came out and tried to get the bullet out of Augustus, but the bullet was stubborn, having found a home.
When Augustus Townsend died in Georgia near the Florida line, he rose up above the barn where he had died, up above the trees and the crumbling smokehouse and the little family house nearby, and he walked away quick-like, toward Virginia. He discovered that when people were above it all they walked faster, as much as a hundred times faster than when they were confined to the earth. And so he reached Virginia in little or no time. He came to the house he had built for his family, for Mildred his wife and Henry his son, and he opened and went through the door. He thought she might be at the kitchen table, unable to sleep and drinking something to ease her mind. But he did not find his wife there. Augustus went upstairs and found Mildred sleeping in their bed. He looked at her for a long time, certainly as long as it would have taken him, walking up above it all, to walk to Canada and beyond. Then he went to the bed, leaned over and kissed her left breast.
The kiss went through the breast, through skin and bone, and came to the cage that protected the heart. Now the kiss, like so many kisses, had all manner of keys, but it, like so many kisses, was forgetful, and it could not find the right key to the cage. So in the end, frustrated, desperate, the kiss squeezed through the bars and kissed Mildred’s heart. She woke immediately and she knew her husband was gone forever. All breath went and she was seized with such a pain that she had to come to her feet. But the room and the house were not big enough to contain her pain and she stumbled out of the room, out and down the stairs, out through the door that Augustus, as usual, had left open. The dog watched her from the hearth. Only in the yard could she begin to breathe again. And breath brought tears. She fell to her knees, out in the open yard, in her nightclothes, something Augustus would not have approved of.
Augustus died on Wednesday.
Skiffington had slept little since the day Bennett came to tell him about Moses. The Thursday after Augustus was killed had brought on a small toothache that became overwhelming by midday Friday. He lay in bed beside Winifred that Friday night only to avoid her pestering him about not getting enough sleep; he lay and listened to her quiet sleeping, thinking about where Moses could hide in his county and shifting now and again as the toothache hounded him into Saturday morning.
He had been berating Counsel and the patrollers all week, and he had them all out most of the days and the nights to search for the man he began calling the murdering runaway. “Which is the worst,” Harvey Travis the patroller joked behind Skiffington’s back, “the murdering or the running away?” The bloodhounds in Manchester seemed most ineffectual, “couldn’t find stink on a skunk,” Oden Peoples complained, and more dogs were brought in from other counties. But they failed as well. The patrollers and the dogs concentrated on places to the east of the town, the places that were the closest to the north. By that Saturday they were searching not only for Moses but Gloria and Clement as well. “Somebody,” Travis said, “should close the gate at her place, or teach her how to own a slave. A man dies and a woman runs his place into the ground.”
Skiffington spent the days chewing bark that a slave, a root worker down the street, said would give him some relief for his toothache. She had peered into his mouth on Tuesday and told him there wasn’t much she could do for his suffering. “I do believe,” she said looking from one tooth to another, “that that pain is bringin you down and you just gotta pull it out. Just take it by the root and yank and yank till there ain’t nothin left.” They hadn’t bothered going inside to where she lived and she used the dying sunlight to investigate his mouth. “Open just so, Mr. Sheriff.” She touched the bad tooth with the end of a piece of bark and he shrank away in pain. He thought all the talk of yanking was her way of saying she could perform the task. But she told him, after pulling him back to her and closing his mouth with both her hands, that the mouth wasn’t something she liked to spend time thinking about. “You got a back ache, you got a heart ache, you got a foot ache, I can help you. But I don’t like to go to the mouth. Too far away from what I know bout helpin people. Too near the brain.” He came on Wednesday and offered her a fifty-cent piece to pull out the tooth but she said no and put the money back in his hand. Her master allowed her to do extra work for people so she could buy her freedom. On that Wednesday she had saved up $113 after three years of work. The price her master had quoted for her freedom was $350. “I can’t touch your mouth, Mr. Sheriff. I might hurt you more than I can help you.”
