Chapter Sixty-five
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Mysteries and Family Secrets
Oh, Isaac, what you did not know will when you learn of it kill you!
Run, hurry, hide! But you are a brave young fellow and so you won’t do that, will you?
Chapter Sixty-six
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And then death seemed to gather all about Isaac, like a cloud, like a cloak. He carried the scheme around with him in his mind, and though it faded out when he worked at day’s end he found it haunting him again, the revenge plot against the master’s son, the master’s son who would one day, sooner, no doubt, than later, become master himself, the revenge against the entire family itself before this happened.
It did not help that as he now reckoned his own father was fading so quickly. In the cabin after sunset he would sit with the older man and gaze into his eyes, and he swore he could see a light flickering, as if his soul were like some candle about to gutter out in the wind.
“Daddy,” he said, “tell me about when you came here.”
“Why you want to know about that?”
The older man shifted on the pallet as though caught up in a dream, except that he was wide awake.
“I just want to know.”
“Doesn’t do you good to know. Back in the old country my father might have been a king. What good that do you here, slave as you are?”
“Was he a king? I did not know that.”
“No, no, son. I was joking. He was…a slave,” the older man said. “The story he told me, hunters took me from him, but living with him I was not free there either. I will be free soon.”
“What do you say?”
“I am going to be free.”
The darkness settled around them, flowing from outside in, as though it were a liquid to be poured, a substance that flowed, on which the lightest objects might float. An ailing angry man, his angry son, the pair of them surrounded by the dark that grew deeper and deeper, it made a picture you scarcely ever see, real life among our people, an aspect of the pose and emotion of all manner of people since our ancestors—everyone’s ancestors!—first came down out of the trees to walk about and forage, oh, never to return to those heights.
After his father fell asleep Isaac left the cabin and wandered over to visit Liza.
The dark had settled over the quarters so deeply and indelibly it seemed impossible that light would ever return. It surprised him to find Liza in her own small cabin, illuminated by a steady-burning fire, holding a book in her hands.
“What you doing?” he said.
She looked up at him, inclined her head toward the fire.
“Reading.”
He knew books, there was a room in the big house full of them, though he had never touched one, let alone opened one. Ever since the doctor began teaching Liza, and it began when she was a little girl, there was always one book or another lying around. He just had never felt the desire to pick one up and start reading. Though he usually liked it when she read to him.
“What’s that one?” he said, pointing to the volume that lay open on the floor of her cabin.
“A good story about a good boy living with bad people. Would you like to hear it?”
Isaac shrugged, held up his hands. (When did the shrug first appear as part of human behavior? Did an animal shrug? Or was it something that happened on the ground, walking away from that exploding volcano? Or much later? When?)
She picked up the book and turned to the front of it. She moved her lips, she sounded, mostly correctly, these words (and it took her a much longer time to do this than it would take you or me, much longer):
“‘Although I am not disposed to maintain that the being born in a workhouse, is in itself the most fortunate and enviable circumstance that can possibly befall a human being, I do mean to say that in this particular instance, it was the best thing for Oliver Twist that could by possibility have occurred…’”
“What is that, what is that?” Isaac paced back and forth in the small cabin, unable to settle down and listen.
“‘The fact is, that there was considerable difficulty in inducing Oliver to take upon himself the office of respiration,- a troublesome practice’”—Liza went on reading, with all sorts of troublesome pronunciation and emphases, but read she did nevertheless—“‘but one which custom has rendered necessary to our easy existence; and for some time he lay gasping on a little flock mattress, rather unequally poised between this world and the next: the balance being decidedly in favour of the latter. Now, if, during this brief period, Oliver had been surrounded by careful grandmothers, anxious aunts, experienced nurses, and doctors of profound wisdom, he would most inevitably and indubitably have been killed in no time. There being nobody by, however, but a pauper old woman, who was rendered rather misty by an unwonted allowance of beer; and a parish surgeon who did such matters by contract; Oliver and Nature fought out the point between them. The result was, that, after a few struggles, Oliver breathed, sneezed, and proceeded to advertise to the inmates of the workhouse the fact of a new burden having been imposed upon the parish, by setting up as loud a cry as could reasonably have been expected from a male infant who had not been possessed of that very useful appendage, a voice, for a much longer space of time than three minutes and a quarter…’”
“Who is Nature? What is pauper? Workhouse like a plantation?”
