The Known World - Edward P. Jones [53]
“Tell her I will see her soon. Please give my best to her. And, Herbert, there will be more okra to come. I can promise you that.”
“And I thank you right on.”
She and Anderson watched the man go down to the corner, look left and right, then go left. “I sometimes think I put too much faith in my garden,” Fern said. “One day it will fail me and I will come to be known as a liar to one and all.”
“Mrs. Elston, would you tell me about Mr. Townsend?”
She sipped from her lemonade but did not look back at him. She took a long time swallowing, and then she considered the glass when she was finished. Cold glasses of lemonade cry, she thought. Some poet should put that in a poem to his lady, unless the lady has already said it twice in one of her letters to him. “Henry or Augustus? I can say I knew Henry. I think I knew Henry very well. But I cannot say that I knew Augustus at all.” Even as she spoke, she was trying to remember Augustus, but the memory of him was full of holes, the same as her memory of the one-legged gambler. Such duty, such a wife. In her life, she had not seen very much of Augustus, and most of what she retained came from the day she stood across from him at Henry’s funeral. He was a handsome man, she said of Augustus. “I never leaned toward exaggeration,” she said to Anderson. “So when I say he was a handsome man, he was indeed. Henry was, too, but he never got old enough to lose that boyish facade colored men have before they settle into being handsome and unafraid, before they learn that death is as near as a shadow and go about living their lives accordingly. When they learn that, they become more beautiful than even God could imagine, Mr. Frazier.”
In addition to being William Robbins’s groom, the boy Henry Townsend had been an apprentice to the boot- and shoemaker at the Robbins plantation. He became better than the man who taught him. “There ain’t nothin else for me to put in his head, Master,” the man, Timmons, told Robbins about two years before Augustus and Mildred bought their son’s freedom. “He done ate up all I had and lookin round now for some more.” It was not long after that that Robbins allowed Henry to measure him and had the boy make him boots for the first time. He was very pleased. “If Mrs. Robbins would permit, Henry, I would sleep in them.” This was shortly before he and his wife began sleeping in separate beds, she in a part of the mansion their daughter as a child called the East and he in what the daughter called the West.
As the days dwindled down to the time Henry’s parents would take him into freedom, Robbins was surprised to know that he would miss the boy. He had not been so surprised about his feelings for a black human being since realizing that he loved Philomena. He had gotten used to seeing Henry standing in the lane, waiting as Robbins came back from some business or from visiting Philomena and their children. The boy had a calming way about him and stood with all the patience in the world as Robbins, often recovering from an episode of a storm in the head, made his slow way from the road to the lane and up to the house. Fathers waited that way for prodigal sons, Robbins once thought.
“Good mornin, Massa Robbins,” the boy would say, for it was invariably morning when Robbins returned home.
“Mornin, Henry. How long have you been here?”
“Not so long,” the boy would say, though he usually had been waiting for hours, starting in the dark, no matter what the weather. Robbins would make his way off the horse, and sometimes he needed help getting to his door. Once the man was inside, the boy would tend to the horse.
When Henry went into freedom, Robbins had the boy come back again and again to make boots and shoes for him and his male guests. Henry was, to be sure, not allowed to touch a white woman, but by using one of Robbins’s female house slaves to measure their feet, he made the same for Robbins’s wife, Ethel, his daughter,