Hunting Midnight

are …”In his desperation, Benjamin closed his eyes and began reciting a prayer in Hebrew. After a time, he said, “I know I ought to have given them to you years ago, but I was so very frightened. You and Francisca and the girls were so happy. I said to myself, ‘Why must I ruin their lives? Midnight is gone and I shall try to find him by myself.’ I continued writing over the years to many men in England and America, but I had no better luck than James. It has been suggested to me that Midnight may even be dead. The African slaves … Dear boy, their lives are brief in America.”

My head was throbbing, and a stern voice was telling me that my nine years of happiness with my wife and children had been beyond contemptible; all the while, Midnight had been caged.

“But what could have made my father do such a thing?” I demanded. “I don’t think anything could make him do something so evil.”

“John, this is difficult for me. It is not my place — ”

“I shall not hold it against you. Tell me.”

“Your mother … your mother and Midnight — ”

“Out with it, man!”

“John, forgive me, but it seems that May and Midnight … that they … that they had shared a bed together as man and wife.”

Benjamin spoke some more, but I heard nothing. Time was ticking outside of me. I closed my eyes and could feel Father and Midnight by my side. Their presence bore down on my chest, suffocating me. Then I saw Francisca on her deathbed — pale and withered. I was singing to her: In Scarlet town, where I was born … Midnight had been in captivity all the while we had been raising our daughters — during every moment of happiness. I had betrayed him with my own good fortune.

Had my wife been taken by God to pay for my wickedness?

A wail rose from the depths of my being. I wanted it to shatter the roof and the Lookout Tower, to summon the dead from their graves — to shred my life into so many bloody strips that it could never be sewn together again.

XXIX

My daughters rushed down the stairs, summoned by my unholy cry. Benjamin calmed them, saying I’d had a spell of dizziness thinking of their late mother and had shouted in fright.

My usually dependable stomach heaved at that moment, obliging me to call for a basin — thrust at me by Graca just in time.

With his quick hands, Benjamin cleverly hid the letters under his cloak. I had a chance to reread them only after the girls were sent to bed again. When I’d finished, I took my father’s watch from my waistcoat pocket. It was half past one in the morning. I had just passed through an invisible threshold. I was no longer the person I had been.

“Benjamin, I beg of you,” I said quietly, “was the reason for Father’s betrayal truly as you said?”

“John, your mother and Midnight — must I tell you again what your father told me?”

In vain I studied his face for a sign of treachery. I said, “But what you’re saying is preposterous.”

“Nevertheless, it is what James told me.”

“I would have known. I would have been able to tell.”

“John, you were only a lad. You could not see what they hid from you.” He shook his head. “No child understands the ways of the adult heart. These things were beyond you. And not just you. I had not guessed.”

“For how long were they presumed to have been … to have been — ”

“Your father and I did not discuss that.”

“I cannot imagine Mother betraying Father in that way. And Midnight would never have been a traitor to him.”

“Perhaps not — I do not know. I can only repeat what I was told. John, there is one other thing, for I must unburden myself of all my secrets before I go. And I pray again that you do not hate me. You will recall that your mother left your home for several days after your father’s return from England. She was feeling sick. She went to stay with your grandmother.”

“Indeed, I remember well.”

He stood up and warmed his hands at our hearth for a time, plainly gathering his courage.

“It was then that she lost … she lost the child,” he said to the flames.

“What child? Speak plainly.”

“John, your father … he said your mother was with child by Midnight. A time came when she was having the sickness in the morning. She quit your home to be with your grandmother. It was then that she lost the child.”

“What? How can this be? This is insanity, Benjamin!”

“I only know what I was told, dear boy.”

“That she was with child — Midnight’s child?”

“Yes.”

“I cannot see how that is — did she lose it or was it killed?”

“I do not know.”

I walked to the foot of the stairs. I looked up, thinking of my daughters safe in bed. What an inheritance I had given them! My thoughts carried me into the past — to just after Father’s return from London. I stood outside the locked door to my parents’ bedroom, where Mother had hidden herself away — to ensure that I would not notice her pregnancy.

I despised Benjamin at that moment, just as he had feared. “Mother was often given to agitation,” I said crossly. “Her sickness was simply a loss of equilibrium brought on by — ”

“John, say what you will. I am only repeating what James told me. He swore me to silence. I must tell you that. I am breaking my vow to tell you.”

I wondered then if Grandmother Rosa had known about Mother. I doubted it, since she would certainly have used it as a weapon against us if she had.

Benjamin handed me a glass of wine.

“John, despite your anger at me, and despite any errors in judgment an old man may have made, do you think you might permit him to give you some advice?” When I agreed, he said, “If you ask your mother of these things, I’d tread lightly.”

I shook a fist at him in a fresh burst of rage. “She will be the one who will have to tread lightly! I have been lied to all these years.”

“Even so, she is apt to react badly to you knowing. She would not have wished that for anything. She will be terribly angry with me.”

I threw my glass into the fire. “Damn her! You’ve done the right thing. Damn them all!”

“Calm yourself. The girls.”

“My girls have been cheated out of their grandfather by his own selfish perfidy. Not only that, but they might have grown up with Midnight. Goddamn it, don’t you see how Papa cheated us all — even himself!”

“John, I have been cheated as well, do not forget. Midnight and I …” Benjamin’s voice faltered. “Well, let us just say that I lost a powerful partner for my true work. He … he was like a son to me.”

Filled with remorse, I apologized for my disrespectful words. I saw now what had to be done. “Benjamin, I must go to London now to speak to my mother. Afterward, I’ll take a ship to New York. Violeta will not mind putting me up there for a few days. And then I shall go to Alexandria and Charleston. If Midnight has been living in slavery these seventeen years …”

The world suddenly seemed to darken and I felt very weak. “I cannot understand any of this,” I kept repeating. Yet I was beginning to see how each link of the past met its neighbor perfectly. I now had the explanation for the collapse of my family that I had so long sought. What a fool I had been to believe that the answer would bring me solace!

I wondered then if Mother had known of Father’s betrayal of Midnight. If not, and if she had been in love with the African, then she probably believed that Father had murdered him.