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.
Luke slept beside Elias that Tuesday night after Oden cut off part of his ear. Luke knew a boy who had known Fred and he thought that if Elias should start bleeding during the night, he would be there to help him, could run fast enough to get Loretta before Elias lost all his blood. Elias told him at first that he didn’t want a soul near him and that he would kill him if the boy stayed. Luke said nothing and made his pallet a few inches from where Elias was chained up.
Caldonia and Loretta came in the barn before either the man or the boy went to sleep. Loretta removed Oden’s poultice and put on her own bandage, never saying a word during the whole time.
“Please, try to be good,” Caldonia said before leaving. “Please, try.” The two women had knelt down to Elias and Loretta had dropped Oden’s poultice in the straw and Caldonia had picked it up. There was not enough blood on it to worry about; one hour of her monthlies produced more. The smell of the pepper was strong. Caldonia said to Elias before standing up, “It is just as easy to do good as it is to do bad.” Elias stayed silent.
Caldonia looked down at Loretta tending to him and Luke looking at the man and the woman. All of it, every single bit of it, was a horrible mess. These were the times that made her want to rethink the road they were all going down. Such a long road for such a legacy, for slaves. “My legacy,” her mother Maude often said. “We must protect the legacy.”
Loretta stood and took the poultice from Caldonia. “I’ll see bout you in the mornin,” Loretta said. They left the barn and Caldonia told her to go on up to the house, that she wanted to visit a mite before retiring. She often visited the people in the lane, and some of them were ashamed to have her come into the cabins, knowing the miracle of the house she lived in. “I’ll come with you,” Loretta said. Caldonia shook her head. She said, “Tell your master I’ll be along directly.” Caldonia turned away and went to the lane. Where there was light seeping from under a door she knocked and knocked again until someone opened or asked, “Who that there? Who that comin to my door?”
Some two weeks later, another Sunday, after Moffett had come and preached and gone, Elias came upon Celeste holding Luke in her arms. They were near the fields and the boy was sobbing. She looked up and saw Elias and was not happy to see him, remembering the way he must have watched her limping about.
”Luke, boy, whas the matter with you?” Elias said. For a brief moment he thought Celeste may have slapped him and then regretted what she had done. But the way her arms engulfed the boy told him that she had done him no harm. His time with the boy had put Luke as close as any human being could be to the man’s heart. “Luke, boy, tell Elias whas wrong? Who hurt you? Tell Elias who it be?”
Celeste said, “I think he just missin his mama. A boy can miss his mama. A girl can miss her mama. I found him under that tree just cryin his heart out.” She did not want Elias the watcher man to come any closer to them but he did and he put his hand over the boy’s head and his hand was near one of her wrists. “Luke, I’ll be your mama,” she said. “I’ll be all the mama I can be for you.”
Soon, the boy quieted. Celeste looked at Elias’s hand and then up at him. There was a storm coming, which was why Elias had gone looking for Luke. The boy liked to play in the rain and never cared that lightning could kill him. The rain came now, a teasing kind of rain, soft, intermittent drops. A thirsty sparrow could have leaned its head back and enjoyed the drops without any fear of drowning. Celeste looked at a large drop of rain on the back of Elias’s hand covering Luke’s head, watched as the one drop was joined by two others. There was the sound of thunder but it was still far away, on the other side of the mountains. Celeste said, “We best get him out of this mess.” She managed to look the man in the face. “Yes, we best get him out of it.”
They, Celeste and Elias, continued to have next to nothing to say to each other after that and Elias went back to planning on running away. Late in the night, after Moses had assured Henry that Elias had learned his lesson, Elias would test the waters and go out to the road and wait to see what might descend on him.
When he began to care for Celeste, he would never be able to say, only that he awoke one morning to a quietness and stillness in the world he had never known before. The birds were not singing, the fire in the hearth did not crackle, the mice did not come and go, and even the snorers he shared the cabin with slept in silence. It was at such a time that he had always imagined he would slip away to freedom, a time when all the world had their heads turned the other way. But he sat up on his pallet and listened to the nothing and wanted to be with her. Slowly, the world seemed to come back to its senses and the first thing he thought he heard was the sound of her limping down the lane, the hem of her frock swishing along the ground, the foot of her bad leg scraping along in that second before she lifted it.