“No, thank you. But good night. And thank you for a fine meal. For the pie, too.”
“And thank you, too, suh. A good night. And good mornin when mornin comes.”
“Good night.” Skiffington left, the awkwardness still in the air. He went back to the parlor and picked up the Bible where he had left off. But that chapter was not what he felt he needed right then so he flipped through the book and settled on Job, after God had given him so much more, far more than what he had before God devastated his life.
He told Clara the next day that he had spoken with Ralph and that all was well, that she was not to worry anymore. “Worry bout rain for your garden, and don’t go any higher on the worry ladder,” he told her. She smiled.
He had business with two patrollers—Harvey Travis and Clarence Wilford—several miles from her, and after dinner, near one o’clock, he set out on a horse Ralph saddled for him. The Saturday was cloudy but he was confident that he could get there and back before the rain, if rain there was.
When the group of patrollers were formed, Barnum Kinsey and Oden Peoples, brother-in-law to Harvey Travis, were the only patrollers who owned slaves. The patrollers were paid $12 a month, mostly from the tax on slaveowners, a levy of 5 cents a slave every other month. (The tax went to 10 cents a slave with the start of the War between the States, and it was enforced through most of 1865.) Barnum Kinsey was exempt from the tax for the time his one slave Jeff was alive, and Oden Peoples was never taxed.
Oden was a full-blooded Cherokee. He had four black slaves. One was his “mother-in-law.” Another was his “wife,” who was half-Cherokee herself, and the other two were their children. His wife had belonged to Oden’s father, and so had the mother-in-law. When Oden took Tassock as his woman, the father threw in her mother because he thought Oden’s woman might be lonely so far away from the village where she had been his slave. Oden’s father liked to go about the world claiming he was a Cherokee chief, the leader of a thousand people, but that was not true, and people, black and white and Indian, would ridicule him about the lie, to his face and behind his back. Chief Tell-A-Lie, they called him.
Oden’s wife was half sister to a woman the patroller Harvey Travis had married. She, too, had been a slave, though full Cherokee, but Travis essentially bought her from Chief Tell-A-Lie and freed her, saying he would never marry a slave.
In so many ways, Travis became Skiffington’s most difficult patroller. But Travis was good at what he did, and Skiffington saw him as a free-ranging cat who couldn’t be tamed but who killed enough mice to make up for his lawlessness.
That cloudy Saturday after dinner at Clara’s, Skiffington rode out because of a dispute Travis had with the patroller Clarence Wilford. Travis had a dying cow that he decided to sell to Clarence and his wife Beth Ann. Harvey got $15 and claimed to Clarence that the cow was a good milker, though in fact more milk fell from the sky than came from the cow. Clarence had eight children and they were getting to the point where they were forgetting what cow milk tasted like. Indeed, his three youngest had only tasted their mother’s milk. So Beth Ann and Clarence bought the cow and waited and waited for the milk to come. “I’ve never known drier teats,” Clarence told his wife. That went on for weeks, with Clarence stewing and growing ever more angry with Harvey. It was so bad that during patrols they would argue and fight and no other patrollers wanted to work with them.
Then, a week before the Saturday John Skiffington showed up, Clarence came out of his house, determined to slaughter the cow and settle for the meat he could get. He knew the problem he would have, for his children had taken a liking to the cow, had even given the thing a number of pet names in the time she was with them. Clarence came out to the barn and found his wife Beth Ann on her haunches milking the cow. She looked up at him and her whole face was wet with tears. “Dear dear Jesus,” she was saying. She was using the water bucket to catch the milk and as she milked with both hands, she was trying to dry the tears from her face with the sleeves of her blouse, lest the tears fall into the milk. “She was mooin out here and I just came in to see what was the matter.”
Clarence went to his wife, kissed her cheek. “Call em,” she said to him, speaking of the children. “Call em all in here.” He stood up from her and stepped back once, twice, three times, then he turned his back and shot around to see if the milk was still there. As if she could read his mind, she took one teat and aimed it at a cat standing to her side. The cat closed its eyes and opened its mouth and drank. Its tail had been in the air, but as it drank, the tail lowered and lowered until it was at last resting on the ground.
