The Known World - Edward P. Jones [168]
That Sunday, too, he awoke with the same toothache that had claimed him for many days. He had had some relief the day before but now it was back, a throbbing and insistent lump of pain bedded down on the left side of his face. He told himself he could live with it. Monday would be too late to go after the slave Moses and the other two. Still on the side of the bed, he lowered his head and prayed. His wife was downstairs with Minerva and his father. There would be no time for church services today. Ordinarily, he would have gone to get the tooth pulled at the undertaker, who doubled as the town dentist, but the undertaker had been three days in Charleston, caring for a bachelor brother who had no wife or slaves to do the looking after. Skiffington could have gone to the white doctor, but he and the doctor had not spoken in four years. The doctor had complained for a long time to Skiffington that the sheriff’s Shetland sheepdog had been killing the doctor’s chickens. With no sheep to run after, the doctor told Winifred, the dog had been taking it out on his chickens. Skiffington had believed that he had trained the dog well and the doctor should look elsewhere in the neighborhood for the culprit. “Suspect” was the way Skiffington had put it.
Then, one mild Monday morning after Skiffington had gone off to the jail, the doctor stepped out into his backyard and saw the dog walking casually toward his chicken coop. The dog turned and, almost mesmerized, looked for the longest into the doctor’s eyes, long enough for the doctor to call to his slave for his pistol. He shot the dog four times, twice in the head and twice in the body. Then he had his slave pick up the corpse and throw it into Skiffington’s yard.
Skiffington now dressed and left the house without a meal. He didn’t tell Winifred about the toothache because she would have fussed some more. He found Counsel in the jail cleaning his gun, and the sight of his cousin working away on a Sunday angered him. He had told him about being in the jail on Sunday when there wasn’t a prisoner but Counsel was hardheaded. Counsel was whistling a tune and Skiffington, stepping two feet into the office, thought the words that went with the tune were probably dirty ones.
“Best get ready,” Skiffington said. “We goin.”
“Where?”
“Out to get that runaway Moses.” He was moving as gingerly as he could because movement upset the mess on the side of his face. He was not looking forward to the long ride, the bouncing about, but he had a sworn duty and he did not want to trust Counsel or the patrollers out there with a murderer. No doubt Augustus and Mildred had guns. He took his rifle from the rack.
By ten-thirty they were well out of the town of Manchester. It was a very hot day and they moved into what his father Carl often called “the teeth of the sun.” Counsel was chewing tobacco, a habit he had picked up in Alabama, and now and again, he would spit ahead into the dusty road to see how far the spit would skip. They didn’t talk much, and when they did, it was mostly Counsel just saying something to break the silence between them. And when he wasn’t talking or spitting into the road, he was whistling the tune which surely had dirty words to go with it.
Skiffington did say, about halfway to William Robbins’s plantation, that Counsel should try to drop the tobacco habit. He talked through clenched teeth to keep as little air as possible from getting in and knocking against the ornery nerves of the tooth.
“I’ve never seen anything wrong with it,” Counsel said, making still one more note in his mental book about the shit way his cousin saw the world. “Just a little habit that God don’t mind.”
“If you pile up enough habits,” Skiffington said, “you soon have enough for a real sin. Then you have trouble.”
The unsparing sun put a greater burden on the men and their horses and they arrived at Robbins’s about twelve-thirty, a little later than Skiffington had wanted. Robbins was not there but Mrs. Robbins and Patience her daughter made them at home. Mrs. Robbins had a dinner prepared