The Known World - Edward P. Jones [140]
In the woods, Priscilla began crying. “Moses, why can’t you come now? Please, Moses, please.”
Alice stepped up to her and slapped Priscilla twice. Moses said nothing and Jamie said nothing. Who was this new woman, who was this Alice acting like this in the night? She said, “You just stop all that cryin right now. I won’t have it. Not one tear ever watered my thirst, and it won’t water yours neither. So stop it all right now.”
“It ain’t so bad, Mama,” Jamie said. “We can make it. See.” And the boy ran off for several yards and returned, then ran back and returned again. He stood running in place. “We can make it, Mama.”
“Heed that boy,” Alice said to Priscilla. “You better heed that boy. Moses, you hold off tellin long as you can.” In the dark of the woods, they could not see faces straight on, so the only way anyone could see a person was to stare at something just to the side. Only then did a face come clear. Alice looked at the tree next to Moses. “If they say they see you on the other side, then they know better than I do.”
To look at Alice, he looked at his son beside her. “Then I’ll see yall.”
“Bye, Pa.”
“Moses,” Priscilla said, “don’t you forget me.”
Alice took Priscilla by the hand and the three disappeared into the woods, and no amount of looking left or right could give Moses a picture of them. He heard what he thought was them, but he had heard the same sounds when alone with himself in that other woods. When there was quiet, he began to wonder what would happen if they were caught. Moses helped us do it. . . . He looked behind him, and the sounds started up again. Moses, why would you do this when I trusted you? Why would you take our future and just throw it away? He clenched and unclenched his hands. He knew the way back home, but could he reach them way out there somewhere and still find his way back? Oh, Moses, why? We had this and that and this and that, so why, Moses? He followed them, walking at first, then running, one arm before him to keep the low-hanging branches from hitting him in the face.
He waited until just after the noon hour to report to the house. His heart had beat furiously all night and he had hoped for relief as the sun rose, but the heart refused. In the kitchen, he told Caldonia, as Loretta and Zeddie and Bennett looked on, that Priscilla and the boy had left sometime during the night while he was sleeping. He had gone to Alice’s cabin, he said, and found that she had not returned from her wandering.
Caldonia was not worried and told him the patrollers would come upon them and return them. “They had wandered off,” she said. Alice was just crazy enough to have gotten lost.
When there was no sign of them by nightfall, she told Bennett she wanted him to go to the sheriff the next day, Monday, and report the “disappearance” of three slaves. Escaping was in a very distant part of her mind, given the three people—and no man—involved, but perhaps some harm had come to them. Patrollers may have taken advantage of the women and killed them all to cover the crime. But why kill them if the crime was only rape? Raping a slave would not bring the law down on them. In many minds, raping a slave was not even a crime. Killing property was the greater crime. She wrote Bennett a pass, then she wrote a letter explaining to Sheriff Skiffington what she knew. She told Moses to keep an eye on everyone until the matter could be straightened out. At first she put some blame on him since his wife and child were two of the missing, but her disappointment did not last very long.
Bennett found Skiffington talking to Counsel in front of the jail, and the more Bennett added to what was in the letter, the more Skiffington suspected Moses of something. He didn’t know a great deal about the Townsend place and faulted himself as sheriff of the whole realm. He left Counsel and rode out with Bennett to the plantation. He had faith in his patrollers, that they would not let three pieces