The Known World - Edward P. Jones [45]
Henry and Caldonia retired early that night and he made love to her twice, forever seeking the son who might temper Augustus Townsend’s heart. When it was done, he lay on his back and she rested on her side and put her arm across his chest. “What anyone said never mattered to me,” she said after a time, thinking of what Ramsey the gambler had said. He was sweating and she put her tongue to the side of his face where the sweat poured down and caught some of it with the tip of her tongue.
”I know,” he said.
“Put more armor round that heart of yours about such things,” Caldonia said.
“I’m tryin,” he said and smiled. “I spect I’ll have the full armor by day after tomorrow.” He closed his eyes and she pulled herself even closer and the sweating stopped and she closed her mouth. Sam, the man with one ear, lived on at the Robbins’s plantation. He had a cabin to himself, which Robbins had permitted even after the overseer had said it would spoil him. “Once he learned right from wrong, he gave me good work,” Robbins said to the overseer. Sam was still grabbing and frightening little children. The grown-ups knew it was a habit that they could do nothing about, so they tried to teach the children to avoid him. “Give him not even so much as a good mornin or a good night. Wave from way over yonder when he speak to you and be on your way.”
On his way to the Townsend place on Tuesday morning, Oden Peoples the Cherokee met Sheriff John Skiffington and told him he had been hired by Henry after one of his slaves had run away. Skiffington had in his saddlebag a month-old letter from his cousin Counsel Skiffington in North Carolina. The letter swore by a woman in Amelia County who had a cure for stomach ailments, which John Skiffington had suffered from since he was a boy. Counsel had always teased John about his “woman’s stomach” but he had never thought his cousin’s pain was not real. John had set out for an overnight trip to the woman in Amelia, but hearing about Elias running away, he decided to go with Oden Peoples, one of his patrollers. A runaway slave was, in fact, a thief since he had stolen his master’s property—himself. They arrived about 9:30. Moses and one other man took Elias from the field and Oden sliced off about a third of his ear as everyone, including Henry, stood in the lane. Elias had his head down all the while except when Oden pulled it up to get the razor to do a better job. All of the lobe and then some. Oden always carried a pouch with a pepper poultice, which he blended with vinegar and mustard and a little salt—a proven remedy to halt the bleeding of even those who seemed to have more blood than other men. “The bleeders,” Oden called them. Elias lowered his head again and stood with his hands at his side, refusing to hold the poultice in place. In the end, Oden had to tie the poultice on Elias’s head with a rag Moses brought from his cabin.
Henry told Moses to take everybody back to the field. And there in the lane he paid Oden $1 for doing the job on Elias’s ear. “You think it’ll hold,” Henry said after he and Oden and Skiffington had left the lane and were nearing Oden’s saddleless horse and Skiffington’s red mare. “I don’t know,” Oden said. “It depends on what kinda heart he got in him. But,” and he took the reins, “I’ll come back and do the rest of that ear and won’t charge you.