elias’s girl, came by, leading Alice down to her cabin. “Little Marse be slappin. Little Marse be slappin. Little Marse got the slappin disease,” Alice chanted.
“Why you cryin?” Tessie said.
“You just get on,” Moses said to them. And to Priscilla, “You get on to that cabin.”
She picked herself up and went down to the cabin. There were no secrets among the cabins and, much later, when the sheriff came to inquire about the disappearances, he would hear of how Moses would beat Priscilla. “We could all hear it,” the children told Skiffington, though the adults said little to the white man. “It wasn’t every night, but it was near bout every night. He would hit her and the walls they be shakin. Like this—boom boom boom.” Priscilla reached her cabin and touched the door lightly and it opened to her, and the hearth fire her son had made for them lit her up and she went in and closed the door behind her. “And did he ever hurt that boy of his?” Skiffington would ask the children later. “Did he ever do harm to that Alice?” “He did it to everybody,” Tessie would say, a statement confirmed by every child who could talk.
“Moses,” Caldonia said after he had told her about the day, “how long did it take you and Henry to build this house?”
“How long, Missus?”
“Yes, how long? Weeks? Months?”
“I’d say maybe four months, every day workin. Yessum, many’s the day we’d be workin away and he’d say, ‘Moses, you think Miss Caldonia gon like this here room? You think her heart will be happy when she gets a look at this?’ And I’d say, ‘Yes, Marse Henry, she gon like this.’ ” Her head was leaning back again and if she remembered that the house had been completed long before Henry met her, she said nothing. “I see,” she said after a time.
“Now I wants to say that there were some rooms that he wouldn’t let me work on with him. There were rooms that he wanted to do all by hisself.”
“Rooms?”
“This room, Missus. The parlor. He knowed there’d be days and days he’d want to be here alone with you, and I don’t guess he wanted me to have a hand in it. And . . . and the sleepin room upstairs. He wanted that one to hisself.