The Known World - Edward P. Jones [150]
“Why do you work so hard when you are the one in charge?” she asked. She took the tray from his lap and set it on the tiny table beside his chair. She pulled the perfumed handkerchief from under her sleeve and dabbed at the corners of his mouth and he was uncomfortable with an act that was so far removed from sex, but when she was done and had folded the handkerchief and placed it atop the tray, he was sorry the act was over. “I know overseers who sit on their horses and look over everyone else.”
“Wouldn’t know how to do it any other way,” he said and realized very soon how inadequate was the answer. But his inability to explain was also endearing. Her talking brought more of the same discomfort, and he was afraid that in not knowing the right answer, he might somehow give a wrong answer. “I was sick on my back last year, and I musta hurt more from the not workin than the sick. My wife say it’s in the blood.” He did not pause at the mention of Priscilla, but it came back to her that the three were missing, and for the first time, with the words “my wife,” she had a momentary thought that he might be involved. He held his hands out before him as if they could do a better job of explaining than his words. She took his hands in hers and felt the hardness of aged leather. They were smaller than those of Henry, who used to massage his hands with horse liniment.
She patted his hands and put one on each of his knees. “I been workin since I was three years old, just draggin that cotton sack along,” he said, speaking in a way he had not spoken since the first days with Priscilla, “maybe even before that if I could member back that far,” and he looked down at his lap. “The body commences to turn to the work the way you bend a tree and make it grow whichever way you got a mind to. It don’t know no better. You know, Missus, there’s horses that you can work and work and they keep on workin till they drop dead. Your average mule won’t really do that, but your average horse will. The mule be smarter.” She was afraid that he would share more and she stood up and hoped that that would bring it to an end, but he went on to tell her that certain work songs made the work a little easier but that there were others, depending upon the time of day, that dragged a body down, so “you just gotta be careful with your songs and your hummin and whatnot.” Henry sang as she curled up in his arms. Moses noticed she was standing and stood. He was quiet and she kissed him, for no other reason than that he was now silent. When she withdrew, he realized he should go. He wanted sex because he needed to be able to walk through that back door again without knocking.
Skiffington came the following day to tell Caldonia that no one in the county had seen Alice and Priscilla and Jamie. He had found her going in after being in the garden and they talked on the verandah, a light sheen of sweat about her face.
”It’s a mystery,” he said, “and the law doesn’t like these kinds of mysteries.”
“I don’t either,” Caldonia said. “Do you think they could just have escaped from the county?”
He held his hat down at his side and thought of Travis and Oden selling Augustus. He did not believe they would sell three more Negroes so soon after Augustus and after he had warned them. And, too, he had a strong sense that whatever had happened, Moses was involved. “I am beginning to see that as a possibility,” he said, raising his hat and running his hand along the brim. When she was younger, Minerva had put on one of his hats and he and Winifred had laughed, and so had his father. She was still nine. “They have escaped or—and you have to see this as being possible—they are dead somewhere.”
“Why not just hiding out?”
He brushed at the brim. “I have had my people look in every spot in this county, and unless they have taken to living in tree trunks or beneath