On Sundays, a preacher, a free man named Valtims Moffett, came over and held services for the slaves, in the barn when it was cold and out along the lane when the weather was nice. He would preach for some fifteen minutes and then everyone would sing two or three songs. The day Robbins caught Elias was a day of nice weather, not too warm, though the preacher liked to say that every day was a good day for God’s word. The preacher was a large man who suffered with gout and rheumatism, which, he was quick to tell people, “God put upon me the same way he put the cross on our savior Jesus Christ.” Some mornings it took him more than an hour to get out of bed and dressed. He had a wife and one slave to his name, but the wife, Helen, was a tiny woman and so was their slave, Pauline, full sister to the wife, and both of them together could do only so much with a large man with a cross to bear. The preacher was quite late that Sunday morning after Elias ran away, but he was not as late as he was the day Henry was buried.
Moses had just told Henry that Elias was gone when they heard Robbins’s voice and they both went around the side of the house to the front. Robbins had awakened that morning and not remembered the encounter with Elias the night before, that he had taken Elias back to his plantation and chained him to the back porch. His cook came in and reminded him at the breakfast table.
Robbins now said to Henry, “Good mornin. Sweet good mornin. Are you and Caldonia well?” Elias, chained, stood next to Robbins, only inches from his booted foot in the stirrup.
“Yessir, Mr. Robbins, we well enough,” Henry said.
“I have something of yours,” Robbins said, and he kicked Elias and the slave fell to the ground. “Picked him up on the road home last night. He has a wound somewhere in his leg, but it won’t kill him and it won’t amount to anything if you decide to sell him off one day. Less he had a very noticeable limp.” He laughed, a little joke between them, because Robbins was even less inclined those days to sell a slave and that was what he always advised Henry. He had said once, “Niggers appreciate in value, so appreciate them.”
“I see,” Henry said. Moses was behind him. “Help him up, Moses. You wanna come in, Mr. Robbins.” Moses picked Elias up by the shoulders and gave him a little bit of a smile and reminded Elias with the smile and his eyes that he never liked him.
“No, not today, Henry. Not today, but tell Caldonia I will come back this way soon. I promise.” The land they stood on had once belonged to Robbins, sold to Henry at a price far cheaper than Robbins had ever sold anything, save the slaves Toby and his sister Mindy. Robbins looked once at the side of Elias’s head and nodded to Henry. Henry told him good day. Robbins raised the reins up from his lap and pulled gently and the horse, in a slow and beautiful move of its grand head and neck, the glinting bit in its mouth a kind of accent to all that grandness, turned, and they left, prancing away down to the road, where they took off in a full gallop. The glint would stay forever in Elias’s mind. The night his second child was born he would hold him, still wet from fighting into life, and the fire from the hearth would reflect off that wetness and that glint would come forward again until he blinked it away.
Henry went to Elias and slapped him. “This is a hurtful disappointment to me. What I’m gonna do with you? What in the hell I’m gonna do with you? If you want a hard life, I will oblige.” “I will oblige” was a favorite phrase of Fern Elston’s during her lessons, heard by Henry the first time as he sat with her in her parlor dominated by trees, a peach and a magnolia, she and her servants had managed to domesticate. Her husband the gambler had seen it done by foreign people in a Richmond whorehouse and brought the technique back to Manchester County. “Is that what you want?” Henry asked. “I will oblige you with a hard life.” The trees in Fern’s house disoriented most people, those used to the inside always being inside and the outside always being outside. People said nice things about the trees to Fern even as their minds were swirling. Those people were all free Negroes because white people never came to Fern’s place. Henry had feared that Caldonia might want that done with their parlor.
“No, Marse.” Elias was still chained, Robbins having forgotten that the chains belonged to him. Other slaves had come out and were watching. Celeste was just behind the first row of people and Stamford twisted his shoulder a bit so she could see.
“You sure don’t act like it,” Henry said. Once you own them, once you own even one, you will never be alone, Robbins had told Henry after Henry purchased Moses from him. Knowing how painful loneliness could be, having been separated as a child from Augustus and then Mildred, Henry had thought that a good thing, never to be alone, to always have someone. Henry said to Elias, “If you want a good life, I will oblige that, too.” Fed by light streaming in from windows that went from the floor to a foot shy of the ceiling, the trees in Fern’s parlor grew to a height of about eight or nine feet, then stopped, as if on command. The peaches born on the tree were very tiny, could fit on a man’s thumb, and they were very sweet, too sweet for a pie or cobbler if the cook could manage to collect enough of them. The magnolia blossoms were also small, so beautiful that Fern’s gambling husband said he would frame them if they were pictures.
“Moses,” Henry said, “take him and chain him till I decide if he wants a good life or a bad life.” Since the day was a good one and Valtims Moffett the preacher would hold the services in the lane, Moses chained Elias in the large barn. “You want a good life or a bad life?” Moses mocked and then left him.
His first hours in the stall were spent thinking how he could kill everyone around him, first everyone on the plantation, then everyone in the county, in Virginia. Colored and white. He tried not to move the chains because the sound of their rattling hurt his ears, spread a dryness throughout his mouth. He could stand comfortably enough, if he wanted to stand all the time facing that section of the barn wall, the one section that was without a hole through which he could see the outside. When Elias sat, he found he could twist himself a little away from the wall, but his hands were suspended about level with his face and it was impossible to lie down. For a long time he looked up at the rafters, at the sparrows coming and going to the nest they were building. Engaged in a simple task of living-take straw to the nest, go back for more. The sun came in on them but there was not much of it near where their nest was. He wondered if he would be there long enough for the birds to have eggs, then chicks, to see the chicks grow and then make their own nests. Take straw to the nest, go back for more. To see the grandchildren sparrows become parents. He could wring the neck of everyone on the plantation, it was just a matter of whether to start with Moses or the master. Moses’s neck was thicker. The children’s necks would be the hardest. But over and done with in a snap. He could close his eyes tight with them, with the children, and with the old people. The women would scream the loudest, but God, being the kind of God he was, would give him strength.
He was very tired, not having slept at Robbins’s place. When he leaned his head forward and closed his eyes, his neck soon stiffened and he finally had to lean his head back as far as he could and accept what relief came with that. He closed his eyes but there was no sleep, not even the jittery dozing that had come at Robbins’s place.