Winifred would pick something from the bookcase and read. Skiffington himself was partial to Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle.” “You’ll wear it out, John,” Winifred would say. “You will drain all the freshness out of it.” To coax her, he would begin, “Rip Van Winkle, a posthumous writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker.”
Skiffington thought of “old Rip” when he saw the man on the steps leading up from the street to the jail. The hair on the man’s face was wild and quite abundant, and as Skiffington got closer he made out the eyes and nose and mouth poking through the hair. Only the hair told him it was a white man, because the skin was too dirty to bear witness to that. He could have been one of the mountain men who lived alone and came down every now and again just to hear human voices. The man stood up several yards before Skiffington got to the jail and he stood firm on his two feet, testifying that whatever the dirt and the hair said about him, there was a heart and a mind ready to say something different.
“John,” Counsel Skiffington said.
Skiffington stopped with one foot on the steps and the other still in the street. He studied the man for more than a minute and when the man said his name again, Skiffington said, “Counsel, that you?” He smiled and extended his hand. He had heard thirdhand that Counsel had fallen into the blaze he created at A Child’s Dream in North Carolina just after he had shot himself in the head. The bank Counsel owed had actually started that story in its attempt to provide some conclusion to the whole Counsel Skiffington affair. Among dozens of burnt bodies, who would know that one wasn’t the master of the plantation?
“It’s me,” Counsel said. “It’s me and I think I can say that and mean it.” They went on shaking hands and would have embraced but the cousins had never had that kind of love. Counsel had arrived late in the night with a man who had picked him up in Roanoke. The man was leading two wagonloads of goods—from cloth to bullets to books—to northern Virginia. Counsel had intended to accept free passage all the way to the man’s destination, but the God he found in Texas told him he might as well stop and see what might happen with John Skiffington.
“Counsel, I took you for dead,” Skiffington said. “Winifred and I took you and everybody for dead, that’s what we heard.”
“Everybody is, John. I suppose I was, too. But now I’m standing here and telling you I’m not.”
“Let me take you home to Winifred, get you cleaned up.”
“I don’t think I’m fit to meet any womenkind,” Counsel said. “Especially not one I’m related to.”
“Mrs. Skiffington wouldn’t mind.”
“I would, John. I would,” and Counsel remembered that the world had always called his wife Mrs. Skiffington. “I would mind. Maybe if you could spare me something so I could put up at the boardinghouse, I might be presentable in a day or two. A bath, some meals, and I’ll be a man ready for civilized society again.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you, but if the boardinghouse is what you want, then that is what I’ll give you.” They went two streets over and Skiffington paid for three nights at the boardinghouse.
He came by about noon and he and Counsel took dinner in the house’s small dining room. Counsel had bathed and shaved, and as he ate, the man John Skiffington loved but had had so much trouble with began to emerge. During the meal, Counsel said that he had been practically everywhere and now he did not know what to do with himself. By the end of the meal, Skiffington was asking Counsel if he wanted to be his deputy.
“You always struck me as a man who wanted the job all to himself,” Counsel said, drinking coffee. “Or that’s what I got from Belle reading Winifred’s letters to me. John Skiffington could do everything alone.”
“There gets to be more to be done. It wouldn’t hurt to have someone standing sharp at my back. Family is good for that. Good for backing you up.”
“I’ll do whatever I can.”
Counsel came to live in Skiffington’s house, shared a room and bed with Carl Skiffington, John’s father. Though he said nothing to anyone, Counsel thought himself entitled to the room that had always been Minerva’s. He did not understand why a slave girl should be put above him. A slave he himself had once owned. He suspected that there was more between her and Skiffington and that her own room was just one thing the girl had managed to wheedle out of his cousin. He had seen other white men fall prey, so why not a man who claimed so much to walk with God? After his first month’s pay, Counsel moved back to the boardinghouse, and the woman that owned the place charged him less than the other boarders, because he was the law and because he had suffered tragedies in North Carolina.
Mildred Townsend came out to the road in the morning and the evening every day after they took Augustus and waited for nearly a half hour. She knew that Augustus sometimes took on unexpected jobs when he was away from home and forgot to send word back to her that he would be home before long. At the end of each half hour she would raise her arms up high, her fingers extended, and she would feel Augustus’s spirit flow into the tips of her fingers and she would know that he was on his way. She did not worry the first week or for most of the second week. “I’ll give that man pure hell when he do show up,” she said to their dog, who came out to the road with her and waited beside her the whole time. “And you help me, huh? You help me give him pure hell.” She and Augustus had been married for more than thirty-five years, and she trusted him to be somewhere safe. She knew that with their only child gone, her husband would not do anything to put more suffering in her heart. It would be toward the end of that second week that she would go to Caldonia and they, with Fern Elston the teacher, would go to Skiffington, who would be away. But Counsel, his new deputy, would be there in the jail.
About a week after South Carolina, outside of McRae, Georgia, they camped and after Stennis had crushed up some food for Darcy, who had but two teeth in his head, Stennis fed Augustus and settled him down at an apple tree.
Augustus said to Stennis before he went to Darcy, “I owe you the same licks that you gave me back in Virginia. I want you to know I be owin you good.”
“I spect everything cost somethin, even some licks from way back in Virginia.”
“And when I come for you, you gon know it,” Augustus said.
“I done figured that in the cost of my business, too.”
“I wanna to go home,” Augustus said. “I wanna go home and I think you know the way to help me.”
“We all wanna go home.”
“I want to go home.”
Stennis noted that these were the first words Augustus had spoken since the deaf-mute stunt in South Carolina. “I see you back to talkin again.”
“I ain’t had nothin to say.”
Stennis checked the chains again. “You have a good night.”
“Let me just slip away,” Augustus said.
“He would know that I the one that opened the door for you.”
“Then come with me. We can go together. Us together.”
“That ain’t in my power.”
“I say it is.”
“It just ain’t. He be my bread and butter. Jam, too.”
“Back home,” Augustus said, “I be my own bread and butter.”
Stennis sighed. “I can see that.” He stood up. “I can see that with my own two eyes.”
Darcy shouted, “Stennis! Stennis! Where you at?”
“Over here, Marse.” Stennis began walking away.
“Just let me slip away.”
“Stennis!”
“Comin, Marse!”
“Well, come on then. Come here and rub my feet.”
The morning after Caldonia Townsend made love to Moses her overseer for the first time, she woke about dawn and sat up in her bed and watched the sun come up. She had thought she would not sleep very well, but the night had been kind and she slept many hours without disturbance once sleep did arrive. She had had a dream just before waking of being in a house smaller than her own, a house she had to share with a thousand others. As she sat watching the sun she tried to remember more about the dream. Nothing came to her except the memory of someone in the dream saying that people in the attic were burning other people. The house Henry had built had no attic. She always slept with the curtains open, something Henry had gotten used to. Who else in this world could accept sleeping with the curtains open? she thought and raised her knees to her chin. She felt no guilt about Moses, which surprised her. Someone down in the fields, a woman, was singing. She soon realized that the woman was