That Wednesday he went, again, with Counsel out to the farthest eastern edge of the county, out to where his cousin-in-law Clara Martin lived, then crossed into the neighboring county, knowing that the sheriff there would understand his encroachment. On the way back, Counsel complained about all the riding and said they should spend the night at Clara’s, but Skiffington wanted to get back to Winifred.
Fern came with Dora and Louis on Thursday to see Caldonia. After Robbins heard about the escaping slaves, he sent them to Caldonia to see what help she might be. Robbins told no one except Louis that he no longer had faith in Skiffington. Along the way to Caldonia, the young people had paid a courtesy visit to Fern, and she had decided to accompany them. It would be good to be away from Jebediah Dickinson, the gambler. Weeks and weeks later, when he was on the road to Baltimore, she would send Zeus into Manchester every day to ask about the mail. She promised God that if she ever heard from Jebediah she would send him the remaining $450 he said her husband owed him.
They had an early supper and Caldonia excused herself and rose from the table afterwards and told her guests that since the escape of the overseer she had been visiting the quarters each evening, “to ease my mind.” She did nothing during the visits but walk with Loretta from one end of the lane to the other, as if her presence might prevent still one more slave from running away. She had put the day-to-day running of the plantation in Elias’s hands. When she asked him Thursday morning in the parlor if he knew if others might escape, Elias looked first at Loretta and said that was a question for God. That morning, after Elias went to the fields, she sent word to Maude, her mother, to come to her, that she needed her near.
Her guests, including Fern, decided to come with her late that Thursday afternoon. Carrying a lantern even though there was still sufficient sunlight, Loretta walked two paces behind the group. Elias had freed the slaves early from the fields and most everyone was home eating their supper. So the lane was empty when they first entered, but Elias came out and then Delphie and Cassandra came out of their cabin. Celeste came to the door but did not cross her threshold. “Howdy, Tessie. Howdy, Celeste,” Caldonia said. Celeste only nodded.
“Hi you, Missus?” Tessie said. She was carrying her doll because her brothers had been playing with it more than she was comfortable with.
“I am well,” Caldonia said. “And you, Celeste?”
“Fine, Missus.”
“That’s such a pretty doll,” Fern said.
“My daddy made it for me,” Tessie said. She would repeat those words just before she died, a little less than ninety years later. Her father had been on her mind all that dying morning, and she asked one of her great- grandchildren to go to the attic and find the doll.
“Your daddy got the touch,” Louis said.
“Yes, Marse, he do.”
Elias was in the lane and said good evening to everyone, nodding finally to Loretta. Ellwood, Elias’s youngest, crawled up behind Celeste in the doorway and she picked him up. She heard Louis say that he was going out to search for Moses and the others and Elias said that if Moses was still gone come Sunday, he would join the search. Elias had asked Delphie to cut a lock of the dead baby’s hair before she put her into the ground, and he carried that hair in a piece of cloth pinned inside his shirt. Celeste then heard Elias say to Louis that Moses was world-stupid, the same words he had spoken to Skiffington, and that Moses did not know north from south unless somebody told him and even then he wasn’t real sure. The two men laughed. Caldonia said nothing and felt Loretta at her back.
Celeste shifted Ellwood in her arms. Tessie and Grant were on either side of her, clinging to her frock, and the four of them watched together. A bloodhound from another county, who had wandered into the neighborhood of the lane three days ago, rested beside Grant. Celeste did not know what she was going to do with Elias. She loved him, and no matter what there would be no way to get around that. Everything else that came their way—even his hatred of Moses—would have to do battle with her love for him. She could only hope that Elias would find his way back to what he had been.
She saw Elias say something she could not hear, but she noted Louis and Fern laughing in response. Dora and Caldonia were holding hands, the way she and Cassandra often did, the way she did with May, the way she used to do with Gloria. How so very different the world would be if Elias did not love her, too. But she knew that he did love her, even if some things in their days and nights blinded him to it.
Elias turned and looked for a very long time at his wife. Wife, trust me, his eyes said, and I will get us,
