The Purchase (15 page)

Daniel watched his neighbour with a growing fear. This was a situation beyond his experience or reckoning.

“I require twenty dollas here and now to recompense.”

“Recompense?” Daniel found his voice. “I say it is not possible for Onesimus to walk so far as to your place, but if it is true that he did so, has he not
enriched
you by one, providing you with yet another unfortunate piece of living property?” Daniel hoped the listening children had not taken his meaning, but he could not calm his sense of outrage. Under the porch, the two little boys must be gazing out in terror at the horse, which had reared up now and was pawing at the air close to their hiding place. Astride the horse, Jester Fox had become half-man half-beast, but when the hooves hit the ground and the man jumped off, Isaac crawled out from under the porch and ran to him with doubled-up fists. “Don’t touch my papa!” he cried. “Or I will kill thee!”

Daniel looked at his child in stunned horror. He had raised his children devotedly as pacifists and now one of them had uttered words of mortal aggression. He stepped off his porch and strode over to Isaac, grabbing his shoulder, telling him to apologize instantly.

Isaac shook his head.

Jester Fox sneered. “Brave little man you got there, but I want my twenty dollas and your nig to beat alongside of mine.”

Daniel, who believed there were times in his life when his pacifism was encouraged by weakness, advanced a step toward
his neighbour, aware that his sons were watching, that he must master his fear and stop his trembling. “Neither one nor the other,” he said, but the voice that came out of him was now puny to his own ears.

Jester Fox spat out a spiral of tobacco juice. “You think I’m bat blind to your policies? I seen you take Shoffert’s land so’s to keep me small. I seen you buy up my water rights to drive me off. And now it’s my girl servin’ as your strumpet!” The red hair on his head stood out stiff as wire and his face was splotched under the skin. “Which of you goes first on her, I wonder, you or the nig?”

Daniel felt rage come in a flood. “If the girl is what you say, you cannot blame Onesimus!” It was wicked to win his argument at the cost of the girl’s honour, but it was what the loosened rage demanded. He heard the word
tarnation
escape his lips and clamped them shut.

Jester Fox thrust out his arm and struck his hat across Daniel’s face.

Seeing nothing, feeling nothing, Daniel stepped back. It was the first chance he’d had in his life to turn the other cheek but that did not occur to him. His mind was blank. Then his heart resumed its loud beating. He had not considered Jester Fox to be a danger, but now he saw the edge of violence in himself and it was terrifying.

“I coulda bought up this place,” Fox snarled.

“But you did not,” Daniel threw back. “Nor will you set foot on this land again or rue the day!” It was not fear he felt now but untempered, untrammelled fury, which is the arsenal of the devil, he told himself, and I have entered his range.

“I catch her over here, I’ll hang your nig’s festerin cock up a tree,” Jester Fox stuttered, and he went back to his horse and took hold of the reins and pulled himself into the saddle almost
gracefully, looking around just long enough to take in the unfinished state of the house, which was entered by climbing two bare wooden planks. He saw that an empty window sat on one side of the door braced by its sash. And there was no chimney, only a pile of stones on the ground varied in size and shape. “I’ll be waitin for the twenty dollas and the nigger to be brought,” he growled. “But I’ll not wait for more’n a day.”

Mary, Ruth, and Jemima had heard every word of this awful encounter while standing inside, behind the door, and they had felt variously about Daniel’s response to their neighbour’s threats. Jemima believed her father to be brave. Mary was glad of his lack of violence and surprised by his rage. But Ruth was ashamed, for she had expected Daniel to leap on Jester Fox and prove his strength. Instead, she had seen only cowardice.

That night, when the moon was high enough, Daniel left the cabin, believing everyone to be asleep. Listening to leaves crunch under his boots and feeling a thorn come through the sole of one of them, he stopped to pull it out and found himself on his knees in the crackle of all the living and dying life around him. He was not a man to put words to his prayers, but he gave his whole weight to the ground and felt it push back. He let the muscles of his calves relax, slid the tops of his boots around on the elements – soil and pokeweed and grass and leaf. He put his wandering thought to the two slaves and considered their form, which was human, and their needs, which matched his own in so many ways, believing they, too, must contain a spark of the divine. This thought brought him comfort and many minutes passed before he stood up in his boots again and saw that the dark had come on fast, as if answering some need he had not expressed. Now he could move stealthily, feeling his way
through the trees, limb by limb and trunk by trunk, for he knew the feel of each of these parts of the path. He had given Simus a lamp, but there was no light inside the little hut and no sound, so the boy must be well asleep. Simus had been recently feeding the pigs an allowance of corn, justifying this by explaining the benefits. “Soon tha hog to be dress and salted down,” he’d said. “He to be smoke afta the brine form up and I build a smoke house for him.” The boy was excited about his venture and this was all very well, even admirable, but Simus must atone for the advantage taken of an unknowing girl and the cost to Daniel’s standing in the newly made community. Double shame it was, and reprimand must be meted out or Simus would not comprehend the serious nature of his wanton conduct. Or was
conduct
the appropriate word? As he crept through the underbrush surrounding the meagre hut he had built over the boy, Daniel wondered if the two young slaves even understood the act that had created yet another unfortunate soul to be enslaved by a man without heart or decency, a man to be loathed although the gospels taught otherwise. How could he love his neighbour? How could he turn the other cheek?
Conduct
. He turned his tongue around the word. It was likely the boy and girl had coupled out of lonely instinct, like wild animals, for that is what they were, lacking all education and refinement, lacking even self-respect. Without learning and understanding, how is conduct possible since it requires intention?

