The Known World - Edward P. Jones [151]
She wondered if the three slaves would have been covered under policies from Atlas Life, Casualty and Assurance. Payment for escaped slaves.
“I have to go see Mildred Townsend,” he said. “I will say you said howdy if that is fine by you.”
“Yes. Yes,” Caldonia said. “Please tell her I will be out tomorrow. And you have heard nothing about Augustus?” He shook his head. “It might be the same people grabbed my three that grabbed Augustus.”
“I have considered that,” he said, “but those rascals are long gone. It would be months before they could come back through. He went south. If yours escaped, they went north unless the stars and the sun confused them, and they went in another direction.” He put on his hat. “I’ll be going, Caldonia. Want to ask a few things of your servants before I do, though.”
“Yes,” she said. “Have a good day, sheriff.”
“And you, Caldonia.” She went inside.
He walked his horse to the fields and looked for a long time until he found Moses among the other slaves. Moses saw him after a time but did not acknowledge him and kept on working. Skiffington got on his horse. He was beginning to feel that matters were getting beyond his control and that if he did not soon corral it all, he and all he had built up would be lost. Augustus. Three slaves very possibly murdered. That was how it started with Gilly Patterson, a failure to corral and then William Robbins’s loss of confidence in him. He had once asked God if wanting Robbins’s confidence in him put him in a bad light with God, and the answer came back no.
He saw a child returning from a privy to the fields and asked her if she knew the three missing slaves and she said she did. Tessie, Celeste and Elias’s girl, seemed to take a while to answer and he thought she was thinking of some kind of untruth when she was really wondering why he would ask that when the answer was as easy as telling him her name. He also asked who lived in the cabin next to Moses and she told him Elias and Celeste and their children. He told her to go tell Elias he wanted to see him. She told him Elias was her father. “Tell your daddy to come here.” Elias had nothing much to say but five days later he did, and his wife begged him to keep it to himself but he said he couldn’t hold it in. Had it been anyone else, he would have held his tongue, he told Celeste. “Try to hold it then for me,” she said back.
Skiffington knocked at Mildred’s door and heard the dog bark. She invited him in but he knew he had no good news and so did not want to take up too much of her time. He said, “I am always in a hurry to get, and this is another one of those days.”
”My husband still gone,” she said.
“Yes, Mildred. I can say no more than that.”
“I thank you for the trip.”
He spent the night at William Robbins’s place and blamed his angry stomach the next morning on the tough chicken—unusual for the Robbins table—they fed him for supper. Had they somehow riled up the bird before they wrung the neck? Angered up the meat?
At supper, Robbins had said, “John, I want to set a five-hundred-dollar bounty on the head of that speculator that took Augustus Townsend. I will pay that to whoever brings him to me or to you. Do I need to say it doesn’t matter if he is dead when they bring him?”
“I think when a man sees that five-hundred-dollar number, he will think ‘dead’ without the poster saying it.”
“Good,” Robbins said and ate heartily of the chicken, of the corn, of everything on the table, and as Skiffington put his face in the bowl of water the next morning, he was grateful that Robbins had not asked about the three slaves. But that would not have been Robbins’s way—he gave a man a while to prove if he could do the job. The slaves had been gone not a week.
On his way back to town, he stopped at Caldonia’s plantation and went to the fields and sat on his horse until Moses knew that he was there. The courteous thing would have been to let the mistress of the plantation know he was about but he did not think Caldonia would mind. He stayed so long he had time to bring out his Bible