Elias was next and he dug down and then he gave the shovel to Stamford, forty years old. Stamford, in addition to chasing young women, could be a most disagreeable man if he was idle too long. When he was honest with himself, Stamford knew his days with Gloria were at an end. He was now studying on Cassandra, Alice’s cabin mate, but Cassandra had already told him once she wouldn’t go with an old dog full of fleas. Gloria, twenty-six, loved biscuits, loved to open them hot and soak them in molasses when she could get it. Stamford knew how to cook biscuits the way she liked, but that had not been enough. They had fought all the time; once it was an all-night battle and they, bruised and sore, were unfit for the fields the next day. After a week of the fighting, Henry had Moses separate them. It was a good thing, people said, because in another week Gloria would have killed him. Stamford had a plan to make Cassandra like him, the third plan that summer. That day weeks later when Stamford would see the crows fall dead from the tree, before he himself walked out toward death, he would say good-bye to Gloria and he would say good-bye to Cassandra, to all that good young stuff that the man had once advised him would allow him to survive slavery. “Without all that young stuff, Stamford, you will die a slave. And it will not be a pretty die.”
When Stamford was done, Calvin took the shovel back and before long six feet were finally ready for Henry. The men then collected the lumber from the wagon Augustus and Mildred came in and took it to the second barn, where they made Henry a coffin. The wood was pine, which just about everybody in Manchester County, in Virginia, was buried in. The slaves sometimes got pine, if they had always done the right thing and their masters thought they deserved it.
Sometime after two o’clock William Robbins left with Dora and Louis, he off to his plantation and they off to the house they shared with their mother outside the town. The rest of the day wore itself away and nothing good and nothing bad happened.
Alice, the woman who wandered in the night, had started being restless way long before bedtime. “Just leave her be,” Cassandra kept telling her mother, Delphie, who wanted some way to calm Alice. The three shared their cabin with an orphaned teenage girl. In the end, leaving her alone was just what Delphie had to do and she shook her head as Alice went out the door. Alice had a minor cut on her foot from walking all about the night before, the night her master died. But the cut did not prevent her now from strolling up and down the lane, chanting, “Master dead master dead master be dead.” Moses did not go out that evening to be alone with himself in the woods, but before he went to bed he did go about the plantation to make certain all was well. He told Alice to hush three times and that last time she did, choosing then to only pace up and down the lane. If Augustus and Mildred in May’s cabin heard Alice chanting about their dead son they made nothing of it. Finally, Alice sauntered off toward the smokehouse.
Caldonia and Calvin and their mother came down to the lane once that evening to ask Augustus and Mildred to please come and stay in the house. They declined, as they had twice before that day. Mildred might have gone up, had she not been with Augustus. Fern Elston came down to the lane as well, the first time she had ever done so. Before now, before she had seen off the gambler with one leg weeks earlier, she had always stayed in the house on her visits, preferring not to mingle with “any slave that was not house broken,” as she put it. But the gambler who lost his leg would change everything and she was never to see the world the same way again. That evening, as she walked behind Caldonia, Maude and Calvin, she thought that the gambler, Jebediah Dickinson, should have been more than halfway to Baltimore by now, if he made it, if the horse and wagon she gave him held up. In a different world, she had been thinking since two mornings after he left, she might have found something with him, one leg or not, dark skin or not. She would not even have had to teach him how to read and write, because he came knowing that already. I have been a dutiful wife.
Moses and Priscilla came out of their cabin and joined the small group as they went down the lane. The evening smoke of supper fires hung thick all about them. Caldonia, still veiled, knocked at a few doors and poked her head inside one or two cabins to ask if there was anything anyone needed. All the children liked her, Mistress Caldonia. Her mother Maude had been saying all day that she had to take care of her “legacy,” but as Caldonia went about what Henry, following William Robbins, had called “the business of mastering,” she did not think she was doing anything more than escaping for a spell from a house that was twice as large as it had been the day before. Moses spoke to her all the while as she walked, letting her know what he and the slaves would be doing when they returned to work, what his tasting of the soil had told him about the crops. His droning on and on was a bit soothing, far more than Calvin’s hand on her arm or the children’s smiling up at her. His talking told her in some odd way that one day the pain would at least be cut in half.
At the end of the lane, they turned around. Fern stopped and stood alone and looked out beyond the lane, to the fields. When she turned back, Alice was in front of her, telling Fern that the master was dead. “I know,” Fern said. “We know that.” “Then why ain’t you ready?” Alice said. Fern looked back toward the fields and when she turned around again, Alice had gone away. In four generations, Fern’s family had managed to produce people who could easily pass for white. “Marry nothing beneath you,” her mother always said, meaning no one darker than herself, and Fern had not. Her mother would not have approved of the gambler who lost a leg. “Human beings should never go back. They should always go forward.” Some of Fern’s people had gone white, disappearing across the color line and never looking back. She saw some of her kin now and again, a sister, cousins, in Richmond, in Petersburg, carriaging away with fine horses down the street, and she would nod to them and they would nod to her and go on about their business. Fern’s husband was also a gambler and he was slowly gambling away their little fortune but there was nothing she could do about it. The gambler with the one leg was gone. She had never known anyone to go to Baltimore and return to tell her about it. I have been a dutiful wife.
The lane quieted after they returned to the house. Moses and Priscilla went into their cabin and shut the door for the night. Alice the wanderer came back to the lane, walking up and down. In their cabin, Augustus and Mildred lay down and held each other. One of them started talking-they would not remember which one it was-all about Henry, from his birth to his death, starting a weeks-long project of recalling all that they could about their son. If they had known how to read and write, they could have put it all in a book of two thousand pages. Up in the house, Calvin lit another set of candles, preparing to sit the night with Henry. As Calvin lit the candles, Loretta covered Henry’s face with a black silk cloth-she felt he had best rest before the trip in the morning.
Alice set off and she was no sooner out in the road than she began chanting again. Loud, as if she were trying to reach the rafters of heaven. In a little more than a mile from the Townsend plantation Sheriff John Skiffington’s patrollers came upon her. “Master dead master dead master be dead.”
”What you doin out here?” asked Harvey Travis, the man with the Cherokee wife. He knew Alice was crazy but he thought his job required asking a question even if there was no logical answer. There were three of them, the patrollers, the same number as always for that section of the county.