Under the canvas door, the opening was fenced halfway up so that the pigs, full grown now, could not escape. It is the chain of life, Daniel thought tiredly, one kept by another by another and by another. He had the fleeting impression that he, too, was a slave to something, but in a moment that impression was lost in his surprise at finding the hut empty except for the softly grunting and snorting pigs.

What if the boy had word of the girl’s situation and had gone to her on his limping leg? Daniel pulled the canvas back over the hut’s opening and rushed back to the house, which he did not enter. Instead, he saddled Mulberry quickly and took to the road, which was bare and moonlit.

U
naccustomed to night rides, the horse thudded heavily through the dark, flaring her nostrils and heaving her chest. The full moon was in a fit of fast swimming across the sky, moving among the scuttling clouds as if it were buoyant. In its bright light, Daniel made out a hobbling shape on the road ahead and pulling up next to it saw that he had caught up with Simus. “What are you doing out with that shingle knife?” he demanded.

Simus had the knife in his left hand and a walking stick held like a cane in his right. The knife reflected moonlight and starlight on its angled blade. Old men, too feeble to swing an axe, were given this tool to split kindling. It was used to split barrel hoops and lath flats and willow poles and none of these employments explained the boy’s walking out with it on the road at night. Simus said nothing.

“On your way to the Fox place, is it? To cause yet more trouble? Do you want to endanger that girl further?” Daniel got down from the horse and stood facing the boy, clenching his teeth and wanting to grab Simus as he had grabbed Isaac earlier in the day. “Listen now!” He reached out, holding his eyes on the boy’s starched face. “Give over that knife.”

Simus stepped back, reckoning his chances at anything but death now, anything but death including flight. He raised the knife.

Daniel made himself louder. “Listen hard and believe. I will act on the girl’s behalf.” He paused and drew breath and thought that Simus could not know what he meant however hard he listened. He took the boy by an elbow so that the walking stick dangled from his hand. “Hear me now. Hear me now … Jester Fox is raging. Go home. Go back. This is an order I give.”

The boy pulled his arm away and with the lifted blade struck his right hand so suddenly that for a long moment, the blade hung in the flesh, wavering. Pierced through the meat between thumb and forefinger, the hand was nailed to the walking stick. “He always takin her,” Simus said, looking down at the hand. In sorrow, in defeat, he turned his face left and right. The walking stick fell with a hollow clank and Daniel watched the boy’s blood dripping onto the road, watched it illumined by the moonlight as it made a dark pool at their feet. He did not for an instant believe what the boy had said about Jester Fox, but the smell of blood and the thought of such unworthy lust sickened him. He remembered then that Fox had accused him of the selfsame crime, but it was too much to think about or examine. “You’ve given yourself a terrible wound,” he muttered, swallowing the bile that had risen in his throat. But why? Why? Would a dog or a wild animal do such a thing? There seemed to be nothing with which to stanch the flow of blood, for it did not occur to Daniel to remove his own shirt.

The hand, lowered now, was gushing dangerously and Simus did not make a sound, although he still held the bloodied shingle knife.

“An injury to thyself pains the Lord,” Daniel whispered. He had forgotten the quiet intensity of his prayer in the timber lot. “Take Mulberry home,” he said. “I will walk on to the Fox place to see how things stand with the girl.”

It was a week after the purchase of the blue dress that this incident on the road occurred, although the second thing did not follow the first in any logical sequence. Certainly there was no cause, no effect. First the dress had been bought and given away, the butter had been churned to a chant, and then Jester Fox had arrived, struck Daniel with his folded hat, and Daniel had left the house late at night. Must events be related? The moon, full and stately, was still swimming through the clouds as Daniel trudged along the road. He kept his hands behind him as if they were chained and his head down, as if every stone on the road must be studied as a potential piece of chimney. Simus was turned toward home and surely Jester Fox would … what? Daniel’s thoughts moved like the moon, in and out of possibilities. He thought of the girl’s face the only time he had seen it. She was not much older than Mary. Or Ruth. And what if Fox had been using her as Simus proclaimed? Such things were said to happen on the plantations, where wealth had stolen the Holy Spirit from certain owners and turned their hearts to wretchedness, but out here in the woods of southwest Virginia, where they were all struggling to civilize the very ground where they walked, where they were required to live as Christians together or descend into chaos … out here, it was unthinkable that a man on his own home place with a young and helpless servant and a nearby wife in his bed … and children … The walk seemed to take forever. It was the Lord protecting him, giving him time to meditate. What if Simus had told an untruth to besmirch the girl’s owner and clear himself? On and on, this walking.
If thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone
 … It was a mile or so between houses, going by road.
If he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother
 … What if Simus had visited Bett by crossing the creek? The road dipped and swayed. Jester Fox had
accused Daniel of taking the girl himself. Those coarse words were beyond comprehension. Unless his neighbour was familiar with such a crime. The moon rose higher and peered all the way down to the place, somewhere behind him, where there must still be a pool of shining blood as if the earth had received a wound.
No cede malis
, he whispered. What if events were shaped by conditions rather than faith?