The Known World - Edward P. Jones [173]
Skiffington fell. His horse tried to step away from him once he hit the ground, but it could not go far because Skiffington’s right foot was caught in the stirrup, and so the horse was caught between wanting to be away from a dead man and wanting to be near its master. Counsel reached back and dropped the rifle, then wiped his hands on the parts of Mildred’s clothing that were not bloody. At the sound of the rifle hitting the floor Skiffington’s horse stopped moving. Counsel’s horse had remained in its place all along, moving not one inch. Counsel heard the stairs creak and looked over to see a Negro watching him, his hands up. Counsel took out his pistol and waved him over with the gun. “You the Moses we’ve been looking for?” Counsel said. Moses came over, nodding his head all the while. “Where are the other two?” Counsel asked, meaning Gloria and Clement, and Moses said he didn’t know about any other two, that he was alone, he and Mildred. So, Counsel thought, he had been hiding somewhere secret and that made him happy because it meant there were places where the gold could be.
The idea that Moses had killed Priscilla his wife and his son Jamie and the madwoman Alice died with John Skiffington, and that was where it stayed for many years.
Counsel said to Moses, “Are you sure you’re alone?”
“Yessir.” Moses looked over at Mildred and it was all he could do to stop from going to her. She had asked him not one question, just gave him a home. “We,” she had said, “will find a way to get you out of this here mess.”
“Open your mouth,” Counsel said. Moses did and Counsel stuck his pistol far back into the man’s throat and Moses tried to wiggle away but Counsel stayed with him. He took Moses by the shirtfront and held him. “I don’t want to kill two in one day but I’m not above doing it.” Moses coughed around the pistol. “You keep everything you know just as locked in as your words are locked in right now. You hear what I say?” Moses, in pain, gagging, nodded his head as much as he could. “If you ever say a word, I will shoot you down like a dog. And you can see right here that that’s something I will do.”
This nigger, Counsel decided, has never killed anyone. What had John been thinking?
Counsel withdrew the gun and motioned Moses to the door, and Moses bent down to Mildred, touched her bloody hair. Moses stood back up. Counsel, seeing his victory approaching after all those years, began to feel generous. He said to Moses, “Tell her good-bye in any way you see fit.” The dead woman, after all, had opened the door to that golden victory. Was there a prayer Job had offered to God after he put his servant back a million times better than Job had been before the devastation? Thank you, O Lord. I cannot forget what I once had, but I will not resent you so much when I think of those old days and my dead loved ones.
“I don’t wanna leave Miss Mildred out here on the floor like this, Mister,” Moses said.
Counsel sighed and shrugged his shoulders. Moses bent down again to Mildred. In less than a half hour, when Counsel began to realize that he did not have all the time in the world, he would regret the generosity. But now he holstered the pistol and stepped out onto the porch. He didn’t care about the rifle beside Mildred because all the power it had was now soaking in John Skiffington.
In less than two hours, many miles down the road from where Mildred and Augustus Townsend had lived, Counsel on his horse would come upon Elias and Louis, the bastard son of William Robbins and future husband to Caldonia Townsend. Counsel would also come upon the patrollers Barnum Kinsey, Harvey Travis and Oden Peoples, a full Cherokee man. All of those men would be on horses. Counsel was to greet them with the appropriate grieving face of a man who just had his relative killed. Tied to the pommel of Counsel’s horse would be a rope that led back some five feet to the tied hands of Moses,