Elias said, “I know. I know that.” Dropping the cup into his lap, he leaned his face into his hands and began to cry. On the worst days he had ever had, he had always been able to see himself as one day living free. But now…

“Is all right,” Luke said. “I’ll sit with you. Is all right. I’ma sit with you till all them hants leave you alone. I ain’t afraid of no hants.”

Moffett, after the services, sat with Henry and Caldonia in their dining room, eating bread and cheese and a tea that was more honey than anything else. He claimed anything sweet eased his gout. Now and again in their lives Caldonia and Henry would go down to the services with the slaves but generally the sitting with Moffett would pass in their minds as a kind of service, as communion with God. After the meal, Moffett sat with his feet propped on a stool Zeddie the cook had brought in from the back for him. The stool, padded, was used for little else and had become known as the Reverend Moffett stool.

Henry said little, thinking about what he would do with Elias.

“You are away from us this day, Henry,” Moffett said at one point. He had been paid the $1 for conducting the services the moment after he entered the house. In his early days of preaching, before the gout, he had been paid 3 cents for every slave he preached to, but the county had been wealthier then. Now, few white slaveowners employed him, many preferring to simply read to their servants out of the Bible. The few black slaveowners had begun to believe that their own salvation would flow down to their slaves; if they themselves went to church and led exemplary lives, then God would bless them and what they owned. And one day they would go to heaven, and so would their slaves. So why pay Moffett to help do what they could manage for nothing?

“He hasn’t been sleeping well,” Caldonia said. “I believe, Reverend Moffett, he works too hard and it shows with all those headaches. Sleepless nights. ‘Rest up, Henry,’ I’m always telling him. ‘Rest up.’ Perhaps you could supplement my words, Reverend Moffett. Remind him that God would not be happy to see us work ourselves to death.” She and Henry had been married three years and seven months.

“He certainly wouldn’t,” Moffett said. “Laziness is one sin, Henry, but working too much is also a sin. Why do you think God put such emphasis on Sunday, on resting. Keep the Sabbath holy is just God’s way of telling us not to overtax ourselves. Make God happy, Henry, and tax yourself just enough to pay your bill.”

“Precisely,” Caldonia said.

“I do,” Henry said. “I do rest up. It’s just that my wife doesn’t see all the times that I do.” Watching Moses tell him that Elias was gone, he had decided that a whipping would not be enough, that only an ear would do this time. He had just not decided if it should be the whole ear or only a piece, and if a piece, how big a piece?

“Oh, for goodness sakes, Henry!” Caldonia said. “You might get Reverend Moffett to accept that, but I know better.”

Moffett shifted in his chair and put one foot over the other on the stool. He had two more services to conduct that day and he would be late for both. Henry used him because he remembered him from his days as a slave at William Robbins’s, had liked to listen to him after his parents were gone into freedom and there was only Rita, his second mother, to care for him.

Moffett left.

Henry watched him ride off in his buggy and decided then that he would send for Oden Peoples, the Cherokee, the next day. He told Caldonia once they were back inside, in their parlor.

“That,” she said, “seems too great a punishment, Henry. Too much for such a small crime.” She was on the settee and he was at the window on the left side of the room.

“It ain’t that small, Caldonia. It’s a bad apple in the barrel, right down at the bottom, not even at the top where you can pick it and throw it away. Somethin gots to be done,” he said. Sometimes he talked the way Fern had tried to teach him and sometimes he did not. He was especially “deviant and lazy,” as she called it, when he was tired and uncertain. Caldonia sensed the exhaustion now and went to him, putting her arms around his back. Marriage, too, meant the end of loneliness, but Robbins had said nothing about that.

“Let him try one more time to do what’s right, Henry.”

“I cain’t. I just cain’t.” As a boy at Robbins’s plantation, he had known a man whose right ear had been cut off after he ran away a second time. When the man, Sam, wifeless, childless, was old and running was not so much on his mind anymore and he had time to gnaw on his unhappiness, he liked to grab small children to scare them, putting the earless side of his head close to the child’s face until the child screamed to be let go. The wound had blossomed into a terrible mushroom of scar tissue and was as different from the other side of his face as heaven from hell. “Go find my ear!” the old man would holler as he shook them. “Go find my ear, I say, and be quick about it!” One boy had fainted. Another child’s father had beat Sam but still he did not stop grabbing hold of children. Henry himself had been grabbed a few times, but one day, when he was twelve, he found himself not afraid anymore, wondered where the fear had gone as Sam pulled him closer to the side of his head and the mushroom once again threatened to open up and become large enough to pull him in. He was held long enough to study the brown smoothness of the scar that invited him to reach over and touch. Henry even had time to peer into the ear hole partly covered over with gray hair and brown smoothness and wonder how much sound such an ear could take in.

“Give him another day in the barn to reconsider,” Caldonia said. She took her arms from around him and held them at her sides but still continued leaning into his back.

“A day too long a time, Caldonia.”

As had been planned, they took an early supper at Fern Elston’s. Her gambler of a husband, Ramsey, was there and had started to drink even before their guests had arrived. Ramsey was not drunk but as often happened with him, he turned combative in the middle of the meal and accused another guest of owing him money. That guest, Saunders Church, was there with his wife, Isabelle, two free colored people without a slave to their names. Saunders laughed at first, thinking Ramsey was trying to fun him.

”Ramsey,” Fern said after her husband had asked for the money a third time, “let us leave financial matters until another day.”

Henry had been silent the entire meal. He had not wanted to come but Caldonia had insisted, saying that it might raise his mood.

“I owe you nothin,” Saunders said at last, seeing that Ramsey was not out to fun him. “I owe you nothin.” It was true; the drinking often made Ramsey think the whole world owed him a debt. The three men and the three women were the entire supper party. Ramsey was at the head of his table.

“Why not leave off, Ramsey, just like Fern said,” Henry said. “Saunders be your guest.” He was sitting at Ramsey’s left and Isabelle was sitting at Ramsey’s right.

“I didn’t ask some white man’s nigger about living my life,” Ramsey said. “You ask Robbins what to say this evening?”

Henry looked down at his lap and then reached over swiftly before Ramsey could move and held tight to Ramsey’s throat, shook it a time or two and continued to hold on. Ramsey began to sink in his seat. He was a reddish black man but slowly, as Henry held tight, all color disappeared from his face and his mouth opened and closed ever so slowly, like that of a fish, as he tried to pull in what little bit of air he could. Ramsey was able to look down across the table to his wife. Their marriage was approaching the far side of the hill from where they had started out and Fern looked into his eyes and did not move.

“Henry, for God’s sakes!” Caldonia said and took hold of his arm with both of hers. “Please, Henry!” Saunders got up and managed to pry Henry’s hand from Ramsey’s neck and Ramsey sank even deeper into his seat. Caldonia pulled Henry away and her husband sat in his seat and rested both hands on the edge of the table, on either side of his plate. Henry looked down to Fern and said, “I’m sorry to ruin such a good afternoon.” Isabelle and Saunders and Caldonia tended to Ramsey. Fern nodded and said, “I know you are, Henry. I know you are.”