The Known World - Edward P. Jones [64]
Fern was not a woman to wait for her husband at the window. But she did pine for him. He would tell her the very day when he was coming back. “Don’t wash,” he would say before he left. “Don’t you bathe till I get back.” This was hard for her in the beginning, for she had been raised with the notion that the lack of cleanliness put one closer to those laboring in the fields. “I need to bathe, Mr. Elston,” she said. “I want to bathe.” “Do it after I get back.” “But I will perspire all over myself in the meantime, all the way down to my poor ankles.” “Sweat me up a river, I don’t care. I’ll swim in it. Just don’t bathe.” She tried to avoid her students at such times, for she had taught them, from Dora to Caldonia, the same notion about cleanliness. Ramsey would come back, generally in the late evening, and find her in their bedroom. “I have been a dutiful wife, Mr. Elston.” He would laugh. “And I a dutiful husband, Mrs. Elston,” and she would believe him, night after night, until Jebediah Dickinson came. Then Ramsey would start to undress her, piece by slow piece, the one candle in the room wearing itself away even faster now down to a nub. Long before he had finished undressing her, she would grow heavy with wanting him and feel as if she would drop to the floor, and that was when he would kiss her throat, making the first contact with her skin, tasting for the first time the buildup of salt. The kiss would revive her and she would live until she became heavy once more and he had to kiss her throat again. “Have you bathed, Mrs. Elston?” “I have not bathed, Mr. Elston,” each word being such an effort and yet so very necessary. “I have been a dutiful wife.”
This was in the spring and early summer of their lives together. There was a saying in that part of Virginia that candles burned brighter in the spring and summer of a year because of how the wind came down from the mountains and gave the flames more air to breathe. Other people said no, that they had seen candles burn just as brightly in the fall, and even in the winter when the air wasn’t as nice. Fern Elston subscribed to the latter notion.
The Elstons rarely had more than thirteen slaves, though the gambler Jebediah Dickinson, for the time he was there, would bring the number to fourteen. Thirteen slaves were always enough to serve them in the house and to farm the few acres that would meet all their needs. The field slaves lived in quarters closer to their masters than any hands at any plantation or farm in Virginia. Why this was so, no one ever knew. There was certainly land enough to place them farther away. Those Elstons didn’t have slaves, colored people said, they had neighbors who happened to be slaves.
Fern did not tell Anderson Frazier, the white man who wrote pamphlets, that Henry Townsend was the darkest student she ever had, but she did tell him that he was the first freed slave and was probably the brightest of all her students.
”It might be that his blood was untainted in some way,” she said as the time neared noon that day with Anderson. She was prepared to give no answer if he asked what she meant by that, but Anderson said nothing. She listened to the word untainted echo in her head, thinking that it was the first time she had used it in a long time. “When he could read and write, I opened my library to him, but most of the books did not hold him the way I thought they might have. He was a man, of course, and not a child given to luxuriating. He read, enjoyed, and presented himself for the next one. He would take a book back to his land. Where he got the time to read, I do not know because the word I received was that he was working on the house all day long.” That August day with Anderson, a man and a woman, hand in hand, walked by and she waved to them and the couple waved back. “Now and again some book would take a firm hold of him and he would talk about it for days. Do you know Milton, Mr. Frazier? Do you know Paradise Lost, Mr. Frazier?”
“I do, Mrs. Elston.”