Liza answered his questions as best she could and then continued reading for awhile. When she had finished she shut the book and held it to her chest.
“What is that?” Isaac said again.
Liza opened the book and looked to the small type across from the title page.
“That was London, that is what it was. That was London.”
“How do I know?” Isaac said. “London, what? I never been there and neither have you. So how you know?”
“The words make it happen.”
Isaac, seeming perplexed at first, now took a different tack.
“How you know how to do that? What do you do? You stealing something to do that? Why you keep on doing it?”
Liza took a deep breath and allowed herself a smile.
“Because it makes me free.”
***
Isaac might as well have been wearing chains the way he clanked around in his mixture of anger and resentment. His father was sinking. And whenever he saw the master, his urge to slaughter him and the entire family rose up in his gorge and fire spread through his chest up into his throat.
One day Old Walla-Walla caught him lashing at one of the horses and grabbed his arm.
“What do you think are you doing?” the old man said, holding him in a crushing trap of arms.
Isaac went limp.
He did not know. He was scarcely aware that he had been mistreating the animal. He had just picked up the whip and went at him, in blind fury, in the rush of terrible rage. Damn, damn, damn! Only after the old man stopped him did he hear the animal squealing, hoarsely, in pain. It took hours for them to calm the beast down and treat its wounds.
On another occasion, after a day of watching Liza at some distance at work in and around the house, he turned up at her cabin and found her reading again.
“Hello, Isaac,” she said without looking up.
“More books?”
“Yes.”
“This one good?”
Now she looked at him.
“I am not sure. It is very hard for me to understand.”
“Read to me,” he said, lowering himself onto the pallet next to her.
She gave him a half-smile, and began to read.
Every one loved Elizabeth. The passionate and almost reverential attachment with which all regarded her became, while I shared it, my pride and my delight.
“This about love,” Isaac said.
Liza nodded, and kept on reading.
On the evening previous to her being brought to my home, my mother had said playfully—“I have a pretty present for my Victor—to-morrow he shall have it.” And when, on the morrow, she presented Elizabeth to me as her promised gift, I, with childish seriousness, interpreted her words literally, and looked upon Elizabeth as mine—mine to protect, love, and cherish. All praises bestowed on her, I received as made to a possession of my own. We called each other familiarly by the name of cousin. No word, no expression could body forth the kind of relation in which she stood to me—my more than sister, since till death she was to be mine only…
“I thought this was about love, but this about the slaves,” Isaac said.
“I suppose so,” Liza said. “Or perhaps not.”
“The big folks know you take these from the house?”
Isaac tried to show his concern by touching her on the arm, but she pushed his hand away.
“The doctor gives me books,” she said. “I told you that.”
“Doctor, he ain’t been around,” Isaac said. “Some folks say he sick.”
Now Liza looked interested.
“Where did you hear that?”
“Nowhere in particular,” Isaac said. “I just heard it.”
“What kind of sick?”
Liza set the book down, spine up—Frankenstein was the name on it—and reached over for Isaac.
“Heart trouble, what I heard,” Isaac said.
“Cousin,” she said, “when—?”
“What you call me?”
“Cousin. Like in the book, Isaac. It is a close name, something of affection.”
“Affection? Hungh!” He snorted like a horse. “This reading playing some tricks on you, Liza. Times, I do not know what you are talking about.”
Liza tried to ignore his discomfort.
“Tell me about the doctor, what else you heard?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I will ask folk but for now I hear only nothing more.”
He settled in next to her on the pallet, boyish, despite his bulk.
“Read to me?”
“All right.”
She picked up the book and tried her way through another chapter, while Isaac, though tired from the day’s labors, remained awake and alert.
How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same color as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips…
She explained this to him as she read, and he gave it his best attention.
“Aiiee, this monster got yellow skin and black lips. I do not want to meet him in the woods in the dark.”
“Do not walk there and you will not meet him.”
“How come no one ever told me about him before this?”
“It is a secret.”
“Our doctor make him?’
“No, Doctor Frankenstein made him.”
“He live in Charleston?”
“He lives in this story.”
“What are you talking about? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“What I just said.”
She gave him a playful shove, which turned out to be harder than she had intended, and he went rolling over onto the dirt floor.
“Were you listening?”
“I was listening.”
He brushed himself off and crawled back onto the pallet.
“Keep on reading.” He snorted again like a horse. “Monsters! I ain’t afraid! Here they got black skin and yellow lips…So what’s afraid of that?”