The Known World - Edward P. Jones [164]
“Your daddy got the touch,” Louis said.
“Yes, Marse, he do.”
Elias was in the lane and said good evening to everyone, nodding finally to Loretta. Ellwood, Elias’s youngest, crawled up behind Celeste in the doorway and she picked him up. She heard Louis say that he was going out to search for Moses and the others and Elias said that if Moses was still gone come Sunday, he would join the search. Elias had asked Delphie to cut a lock of the dead baby’s hair before she put her into the ground, and he carried that hair in a piece of cloth pinned inside his shirt. Celeste then heard Elias say to Louis that Moses was world-stupid, the same words he had spoken to Skiffington, and that Moses did not know north from south unless somebody told him and even then he wasn’t real sure. The two men laughed. Caldonia said nothing and felt Loretta at her back.
Celeste shifted Ellwood in her arms. Tessie and Grant were on either side of her, clinging to her frock, and the four of them watched together. A bloodhound from another county, who had wandered into the neighborhood of the lane three days ago, rested beside Grant. Celeste did not know what she was going to do with Elias. She loved him, and no matter what there would be no way to get around that. Everything else that came their way—even his hatred of Moses—would have to do battle with her love for him. She could only hope that Elias would find his way back to what he had been.
She saw Elias say something she could not hear, but she noted Louis and Fern laughing in response. Dora and Caldonia were holding hands, the way she and Cassandra often did, the way she did with May, the way she used to do with Gloria. How so very different the world would be if Elias did not love her, too. But she knew that he did love her, even if some things in their days and nights blinded him to it.
Elias turned and looked for a very long time at his wife. Wife, trust me, his eyes said, and I will get us, yours and mine, out of this. Then Elias looked at his two oldest children, at Tessie and Grant. They looked at their father. He held his hand out and they flowed to him. Ellwood the baby clung to Celeste and then he began to wiggle, wanting to be let down to the ground. Elias looked once more at Celeste. Wife, wife . . . She lowered her eyes from him and then took them away from him, took them off down the lane that was now becoming crowded with people, then out down to where the sun tended to come up in the morning. The generations of Celeste and Elias Freemen would be legion in Virginia.
Ellwood continued to wiggle and when his mother put him down, he soon began to pull on her frock, wanting her to pick him up again. “See, see,” she said. “See, you don’t always want what you think you want. See. Why don’t you listen to me sometime?” The baby looked up, pleading: I done learned my lesson. Pick me up again. His mother tapped the foot of her good leg. No, the foot said. No lesson could stick in the head if it was only a few seconds long. She tapped on. The bloodhound beside them was gnawing on a bone that he would keep even when a child came along later and offered something bigger and better. Ellwood extended both hands up to Celeste and she relented. Once up again, Ellwood put his arms around her neck. “Mr. Blueberry,” Ellwood Freemen would say more than twenty years later to Stamford Crow Blueberry in Richmond, “I have come to fulfill my duty, just as I gave you my word that I would. I have come to teach for you and the chaps.” Ellwood the baby, back in his mother’s arms, looked around and sighed. His mother kissed his neck and said, “Maybe next time you’ll listen to me.” In 1993 the University of Virginia Press would publish a 415-page book by a white woman, Marcia H. Shia, documenting that every ninety-seventh person in the Commonwealth of Virginia was kin, by blood or by marriage, to the line that started with Celeste and Elias Freemen.
Stamford now came from behind Celeste and tickled her shoulder. The baby Ellwood and Celeste and Stamford looked at the gathering of people