The Known World - Edward P. Jones [76]
“Will this end, John?” Clarence said.
“There won’t be no more. No more of this.”
“By whose word then, John?” Beth Ann said. “His word or your word?”
“First his word, then backed up by my word,” Skiffington said.
“Good,” and she shook Skiffington’s hand and then he shook her husband’s hand.
Skiffington went back to Travis. “If things stay peaceful, then there might be more days with milk for you, Harvey, but that has to come from Clarence and Beth Ann. They can give you more days cause it’s their property.” Harvey nodded. He turned to leave. “And, Harvey, if someone shoots at Clarence again, I will come out to get you, and it will be a different world for you, your wife and your chaps.”
Travis said nothing but shook Skiffington’s hand and collected his children and went down and over the rise. He still had some of the $15 he had received for the cow, but it would not give him the pleasure he had known before he learned that the cow had another life. Skiffington watched him. Travis had a child on either side of him, both with their black Cherokee hair flowing and both almost as dark as their mother. One of Travis’s children looked up and said something to Travis and Travis, before they all disappeared, looked down to answer the child, the man’s head seeming to go down in small stages, heavy with bitterness. The boy nodded at whatever his father had told him.
Riding back to Clara’s, he was surprised that it had gone well. He could tell by the way Harvey walked away holding his children by the hand that he would keep his word and there would be no more trouble with the cow. His stomach continued to bother him. He often told Winifred that he was a man coming apart at all his seams—bad stomach, bad teeth, a twitch in the left leg before falling to sleep. A twitch in the right to wake him during the night.
About midway back to Clara’s, he decided to walk, seeing that there would be no rain and thinking the walk would ease his stomach. He sensed that Clara’s horse was not one to saunter away so he dropped the reins and the horse followed behind him, like a dog. Then the sun came out brighter, then even brighter, and he stopped and took out his Bible from the saddlebag and sat down under a dogwood tree. Before he opened the Bible, he looked all around, at the way the sun poured down over two peach trees and over the hills. The baby’s breath swayed every which way, and as he looked, he grew happier. This is what my God has given me, he thought.
He liked to think at such times that all the people in his life were as contented as he was but he knew the folly of that thought. Clara was good and Winifred and his father and even the child Minerva, growing every day beyond childhood. Maybe Barnum Kinsey the patroller had had a good night and had not awakened with a pained head from a night of drinking. A boy down the road from Skiffington had burned his leg at the fireplace and Skiffington hoped the boy was doing well. He and the boy liked to fish together; the boy knew how to be silent, which was something not easily taught to a child fisherman. He liked the boy very much but he longed for the day when he would have a child of his own.
Skiffington flipped through the pages of the Bible, wanting something to companion his mood. He came to the place in Genesis where two angels disguised as strangers are guests in Lot’s house. The men in the town came to the house, wanting Lot to send out the strangers so that they could use them as they would use women. Lot sought to protect the strangers and offered the men his virgin daughters instead. It was one of the more disturbing passages in the Bible for Skiffington and he was tempted to pass on, to find his way to Psalms and Revelation or to Matthew, but he knew that Lot and the daughters and the angels posing as strangers were all part of God’s plan. The angels blinded the men as they tried to storm Lot’s house, and then, the next morning, the angels laid waste to the town. Skiffington looked up and followed a male cardinal as it flew from left to right