The Known World - Edward P. Jones [133]
Mildred Townsend came out to the road in the morning and the evening every day after they took Augustus and waited for nearly a half hour. She knew that Augustus sometimes took on unexpected jobs when he was away from home and forgot to send word back to her that he would be home before long. At the end of each half hour she would raise her arms up high, her fingers extended, and she would feel Augustus’s spirit flow into the tips of her fingers and she would know that he was on his way. She did not worry the first week or for most of the second week. “I’ll give that man pure hell when he do show up,” she said to their dog, who came out to the road with her and waited beside her the whole time. “And you help me, huh? You help me give him pure hell.” She and Augustus had been married for more than thirty-five years, and she trusted him to be somewhere safe. She knew that with their only child gone, her husband would not do anything to put more suffering in her heart. It would be toward the end of that second week that she would go to Caldonia and they, with Fern Elston the teacher, would go to Skiffington, who would be away. But Counsel, his new deputy, would be there in the jail.
About a week after South Carolina, outside of McRae, Georgia, they camped and after Stennis had crushed up some food for Darcy, who had but two teeth in his head, Stennis fed Augustus and settled him down at an apple tree.
Augustus said to Stennis before he went to Darcy, “I owe you the same licks that you gave me back in Virginia. I want you to know I be owin you good.”
“I spect everything cost somethin, even some licks from way back in Virginia.”
“And when I come for you, you gon know it,” Augustus said.
“I done figured that in the cost of my business, too.”
“I wanna to go home,” Augustus said. “I wanna go home and I think you know the way to help me.”
“We all wanna go home.”
“I want to go home.”
Stennis noted that these were the first words Augustus had spoken since the deaf-mute stunt in South Carolina. “I see you back to talkin again.”
“I ain’t had nothin to say.”
Stennis checked the chains again. “You have a good night.”
“Let me just slip away,” Augustus said.
“He would know that I the one that opened the door for you.”
“Then come with me. We can go together. Us together.”
“That ain’t in my power.”
“I say it is.”
“It just ain’t. He be my bread and butter. Jam, too.”
“Back home,” Augustus said, “I be my own bread and butter.”
Stennis sighed. “I can see that.” He stood up. “I can see that with my own two eyes.”
Darcy shouted, “Stennis! Stennis! Where you at?”
“Over here, Marse.” Stennis began walking away.
“Just let me slip away.”
“Stennis!”
“Comin, Marse!”
“Well, come on then. Come here and rub my feet.”
The morning after Caldonia Townsend made love to Moses her overseer for the first time, she woke about dawn and sat up in her bed and watched the sun come up. She had thought she would not sleep very well, but the night had been kind and she slept many hours without disturbance once sleep did arrive. She had had a dream just before waking of being in a house smaller than her own, a house she had to share with a thousand others. As she sat watching the sun she tried to remember more about the dream. Nothing came to her except the memory of someone in the dream saying that people in the attic were burning other people. The house Henry had built had no attic. She always slept with the curtains open, something Henry had gotten used to. Who else in this world could accept sleeping with the curtains open? she thought and raised her knees to her chin. She felt no guilt about Moses, which surprised her. Someone down in the fields, a woman, was singing. She soon realized that the woman was Celeste. It was not a sad song Celeste was singing and it was not a happy song, just melodious words to fill the silence that would otherwise be claimed by the songs of the birds. The room had been dark when she first