The Known World - Edward P. Jones [48]
When he tried to get close to her, to walk a little bit beside her, hoping that closeness would say what he did not have words for, she would hurry away, believing he only wanted to see her life with a terrible limp. He hurt, day after day, to see her move away. Then, late one evening, almost two months after Oden took the razor to his ear, after all the work of the day and the slaves were in those moments when they set their minds to sleep, he came to the cabin she shared with two other women and Elias tapped until one of the women came to the door. Celeste had brought Luke to live with her, but he was not there.
“Could you mind tellin Celeste I’d like a word with her?” Elias said to the woman.
The woman laughed but when she saw he wasn’t going away, she turned and called to Celeste, “That Elias be wantin you.”
It seemed a long time before she came to the door. He nodded and she nodded back.
“I just wanted a word with you, thas all,” he said.
“All right,” she said.
He looked her full in the face, the light from inside the cabin silhouetting her. “Why you all the time treatin me bad when all I wanna do is treat you good?”
“What that you say?”
“Why you all the time treatin me bad when all I wanna do is treat you good? Thas what I said.”
“I ain’t think I was treatin you no kinda bad way.”
“Well, you was and all I’m askin is that you stop it.”
She put one hand on the doorjamb to steady herself to come down the one step to him and he took her by the other arm. She said after a minute or so, “I didn’t mean no harm by it.”
He believed her and was again without words. He found them when he heard one of the women inside the cabin laugh at something the other woman said. “I be talkin to you, then. Tomorrow if thas all right with you. I be talkin to you tomorrow.”
“Yes.” She turned, a hand again on the doorjamb, and stepped up as he held her elbow. She went inside and closed the door.
A week later he was at her door again and she was in the doorway and he opened a little piece of a rag and presented a comb he had carved out of a piece of wood. The comb was rough, certainly one of the crudest and ugliest instruments in the history of the world. Not one tooth looked like another; some of the teeth were far too thick, but most of them were very thin, the result of his whittling away with the hope that he was approaching some kind of perfection. “Oh,” Celeste said. “Oh, my.” She took it and smiled. “My goodness gracious.”
”It ain’t much.”
“It be the whole world. You givin it to me?”
“I am.”
“Well, my goodness gracious.” She tried to run the comb through her hair but the comb failed in its duty. “Oh, my,” Celeste said as she struggled with it. Several teeth broke off. “Oh, my.”
He reached up and taking her hand with the comb, they extricated it from her hair. “I done broke it,” she said when they had pulled it away. “Dear Lord, I done broke it.”
“Pay it no mind,” Elias said.
“But you gave it to me, Elias.” Aside from the food in her stomach and the clothes on her back and a little of nothing in a corner of her cabin, the comb was all she had. A child of three could have toted around all she owned all day long and not gotten tired.
“We can do another one.” He reached up and picked out the comb’s teeth that had broken off in her hair.
“But . . .”
“I’ll make you a comb for every hair on your head.”
She began to cry. “Thas easy to say today cause the sun be shinin. Tomorrow, maybe next week, there won’t be no sun, and you won’t be studyin no comb.”
He said again, “I’ll make you a comb for every hair on your head.” He dropped the broken teeth onto the ground and she closed her hand tight over what was left of the comb.
She put her face into her other hand and cried. There had been a slave on the plantation she had come from who had come upon her in a field of corn and told her that a woman like her should be shot, like a horse with a broken leg. And she had cried then as well.
Elias put his arms around her,