The Known World - Edward P. Jones [149]
He put his arm around her but she said she was tired, and when he did not withdraw, she pulled away. They sat for several more minutes before she said again she was tired and needed Loretta and he got up and left.
She went to bed soon after, but could not sleep and got up around two and stood at the window and imagined the three of them coming up the walk, exhausted and glad to be home. What would Henry say of the mess that had come to this place? If three more left tomorrow and then three more and then three more, there would be no one before long but her and Zeddie and Bennett and Loretta. Would Moses be there? Would he go, too? She found solace in the way Skiffington had arrived so promptly. He took what was happening seriously and there was hope in that. She was tempted to go out to Henry’s grave but did not want to go stumbling in the dark out to the cemetery. Waking everyone on such a personal mission.
There was a gentle knock at the door and a momentary fear seized her that it might be Moses. The door opened and Loretta stood with a candle. “I knowed you would be up and not sleepin,” Loretta said. Would Loretta ever leave her? Which group of three would she be among? Henry had paid $450 for her, the big book had told her that morning. “I can feel when the house ain’t settin right.”
“Even if I can’t sleep, you should be,” Caldonia said.
“You want me to bring you somethin?” Loretta did not know all that went on behind the closed parlor door, but she knew that it was probably not good for either the woman or the man.
“Please find something for me in that satchel of yours, Loretta.”
Within five minutes Loretta returned with a drink and Caldonia drank all of it. She got into bed. Loretta sat on the side of the bed. They did not speak. The man Loretta would eventually marry would want to know why she didn’t take his last name, why she wanted no last name at all. “Is that what marryin you gon be?” she asked him. “Question after question every day for the rest of my life? Huh? Is that it?” The man she would marry was a free man who had spent much of his life on the sea. He had been talking to a man one extraordinarily calm day on the sea, and over that man’s shoulder he had seen two other conversing sailors simply disappear, become nothing in only the time it took to end one sentence to the man and begin another. The sailors were not in the sea and they were nowhere on the ship. “No,” the man would say to Loretta, “I won’t ask you no more questions.”
“I worry,” Caldonia said, the drink making its way through her system.
“Shouldn’t worry,” Loretta said. The captain and the sailors on the ship came to attribute the disappearances to one more mystery in their sea lives. The man Loretta would marry did not have very much heart for the sea after that. When his new bride asked him not to ask her so many questions, it was an easy thing to do.
Caldonia covered her mouth as she yawned. Loretta got up and straightened the covers and took up the candle and before she was out the door Caldonia was sleeping.
The next day Moses worked everyone, even the children, until well after dark. Delphie called out at last that they were all hungry and very tired and Moses should mind what he was doing. “We can’t even see what we be doin,” she said. “All this work just goin to waste cause we gon have to do it right tomorrow.”
Moses relented. He stood in the middle of the field and watched them trudge away. He had the reins of a mule and the mule, seeing everyone else leave, started following them. Absently, Moses went with the mule. He had heard someone say after dinner that day that his family had hated him so much that they would rather be whipped and killed by the patrollers than suffer under him. Just yall wait, he had thought, just yall wait till this whole mess is done.
He put the mule up and went to the house, still in the clothes and the