The Known World - Edward P. Jones [77]
So he read through the passage, and not for the second time, and not for the third, and not for the fourth. Then he moved on to Psalms, and after four of those he thought it best to get on to Clara’s. The male cardinal was still there but the female had disappeared.
He never worked on Sunday, the Lord’s day, but riding the carriage back to town with Winifred was far from work. After breakfast, Ralph had brought the carriage around and Skiffington and Winifred and Clara came out. “I be wishin yall good mornin,” Ralph said before he disappeared behind the house. “It’s a good day for a ride. A good day for whatever it is a soul want it to be.”
”Yes,” Winifred said, “a good day for everything.”
Clara had been quiet the last evening and just as quiet that morning. Now, her arms folded across her breasts, she watched as Skiffington helped Winifred into the carriage and he came around, kissed her cheek and got in the carriage.
“I’ll take your word that everything will be fine”—and she tipped her head in the direction of the back of the house where Ralph was. They, Clara and Ralph, would live another twenty-one years together. Long before then he became a free man because the War between the States came and found them. Skiffington got into the carriage. With freedom, Ralph got it into his head that he would go elsewhere. He had people in Washington, D.C. But Clara cried and cried and said this old place, this old damn place wouldn’t be the same if Ralph wasn’t traipsing morning, noon and night all about on it. So he chose to stay; his kin in Washington had never been likable people anyway—one of them was a natural-born drunkard.
“You have my word,” Skiffington said, taking the reins from Winifred. “You got that and more.”
“John, I just don’t know what I would do if Ralph ended up murdering me. What would I do, John?” And after that twenty-one years, Clara would die first, asleep in her bed, a knife under her pillow and another beside her in the bed, as close as a lover. Her hair flowed about her head, not done up but loose, the way she sometimes liked it when she slept, the way Ralph’s hair was when it wasn’t held back by the rope.
Skiffington smiled. “I would come out and arrest him. That’s the first thing I would do.”
On that Sunday, the day Skiffington and Winifred left, Clara had been eating Ralph’s cooking for more than twenty-four years. But after that day, even though she knew no more about cooking than a bird sitting on a nest, she fixed her own meals and she sat across from him while he ate what he had prepared and looked at her and spoke about happy times as she ate what she had prepared.
“Mr. Skiffington would come out, arrest him and take him in to jail, Clara,” Winifred said. “Quicker than you could say Jack Rabbit.”
For some reason this seemed to ease Clara’s mind more than anything else he or Winifred had said that weekend. She smiled and smiled and wouldn’t let loose of the smile even as Skiffington took her cheek in his hand and tugged on it twice. The door to her bedroom was always locked. When she did not come down to fix her breakfast the day she died, Ralph went up and knocked. After more than half an hour of knocking and calling her name, he went out, his own breakfast getting cold on the kitchen table, and he walked two miles to the nearest farm, all the way into neighboring Hanover County, and brought back a white man and the white man’s one-armed cousin and the two white men forced the door open. The door had been secured each night for years with two nails.
“Clara, we’ll see you before long, surely before the end of June, unless you come into town,” Winifred said.
“Good, you know how I look forward to Mr. and Mrs. Skiffington. The Skiffingtons have a place at my table anytime.” Ralph would