The children came in, the big ones carrying the little ones. They all drank from the bucket and when it was empty, their mother filled it again. Then she filled it twice more. Soon, the children, on the barn floor, lay down and fell asleep. Clarence sat beside his wife and after a time he put a hand, the one not stained with milk, to the back of his wife’s head and rubbed her hair. The cow swung its tail and chewed its cud. It farted.
In the end, the parents had to carry all the children into the house to bed because the children did not want to rouse up and walk in. “You know what this means?” Beth Ann said as they carried in the last of the children. “Tell me?” he said. “It means we’ll have to get a new water bucket.”
Harvey Travis wanted the cow back because a cow flowing with milk was not what he had taken $15 for. Clarence had told Skiffington that he had been shot at twice and though he hadn’t seen the shooter, he believed it was Harvey. Beth Ann sent word to Skiffington by patroller Barnum Kinsey: “We will kill him or he will kill us.”
Skiffington got to Clarence’s place and found Beth Ann with two of the children in the garden. Clarence was in the woods and she sent one of the children to fetch him. Skiffington sent the other child to get Harvey, then he and Beth Ann went into the barn so he could see the cow.
“I’m glad you’re here, John,” she said, clapping off the dirt from her hands. Skiffington knew her to be the more fiery of the two. “Maybe you can make some sense of this whole mess. I sure can’t, and Clarence can make less sense than me.” A few chickens scurried as they made their way to the barn. Her long black hair was slightly unkempt, and he saw that it would have taken only a few brush strokes to make it pleasing. The Wilfords were poor but not as poor as the family of Barnum Kinsey.
“I wouldn’t wanna leave here, Beth Ann, without a full settlement.”
“I want you to know I meant what I said about killin Harvey Travis. If it comes to him or the father of my children, I would not hesitate.” Barnum had told Skiffington that word about killing had come from both man and wife. Now he knew that the wife was the sole author, and he could see why Clarence, a man who had craved peace all his life, would want a woman like Beth Ann as his wife.
The barn door was ajar and she forced it open with a hand and a foot.
The cow was scrawnier than Skiffington had imagined, dull yellow with brown spots the size of platters. Dull yellow eyes, too. Something Joseph might have dreamed up and warned Pharaoh about. All that week the Wilford children had been calling the cow Smiley.
When they came out of the barn, Clarence was coming upon them in a trot, sweating, and in little more than a minute, Harvey came over the rise with two of his boys and Clarence’s boy that Skiffington had sent to get him. None of Travis’s children favored him. They all looked like his Cherokee wife, though they were lighter than she was, and that light skin was Travis’s only gift to them.
“You sell Clarence and Beth Ann that cow?” Skiffington asked Travis. Skiffington’s dinner had not set well with him and he was now, suddenly, impatient.
“Yes, I did, John.”
“Well, that should be the end of it, Harvey,” Skiffington said. “The law is on Clarence’s side. Square bargain. Clean deal.”
“Now wait here a minute, John,” Travis said. “Maybe I shoulda got to you first and pled my case, steada bein second to testify like I am.”
“John, you can see what we had to wrestle with out here,” Beth Ann said. “This kinda talk and bullets to keep em company.”
“The only bullets were from your side.” Travis looked at Skiffington. “Or are you to believe all her side on that too? Maybe if Clarence would stiffen up a—”
“I take no side but the right one,” Skiffington said to Travis, “and if you don’t believe that then you can turn around and go home.” He waited. “I ain’t got time to waste on this cow business, Harvey. I don’t want my patrollers actin like this.” He and Harvey were now facing each other. Beth Ann knew enough about life to know when things were dancing their way so she was quiet. Skiffington stepped to Travis so they were but two feet apart. “You tell me this, Harvey: If that cow had died a day after you sold it to him, a day after now. No, not a day, not even a day. One hour after you sold it to him, just long enough for Clarence to lead the thing from your place,
