“Go home now?” Mingo stretched out the stiffness in his spine. “Powerful tired, boss.”
Not because he wanted to go home did Moses leave, but because he was afraid of Isaiah’s body and needed time to think things through. Dry the air, dry the evening down the road that led them home. As if to himself, the old man grumped, “I gave you thought and tongue, and looka what you done with it — they gonna catch and kill you, boy, just as sure as I’m sitting heah.”
“Mingo?” The African shook his long head, sly; he touched his chest with one finger. “Me? Nossuh.”
“Why the hell you keep saying that?” Moses threw his jaw forward so violently muscles in his neck stood out. “You kilt a man, and they gonna burn you crisper than an ear of corn. Ay, God, Mingo,” moaned the old man, “you gotta act responsible, son!” At the thought of what they’d do to Mingo, Moses scrooched the stalk of his head into his stiff collar. He drilled his gaze at the smooth-faced African, careful not to look him in the eye, and barked, “What’re you thinking now?”
“What Mingo know, Massa Green know. Bees like what Mingo sees or don’t see is only what Massa Green taught him to see or don’t see. Like Mingo lives through Massa Green, right?”
Moses waited, suspicious, smelling a trap. “Yeah, all that’s true.”
“Massa Green, he owns Mingo, right?”
“Right,” snorted Moses. He rubbed the knob of his red, porous nose. “Paid good money—”
“So when Mingo works, it bees Massa Green workin’, right? Bees Massa Green workin’, think-in’, doin’ through Mingo — ain’t that so?”
Nobody’s fool, Moses Green could latch onto a notion with no trouble at all; he turned violently off the road leading to his cabin, and plowed on toward Harriet’s, pouring sweat, remembering two night visions he’d had, recurrent, where he and Mingo were wired together like say two ventriloquist’s dummies, one black, one white, and there was somebody — who he didn’t know, yanking their arm and leg strings simultaneously — how he couldn’t figure, but he and Mingo said the same thing together until his liver-spotted hands, the knuckles tight and shriveled like old carrot skin, flew up to his face and, shrieking, he started hauling hips across a cold black countryside. But so did Mingo, his hands on his face, pumping his knees right alongside Moses, shrieking, their voice inflections identical; and then the hazy dream doorwayed luxuriously into another where he was greaved on one half of a thrip — a coin halfway between a nickel and a dime — and on the reverse side was Mingo. Shaking, Moses pulled his rig into Harriet Bridgewater’s yard. His bowels, burning, felt like boiling tar. She was standing on her porch in a checkered Indian shawl, staring at them, her book still open, when Moses scrambled, tripping, skinning his knees, up her steps. He shouted, “Harriet, this boy done kilt Isaiah Jenson in cold blood.” She lost color and wilted back into her doorway. Her hair was swinging in her eyes. Hands flying, he stammered in a flurry of anxiety, “But it wasn’t altogether Mingo’s fault — he didn’t know what he was doin’.”
“Isaiah? You mean Izay-yah? He didn’t kill Izay-yah?”
“Yeah, aw no! Not really—” His mind stuttered to a stop.
“Whose fault is it then?” Harriet gawked at the African picking his nose in the wagon (Moses had, it’s true, not policed himself as well as he’d wanted). A shiver quaked slowly up her left side. She sloughed off her confusion, and flashed, “I can tell you whose fault it is, Moses. Yours! Didn’t I say not to bring that wild African here? Huh? Huh? Huh? You both should be — put to sleep.”
“Aw, woman! Hesh up!” Moses threw down his hat and stomped it out of shape. “You just all upsetted.” Truth to tell, he was not the portrait of composure himself. There were rims of dirt in his nails. His trouser legs had blood splattered on them. Moses stamped his feet to shake road powder off his boots. “You got any spirits in the house? I need your he’p to untangle this thing, but I ain’t hardly touched a drop since I bought Mingo, and my throat’s pretty dr—”
“You’ll just have to get it yourself — on the top shelf of the cupboard.” She touched her face, fingers spread, with a dazed gesture. There was suddenly in her features the intensity found in the look of people who have a year, a month, a minute only to live. “I think I’d better sit down.” Lowering herself onto her rocker, she cradled on her lap a volume by one M. Shelley, a recent tale of monstrosity and existential horror, then she demurely settled her breasts. “It’s just like you, Moses Green, to bring all your bewilderments to me.”
The old man’s face splashed into a huge, foamy smile. He kissed her gently on both eyes, and Harriet, in return, rubbed her cheek like a cat against his gristly jaw. Moses felt lighter than a feather. “Got to have somebody, don’t I?”
In the common room, Moses rifled through the cupboard, came up with a bottle of luke-warm bourbon and, hands trembling, poured himself three fingers’ worth in a glass. Then, because he figured he deserved it, he refilled his glass and, draining it slowly, sloshing it around in his mouth, considered his options. He could turn Mingo over to the law and let it go at that, but damned if he couldn’t shake loose the idea that killing the boy somehow wouldn’t put things to rights; it would be like they were killing Moses himself, destroying a part of his soul. Besides, whatever the African’d done, it was what he’d learned through Moses, who was not the most reliable lens for looking at things. You couldn’t rightly call a man responsible if, in some utterly alien place, he was without power, without privilege, without property — was, in fact, property — if he had no position, had nothing, or virtually next to nothing, and nothing was his product or judgment. “Be damned!” Moses spit. It was a bitter thing to siphon your being from someone else. He knew that now. It was like, on another level, what Liverspoon had once tried to deny about God and man: If God was (and now Moses wasn’t all that sure), and if He made the world, then a man didn’t have to answer for anything. Rape or murder, it all referred back to who-or-whatever was responsible for that world’s make-up. Chest fallen, he tossed away his glass, lifted the bottle to his lips, then nervously lit his pipe. Maybe…maybe they could run, if it came to that, and start all over again in Missouri, where he’d teach Mingo the difference between chicken hawks and strangers. But, sure as day, he’d do it again. He couldn’t change. What was was. They’d be running forever, across all space, all time — so he imagined — like fugitives with no fingers, no toes, like two thieves or yokefellows, each with some God-awful secret that could annihilate the other. Naw! Moses thought. His blood beat up. The deep, powerful stroke of his heart made him wince. His tobacco maybe. Too strong. He sent more whiskey crashing down his throat. Naw! You couldn’t have nothing and just go as you pleased. How strange that owner and owned magically dissolved into each other like two crossing shafts of light (or, if he’d known this, which he did not, particles, subatomic, interconnected in a complex skein of relatedness). Shoot him maybe, reabsorb Mingo, was that more merciful? Naw! He was fast; fast. Then manumit the African? Noble gesture, that. But how in blazes could he disengage himself when Mingo shored up, sustained, let be Moses’s world with all its sores and blemishes every time he opened his oily black eyes? Thanks to the trouble he took cementing Mingo to his own mind, he could not, by thunder, do without him now. Giving him his freedom, handing it to him like a rasher of bacon, would shackle Mingo to him even more. There seemed, just then, no solution.