The Known World - Edward P. Jones [141]
Bennett took care of Skiffington’s horse and Zeddie led him into the parlor where Caldonia stood when he entered the room. He took off his hat and said, as he had at the funeral, that he was sorry about her husband.
“I don’t know where they could have gotten to,” Caldonia said. No one sat.
“I understand the Alice one wasn’t comfortable in her own head.”
“No, and Priscilla would no more leave this plantation than I would, sheriff.”
“How much were they worth?”
“Pardon?”
“How much were the three slaves worth? How much would you get if you were to sell them? On the market.”
“Oh, I don’t know. My husband would have known just like that, but I can’t say I kept up with such matters. I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter very much. How long that overseer and her been married?”
“I’d say about ten years,” Caldonia said. It was the first time she had fully realized that she had been making love to another woman’s husband. Priscilla had always been there and yet she had been on the other side of the earth, married to a different man.
“Ten years is a long time,” Skiffington said. Caldonia said nothing but looked slightly puzzled. When he asked about Moses, she offered to have him brought to the house but he told her he would go out to meet him.
Heading to the fields, he remembered the slave man and woman in his office, the man being sold that day to William Robbins and the woman being sold days later to someone else. We are together, the slave man kept saying. We are one. . . . He came to a small rise that led down to the fields and could not make out the overseer because he was not on a horse looking down, but was just one among the working slaves. He went down the rise and called out that he wanted to see Moses. Moses rose up from the furrow and made his way to Skiffington.
Moses took off his hat and said good morning to Skiffington and the sheriff said good morning.
“You know where they might be?”
“No, sir. I woke yesterday and they was gone, all three just gone.”
“Were they there when you went to sleep?” More and more of the day Moses was sold in the jail was coming back to Skiffington.
“Yes, sir. But that Alice tend to wander, bein not in one piece the way she was. No harm by that. No harm by all that walkin about and such like. And sometimes my Priscilla and Jamie would just go to keep her company. They thought the world of Alice.” Elias would put a lie to most of that on Skiffington’s second visit. Moses continued building a story that Elias and others would tear down with just a few questions from Skiffington.
Finally, Skiffington told him to go on back to work and Moses set his hat on his head and returned. Skiffington would not remember in a few days who told him that Moses and his mistress had supper—“just like some man and his wife be eatin”—just before the slaves disappeared. He would remember that no one would ever report seeing buzzards in the sky to evidence killing by wolves or bears. He became convinced that the three were dead and that someone had had to put the dead in the ground to deprive the buzzards. He watched Moses, who overcame the need to turn and look back at the sheriff, and Skiffington knew any slave would want to leave the field and never return. It was in watching Moses walk away that he began to suspect him of murder. He could not understand why until he heard he had had supper with Caldonia. But why kill when all that was required was for him to step out of the cabin door, wipe his hands clean of a wife and child, and step through the house door? And why hurt a child and a woman not of her own mind?
He watched as Moses went back to the row he had been in and picked up his bag and became one with all around him, the land and its bounty and the slaves leaning over and picking and stepping. The crows hovered above them. Skiffington could see that the birds were high enough to avoid a hand but not high enough to escape a