The Known World - Edward P. Jones [172]
“Counsel!”
“I’m going to look upstairs now, John.”
“Then do it and bring him!”
The stairs did not creak. One more strange thing about the nature of houses—some creaked, some did not, and there wasn’t any use thinking you could say which was which just by looking at them. A two-story nothing in Mississippi had stairs that didn’t make a sound. His destroyed house was one of the finest in North Carolina, in the South, and all the stairs in it had creaked, even the ones going up from the kitchen in the back that were used mostly by the servants and his children. All of them people of light feet.
On the second floor he looked in each room and as he neared the last, Mildred and Augustus’s bedroom, his disappointment grew. If the slave was not here, there would be no living with John’s rage. He stood in the middle of the couple’s bedroom and cursed. “Counsel! We can’t leave Mildred laying there like that.” Counsel opened the top drawer of the dresser beside the door and moved things around with the barrel of his gun and then he heard a clinking. In the folds of a small bolt of yellow cloth he found five twenty-dollar gold pieces. He laughed and looked around, then laughed some more and put the money in his pocket. He went through the rest of the drawers, tore the bed apart, stamped on the floor to see what boards might be covering some hiding place. He found no more gold, but he knew there was more, knew that those two niggers had been out here with a white man’s riches. He looked again around the room, but now with a new eye, the eye of a man who knew salvation and deliverance were very close by. He needed time to search the house, the land, and he did not have that time right then. “Counsel!” There might or might not be enough to share with another man, but he did not want to risk telling Skiffington. His cousin might say it was not theirs to have. There might well be enough to get him where he was before the devastation in North Carolina. No, it would be best not to tell John. What does God’s monkey John Skiffington know about money and need and the loss of family?
He went down the stairs and tried to keep the coins from making a sound and stood at Mildred’s head.
“Where is he, Counsel?”
Somehow, Counsel found it an odd question and he answered, without thinking, in an odd way: “I found him not.” He put his pistol in his holster and reached down and picked up Mildred’s rifle, now as bloody as the floor around her, and pointed it at Skiffington. “Stand back, Counsel. You best stand back and away.” Counsel fired into Skiffington’s chest, and though Skiffington leaned forward only a few inches, Counsel could see the wound was a mortal one. But because John Skiffington was a large man, Counsel Skiffington shot him again. The second shot singed the ear of Skiffington’s horse before it entered the man and the horse reared up, but the man’s weight seemed to force it down and the horse, once back on the ground, shook its head over and over and Skiffington slid to the side, trying to hold on because something told him that holding on was the only way he could be saved.
Skiffington was entering the house he had taken his bride to. He ran up the stairs because he felt there was something important he had to do. He found himself in a very long hall and he ran down the hall, looking in all the open rooms and wanting to stop but knowing he did not have time. He passed them all, from the one with his mother cooking his supper to the one with his father talking to Barnum Kinsey. Minerva sewing. Winifred in her nightgown with her arms open to him. But he did not stop. At the very end of the hall there was a Bible tilting forward, a Bible some three feet taller than he was. He got to it in time to keep it from falling over, his hands reaching to prop it up, his open left hand on the O in Holy and his open right hand on the second B in Bible.
Counsel had not moved. He was thinking of how he would explain everything to everyone, and it was a simple matter in his mind—the Negro woman had shot his cousin and the sheriff had