The Known World - Edward P. Jones [132]
“John,” Counsel Skiffington said.
Skiffington stopped with one foot on the steps and the other still in the street. He studied the man for more than a minute and when the man said his name again, Skiffington said, “Counsel, that you?” He smiled and extended his hand. He had heard thirdhand that Counsel had fallen into the blaze he created at A Child’s Dream in North Carolina just after he had shot himself in the head. The bank Counsel owed had actually started that story in its attempt to provide some conclusion to the whole Counsel Skiffington affair. Among dozens of burnt bodies, who would know that one wasn’t the master of the plantation?
“It’s me,” Counsel said. “It’s me and I think I can say that and mean it.” They went on shaking hands and would have embraced but the cousins had never had that kind of love. Counsel had arrived late in the night with a man who had picked him up in Roanoke. The man was leading two wagonloads of goods—from cloth to bullets to books—to northern Virginia. Counsel had intended to accept free passage all the way to the man’s destination, but the God he found in Texas told him he might as well stop and see what might happen with John Skiffington.
“Counsel, I took you for dead,” Skiffington said. “Winifred and I took you and everybody for dead, that’s what we heard.”
“Everybody is, John. I suppose I was, too. But now I’m standing here and telling you I’m not.”
“Let me take you home to Winifred, get you cleaned up.”
“I don’t think I’m fit to meet any womenkind,” Counsel said. “Especially not one I’m related to.”
“Mrs. Skiffington wouldn’t mind.”
“I would, John. I would,” and Counsel remembered that the world had always called his wife Mrs. Skiffington. “I would mind. Maybe if you could spare me something so I could put up at the boardinghouse, I might be presentable in a day or two. A bath, some meals, and I’ll be a man ready for civilized society again.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you, but if the boardinghouse is what you want, then that is what I’ll give you.” They went two streets over and Skiffington paid for three nights at the boardinghouse.
He came by about noon and he and Counsel took dinner in the house’s small dining room. Counsel had bathed and shaved, and as he ate, the man John Skiffington loved but had had so much trouble with began to emerge. During the meal, Counsel said that he had been practically everywhere and now he did not know what to do with himself. By the end of the meal, Skiffington was asking Counsel if he wanted to be his deputy.
“You always struck me as a man who wanted the job all to himself,” Counsel said, drinking coffee. “Or that’s what I got from Belle reading Winifred’s letters to me. John Skiffington could do everything alone.”
“There gets to be more to be done. It wouldn’t hurt to have someone standing sharp at my back. Family is good for that. Good for backing you up.”
“I’ll do whatever I can.”
Counsel came to live in Skiffington’s house, shared a room and bed with Carl Skiffington, John’s father. Though he said nothing to anyone, Counsel thought himself entitled to the room that had always been Minerva’s. He did not understand why a slave girl should be put above him. A slave he himself had once owned. He suspected that there was more between her and Skiffington and that her own room was just one thing the girl had managed to wheedle out of his cousin. He had seen other white men fall prey, so why not a man who claimed so much to walk with God? After his first month’s pay, Counsel moved back to the boardinghouse, and the woman that owned the place