The Known World - Edward P. Jones [154]
Loretta was standing at the window and Caldonia was in the middle of the settee. “Why would you put a woman in the family way in danger, Moses?” Caldonia said.
“She playactin,” he said. “They all playact sometime. I ain’t never seen a one that don’t playact sometime.” Loretta’s back was to him and he spoke some of his words to her back and some of them to the grandfather clock next to the window.
“She lost her child, Moses. Don’t you know that?” Caldonia said.
“I heard that,” he said.
“You let me know from now on when somebody talks about feeling bad. You come to me first.”
“That could make things bad all round. Real bad.” He wanted to say her name but they were not alone. This is me, he wanted to tell her. It’s me you sayin all this to.
Loretta turned from the window. Whatever she had been watching was no longer of interest. She unfolded her arms. This could have been my husband, she thought, and I could have been his wife. Married, one together. Would she now have been wherever Priscilla and Alice were, out in God knew where with her child?
“I don’t have any more to say, Moses. This is a disappointment. I don’t have any more tonight.” Loretta took two steps, signaling Moses that he was to leave.
He went out the back door but did not go to the cabins. He stood many yards from them, watching the smoke rise from all the chimneys except his own. He heard a hum and thought it might be all the evening conversations rising as one above the cabins and making a noise to the universe. A hearty laugh drifted out of the lane but by the time it reached him there was no life in it. He wanted to go out to the woods and be with himself, something he had not done in days, but he would have had to go down through the lane and he did not want to see any faces seeing his own. There was a long way around but he chose not to take it.
After he had been standing there nearly two hours, the life along the lane quieted and he went down and into his cabin. There were no sounds from the cabin next to his, from Celeste and Elias’s cabin. Moses took off his shoes. He sat with his back against the door in the dark. About three o’clock he just leaned over and fell asleep across the doorway. Not long after he did that, Elias came and tried to push the door in, but finding it barred, he went back to his cabin.
The next evening Moses came in the back door without knocking, just opened it and went by Bennett and Zeddie sitting at the kitchen table, and walked into the parlor where Caldonia was standing talking to Loretta.
”I needs to talk to you,” he said. “I needs to.”
“What?” Caldonia said.
He pointed at Loretta. “You leave.”
“Wait, Moses. You wait,” Caldonia said. Loretta walked around him to the door and Moses stepped closer to Caldonia.
“Why you got me waitin round like this, like I’m somebody’s child? Why ain’t you done freed me?” He raised his fist into the air between them. “Why you doin this?” He took one more step and as he did, Loretta took her time and put her arm around his neck, a knife in her hand pressing into his throat so that he had to lower his foot in mid-stride.
“I ain’t foolin with you,” Loretta said. He had seen her, too, once upon a time before he eventually married Priscilla, but had always thought that a house woman was beyond him. What would she have seen in him? But Priscilla had toiled in the same fields he toiled in. Such a better match. “I ain’t foolin with you, Moses.”
He and Caldonia were watching each other. He trembled and saw himself back in the woods, naked and on his back. The night birds were watching and Alice was watching. He could hear Priscilla approaching, loudly, stepping on first one twig after another. He lowered his head and the knife was closer than before.
When he was gone, Loretta got a pistol and gave one to Bennett. Loretta wanted to go out and find the patrollers, to have them take Moses away, but Caldonia told her he would be himself by morning. “Henry’s death,” she said finally, “has unsettled all of us.” Before going