That day the Townsends and Valtims Moffett arrived back at their respective homes at about the same time. Moffett came up the short lane at his place and before he was even five yards from his little house he could hear his wife and her sister arguing. The dog was dead so there was no one to greet him. There was still a good bit of sun left and his body, oiled and fed by the long day, had enough energy and power to do some work. He took the carriage to the barn and went to his house, stood at the edge of the porch and listened. Their fighting had been going on for two months, since two days after he had slept with his sister-in-law. His unhappy wife had let it be known to her sister that she would not care if the sister slept with Moffett. But once the sister had done so, an unexpected rage took hold of the wife and the two would argue all day and late into the night.
Moffett stood and listened. He took a perverse delight in hearing them, was lulled into sleep by the sound of their fighting. He knew God was not pleased about that, but he felt he had many years of life ahead of him, despite his ailments, and so there would be time to force his knees to bend before God and ask his forgiveness. The women worked to please him, to show him that each was better for him and that the other should be cast out. Did God deny David and Solomon any less? Moffett went to the barn. He could still hear them from there. Soon the sun would be gone, and it would take with it his strength. He prepared the horse for the night and took up his plow. He emptied the money from his purse and counted out what he had earned-$4.50. Still in his Sunday preaching clothes, he took up the tools needed to sharpen the plow.
Henry and Caldonia retired early that night and he made love to her twice, forever seeking the son who might temper Augustus Townsend’s heart. When it was done, he lay on his back and she rested on her side and put her arm across his chest. “What anyone said never mattered to me,” she said after a time, thinking of what Ramsey the gambler had said. He was sweating and she put her tongue to the side of his face where the sweat poured down and caught some of it with the tip of her tongue.
”I know,” he said.
“Put more armor round that heart of yours about such things,” Caldonia said.
“I’m tryin,” he said and smiled. “I spect I’ll have the full armor by day after tomorrow.” He closed his eyes and she pulled herself even closer and the sweating stopped and she closed her mouth. Sam, the man with one ear, lived on at the Robbins’s plantation. He had a cabin to himself, which Robbins had permitted even after the overseer had said it would spoil him. “Once he learned right from wrong, he gave me good work,” Robbins said to the overseer. Sam was still grabbing and frightening little children. The grown-ups knew it was a habit that they could do nothing about, so they tried to teach the children to avoid him. “Give him not even so much as a good mornin or a good night. Wave from way over yonder when he speak to you and be on your way.”
On his way to the Townsend place on Tuesday morning, Oden Peoples the Cherokee met Sheriff John Skiffington and told him he had been hired by Henry after one of his slaves had run away. Skiffington had in his saddlebag a month-old letter from his cousin Counsel Skiffington in North Carolina. The letter swore by a woman in Amelia County who had a cure for stomach ailments, which John Skiffington had suffered from since he was a boy. Counsel had always teased John about his “woman’s stomach” but he had never thought his cousin’s pain was not real. John had set out for an overnight trip to the woman in Amelia, but hearing about Elias running away, he decided to go with Oden Peoples, one of his patrollers. A runaway slave was, in fact, a thief since he had stolen his master’s property-himself. They arrived about 9:30. Moses and one other man took Elias from the field and Oden sliced off about a third of his ear as everyone, including Henry, stood in the lane. Elias had his head down all the while except when Oden pulled it up to get the razor to do a better job. All of the lobe and then some. Oden always carried a pouch with a pepper poultice, which he blended with vinegar and mustard and a little salt-a proven remedy to halt the bleeding of even those who seemed to have more blood than other men. “The bleeders,” Oden called them. Elias lowered his head again and stood with his hands at his side, refusing to hold the poultice in place. In the end, Oden had to tie the poultice on Elias’s head with a rag Moses brought from his cabin.
Henry told Moses to take everybody back to the field. And there in the lane he paid Oden $1 for doing the job on Elias’s ear. “You think it’ll hold,” Henry said after he and Oden and Skiffington had left the lane and were nearing Oden’s saddleless horse and Skiffington’s red mare. “I don’t know,” Oden said. “It depends on what kinda heart he got in him. But,” and he took the reins, “I’ll come back and do the rest of that ear and won’t charge you.”
Henry nodded.
Skiffington said, “I’ll pass through when I return from Amelia to make sure all is right. But you, Henry, have some responsibility. As does everyone else with servants who get it into their head to run away. You must be vigilant.” Not long before, after he had hired the patrollers, he told one white man whose slave had a habit of coming and going as he pleased, “My men are not angels, able to fly above and see wrong being committed and come down and turn the wrong into right. They can only do so much. So you have to help and look out for your servants, too.”
“We’ll see to him, Mr. Skiffington,” Henry said.
Oden said of Elias, “If he runs again, the rest of the ear I’ll do for nothin, but I will have to charge you for any work done on that other ear.” He mounted. He took part of the horse’s mane and ran his fingers through it, laid it to rest on the left side of the horse’s neck. Skiffington mounted and said, “I ain’t never seen a servant with both his ears gone.” “I have,” Oden said, “but it whatn’t me that done it.” Henry said, “That would be a shame. To have em both gone.” Oden, being a Cherokee, wouldn’t have merited a “Mr.” if Henry had called him by name. “Yes, it would be,” Oden said. “Just remember I gotta charge you for the other ear. Thas only fair. But I’ll do the rest of that one for nothin. Won’t cost you a cent.”
Henry said nothing and both men rode out to the road and there they parted, Skiffington to Amelia with hope that the woman could help him and his stomach and Oden, his ponytail bouncing, home to rest after a night of patrolling. Oden would not have had his ear business if it had not been for the death of a slave in Amherst County. A white man had cut off the ear of his “habitual runaway,” and the slave had bled to death. No one could understand what had happened-people had been cutting off ears or parts of ears for more than two centuries. In the seventeenth century throughout the Virginia colony even white indentured servants had had their ears cut off. But somehow the luck of the Amherst County man had run out and his $515 slave had died from the loss of blood. A few white people wanted him indicted for manslaughter, but the grand jury declined, finding that the man had suffered enough with the loss of his property.
People were spooked by what happened to the slave who bled to death, began to believe that even after two hundred years of doing it there might yet be a real science to cutting off ears, just as there was to hobbling a slave and butchering hogs in the fall. Promising good, efficient work and no dying, Oden had stepped forward after the death of the Amherst County slave, a twenty-seven-year-old left-handed man named Fred. Even after Oden took on the task, some masters continued to use the man’s death as a way to frighten possible runaways. “You mess up on me and you’ll get what that nigger Fred got. Then I’ll throw your damn carcass to the hogs.” That wasn’t true-hogs would eat just about anything, but Virginia hogs would never eat human beings. By Skiffington’s fourth year in office, Oden practically had a monopoly on ear cutting in some five counties, not including Manchester.