Chapter Eighty-one
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I awoke to white light turning into golden light streaming in through the windows, and hovering over me, with as it seemed to my senses, a slight odor of smoke adhering to her, a dark figure, herself all dressed in white, and she turned, and I saw her face.
“Precious Sally,” I said.
“You back!” She raised her hands as if at a political rally or prayer meeting. “Thank the God Jehovah! He’s back!”
But of course if she was standing there I was back at The Oaks. I strained to speak, and my voice sounded to my own ears like a noise filtered through a long hollow log. “How did I get here?” Every joint of me ached and my head felt as though it were on fire.
Precious Sally leaned over me, dabbing at my forehead with a damp cloth.
“You arrived on that horse,” she said. “Somebody slung you over the horse like a dead animal. When I saw first you, you was out, like in a deep, deep sleep, I almost thought you was already dead.”
Gathering what little strength I had, I sat up quickly, but immediately fell back onto the bed.
“Where is Liza?”
Again Precious shook her head, and leaned close to me, so that I could drink deeply of her by-now-familiar breath.
“Gone,” she said. “You know she run off. You run off after her, didn’t you? Hoping to catch her, right? That’s what I told Mr. Jonathan. Isaac told him, too. Said he saw her take the horse and run, and then you come running, and you took off after her, you and that boy who just come up out of nowhere. The nights go by. And then you come back, tied onto the back of the horse. You’re shivering and burning. Shouting and seeing things. Please, Mister Nathaniel, I know you got touched by the Visitor, but you got to get out of bed now and makes things all right! There’s a lot of more trouble here at The Oaks. Master Jonathan took off after Liza, dragging Isaac with him. He had a gun, oh, gods, a big old gun. He supposed to be here to watch over the massa but now the men come from town and put him in his grave. I don’t know, what kind of son that is, goes chasing off into the swamp for a missing girl when he supposed to be watching over his father! It’s more than a day gone by. And the Visitor still here, it took our poor Jack while you was sleeping, and half a dozen men from the cabins, they gone. Now the missus is sick in her room. Miss Rebecca, she went to town with the burial men, hoping she wait out the Visitor there.”
I listened and listened to her catalog of doom, while my heart leaped out into the terrible forever, sick with regret because Liza was on the run without me. It made me even more sick than I was to think of that, but then how if she had not left me behind could she run far enough and fast enough to escape the patrols?
“Precious Sally,” I said, upright again and holding steadier than a moment before, “has my cousin read his father’s will?”
“The what, suh?” she said.
The what, I said to myself, the what, indeed!
“I am going to try and evict myself from this bed,” I said. “Precious Sally, can you meanwhile go down to the barns and see if Isaac has returned?”
“Yes, massa Nate,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said, and lay back, listening to her feet, the sound of her walking along the hall, then descending the stairs. How was it that I had found myself back here again after all our plans for running? Oh, yes, I arrived on the horse, tied there no doubt by young Charles from New Jersey. But where had he gone? Was he off and running again? Some moments passed—or was it minutes? Certainly not an hour went by while I lay there, my mind hoping all the best for the young boy and my soul hoping to rush along at the speed of a horse to catch Liza so that I might run with her even further. My legs, however, would not move.
I lay there in that bed, even more helpless than before, despising myself for collapsing under the weight of the illness—that Visitor, as the slaves called it—unable to help Liza. I must have dreamed, because I recall a fleeting image of Liza, and of that same female creature, brown-skinned, with bountiful breasts, whom I had seen rising out of the swamp.
***
A commotion arose outside my window, horses whinnied, and wheels spat up stones along the drive. A strong odor of smoke and burning drifted in the window and into, as I imagined, all the halls and rooms of the house.
“Precious Sally?”
I cried out, finding the strength in my belly if not in my lungs.
Shouts down below. Heavy footsteps in the hall. Suddenly as though from a blast of wind in a sudden storm, the door burst open and in came my cousin Jonathan in torn coat and filthy trousers, swept along by the odor of smoke and burning.
“Well, hello, Cousin. I hear you are not feeling so well. While you were ailing things have moved along. I have been led off on a wild goose chase and that bitch is on the run! And there is this!” he said, holding up a sheaf of smoldering paper.
“What are you doing?” I said to him in challenge.
“What am I doing?” He waved the paper in front of me, bringing it almost within my reach, and so I could smell the stink of the whiskey upon him even stronger than the odor of the fire. “I am making the future. I will not be bound by the past. My late father, now, turns out to have been a man quite haunted by the days gone by, the days when he was a thin gentleman with a thick lust for love among the cabins.” He barked out a monstrous laugh. “Like father, like son, do we say? Except that the son did not know this important fact about the father! The son believed that he was the sole heir of this already God-forsaken enterprise! But the father, the father was skulking about the cabins, making other heirs!”
Again, he waved the paper in front of me, as though he were an attorney arguing a case of law and I was the jury.
I felt all of a sudden absolutely ice-cold lucid and hauled myself upright on the bed.
“And you? You hypocrite! You dare to judge him?”
Jonathan laughed a wild and reckless caw-caw-cawing of a laugh.
“Who will judge him if not me? Cousin, are you Jews in New York mere pale imitations of the Gentiles? Do you sit around and say to yourselves, ‘Well, sirs, man cannot judge. Only God can judge?’ Here, in this deep place of rice and water, of ocean and woods, oh, yes, here, we make our own judgments about ourselves and others. At least do we Jews!”
I swung my feet around and steadied them on the floor next to the bed.
“At least do you who call yourselves Jews,” I said, amazed that I could find my balance. “Slaveholders that you are, you are much more like Pharaohs!”
“Ah, and you, pure heart, have not dabbled with a slave? Not you, no. Who is the hypocrite here? Who wanted to make a purchase of a certain young female!”
“Do not speak of her as though she were an animal, Cousin.”
“You used her as such, did you not?”
I took a step toward him, intending to slap his face, but my knees buckled and I fell back toward the bed.
“You have used her in much worse fashion.”
Ignoring my accusation, he countered with another. “She is a murderer, you know. I have seen the evidence.”
“It was my pistol,” I said.
“Are you saying that you shot Langerhans? I never would have thought you had it in you, Cousin.”
“You have done so much worse,” I said.
“Have I?”
“Bastard!” I reached for him and my breath came up short and the room began to spin.
I tried to regain my balance even as my cousin went about the business of completing the burning of the will.
“I will not let you get away with this,” I said, “I know what that paper contains.”
“Oh, and will you take me to court? On whose behalf?”
“On Isaac’s,” I said. “On the part of your half-brother.”
He opened his hand and the remaining shreds of charred paper drifted to the floor.
“Half no more,” he said.
“What do you say?”
“A sad and unfortunate accident,” he said.
Now I pushed myself from the bed again and stumbled toward him, fists raised.
Deftly, he stepped aside and I went stumbling to the door, where I held myself in tenuous balance.
“What do you say?” I repeated hoarsely, turning myself around.
“Do you want to know the truth, Cousin?”
“Tell me what you did,” I said.
“What I did?”
“Tell me what happened.”
I could scarcely catch a breath, but I hovered there at the doorway, waiting for him to speak while the stink of smoke drifted in through the windows and, in fainter fashion, crept up the stairwell and sneaked into the hall, that insidious odor of the worst things to come.