The Known World - Edward P. Jones [73]
He heard Ralph in the back and got up, placing the Bible open to his page on the chair. In the kitchen, Ralph was in the last stages of cleaning up before going to bed.
“Is there somethin I might get you this mornin, Mr. Skiffington?” he said as Skiffington stood in the doorway. “We got some more that pie you was so fond of. Put a nice little piece on a plate for you, send you off to sleep like a baby.”
“No, Ralph. I just wanted to come in and say good night. I wanted to make sure everything was fine with you. I know caring for Miss Clara can be a mighty chore. You have served her well and she knows that.”
“Night? Good night?”
“Yes. I just wanted to say good night.”
“Yessuh. Thank you. And good night, suh.”
“Yes, well . . . Good night.”
“And good night to you, suh. A good night.” His hair was in the rope again. “No pie? It’s fine pie if I say so myself.”
“No, thank you. But good night. And thank you for a fine meal. For the pie, too.”
“And thank you, too, suh. A good night. And good mornin when mornin comes.”
“Good night.” Skiffington left, the awkwardness still in the air. He went back to the parlor and picked up the Bible where he had left off. But that chapter was not what he felt he needed right then so he flipped through the book and settled on Job, after God had given him so much more, far more than what he had before God devastated his life.
He told Clara the next day that he had spoken with Ralph and that all was well, that she was not to worry anymore. “Worry bout rain for your garden, and don’t go any higher on the worry ladder,” he told her. She smiled.
He had business with two patrollers—Harvey Travis and Clarence Wilford—several miles from her, and after dinner, near one o’clock, he set out on a horse Ralph saddled for him. The Saturday was cloudy but he was confident that he could get there and back before the rain, if rain there was.
When the group of patrollers were formed, Barnum Kinsey and Oden Peoples, brother-in-law to Harvey Travis, were the only patrollers who owned slaves. The patrollers were paid $12 a month, mostly from the tax on slaveowners, a levy of 5 cents a slave every other month. (The tax went to 10 cents a slave with the start of the War between the States, and it was enforced through most of 1865.) Barnum Kinsey was exempt from the tax for the time his one slave Jeff was alive, and Oden Peoples was never taxed.
Oden was a full-blooded Cherokee. He had four black slaves. One was his “mother-in-law.” Another was his “wife,” who was half-Cherokee herself, and the other two were their children. His wife had belonged to Oden’s father, and so had the mother-in-law. When Oden took Tassock as his woman, the father threw in her mother because he thought Oden’s woman might be lonely so far away from the village where she had been his slave. Oden’s father liked to go about the world claiming he was a Cherokee chief, the leader of a thousand people, but that was not true, and people, black and white and Indian, would ridicule him about the lie, to his face and behind his back. Chief Tell-A-Lie, they called him.
Oden’s wife was half sister to a woman the patroller Harvey Travis had married. She, too, had been a slave, though full Cherokee, but Travis essentially bought her from Chief Tell-A-Lie and freed her, saying he would never marry a slave.
In so many ways, Travis became Skiffington’s most difficult patroller. But Travis was good at what he did, and Skiffington saw him as a free-ranging cat who couldn’t be tamed but who killed enough mice to make up for his lawlessness.
That cloudy Saturday after dinner at Clara’s, Skiffington rode out because of a dispute Travis had