When he tried to get close to her, to walk a little bit beside her, hoping that closeness would say what he did not have words for, she would hurry away, believing he only wanted to see her life with a terrible limp. He hurt, day after day, to see her move away. Then, late one evening, almost two months after Oden took the razor to his ear, after all the work of the day and the slaves were in those moments when they set their minds to sleep, he came to the cabin she shared with two other women and Elias tapped until one of the women came to the door. Celeste had brought Luke to live with her, but he was not there.
“Could you mind tellin Celeste I’d like a word with her?” Elias said to the woman.
The woman laughed but when she saw he wasn’t going away, she turned and called to Celeste, “That Elias be wantin you.”
It seemed a long time before she came to the door. He nodded and she nodded back.
“I just wanted a word with you, thas all,” he said.
“All right,” she said.
He looked her full in the face, the light from inside the cabin silhouetting her. “Why you all the time treatin me bad when all I wanna do is treat you good?”
“What that you say?”
“Why you all the time treatin me bad when all I wanna do is treat you good? Thas what I said.”
“I ain’t think I was treatin you no kinda bad way.”
“Well, you was and all I’m askin is that you stop it.”
She put one hand on the doorjamb to steady herself to come down the one step to him and he took her by the other arm. She said after a minute or so, “I didn’t mean no harm by it.”
He believed her and was again without words. He found them when he heard one of the women inside the cabin laugh at something the other woman said. “I be talkin to you, then. Tomorrow if thas all right with you. I be talkin to you tomorrow.”
“Yes.” She turned, a hand again on the doorjamb, and stepped up as he held her elbow. She went inside and closed the door.
A week later he was at her door again and she was in the doorway and he opened a little piece of a rag and presented a comb he had carved out of a piece of wood. The comb was rough, certainly one of the crudest and ugliest instruments in the history of the world. Not one tooth looked like another; some of the teeth were far too thick, but most of them were very thin, the result of his whittling away with the hope that he was approaching some kind of perfection. “Oh,” Celeste said. “Oh, my.” She took it and smiled. “My goodness gracious.”
”It ain’t much.”
“It be the whole world. You givin it to me?”
“I am.”
“Well, my goodness gracious.” She tried to run the comb through her hair but the comb failed in its duty. “Oh, my,” Celeste said as she struggled with it. Several teeth broke off. “Oh, my.”
He reached up and taking her hand with the comb, they extricated it from her hair. “I done broke it,” she said when they had pulled it away. “Dear Lord, I done broke it.”
“Pay it no mind,” Elias said.
“But you gave it to me, Elias.” Aside from the food in her stomach and the clothes on her back and a little of nothing in a corner of her cabin, the comb was all she had. A child of three could have toted around all she owned all day long and not gotten tired.
“We can do another one.” He reached up and picked out the comb’s teeth that had broken off in her hair.
“But…”
“I’ll make you a comb for every hair on your head.”
She began to cry. “Thas easy to say today cause the sun be shinin. Tomorrow, maybe next week, there won’t be no sun, and you won’t be studyin no comb.”
He said again, “I’ll make you a comb for every hair on your head.” He dropped the broken teeth onto the ground and she closed her hand tight over what was left of the comb.
She put her face into her other hand and cried. There had been a slave on the plantation she had come from who had come upon her in a field of corn and told her that a woman like her should be shot, like a horse with a broken leg. And she had cried then as well.
Elias put his arms around her, tentative, for this was the first time. He trembled and the trembling increased the closer she got to his body. He kissed the side of her head, near the hairline, and his lips met not only her skin and hair but a tooth from the comb that he had somehow missed.
They ate their supper together the next day at the edge of the field, and when he was done, he told her he had to speak to the master and he got up from beside her and walked out of the field and Moses didn’t ask him what he was doing or where he was going. At the back of the house, he tapped at the door. Zeddie the cook opened it. “Zeddie, I got to speak with Master Henry. Can I speak with Master Henry, please?”
”I go tell him,” Zeddie said. “You step in here.” She opened the door wider and he came in, his first time in the house. He smelled what a tree smelled like when it was first cut into, the wood blood from the first wound of the ax. Elias shut the door. She returned in moments with their master and Henry said before he was fully into the kitchen, “What is it there, Elias?”
Elias looked at Zeddie, then said, “I be likin Celeste, Master, and I be likin her more as the day go by. That likin ain’t gon stop tomorrow, as I can see.”
“That so, Elias?”
“Yes, Master. I wanna marry her. I wanna be with her. There ain’t nothin more I want sides that, cept to live.” He had dreamed again last night that he had run away to freedom. He had been as safe as an angel at God’s knee, safe on the road to freedom, and then he remembered that there was something way back in slavery that he had forgotten and so he ran back into slavery, passing millions who were running toward freedom. He searched the empty slave quarters for what he had forgotten and in the last cabin out of the hundreds he searched, he had come upon Celeste, without even one leg to stand on. She saw him and turned her face from him.
“And you be wantin me to say ‘Yes’ to this?”
“Master, I make her a good husband and I be a good worker every day God gimme strength. I would hate, Master, for us to be took apart after she my wife. It would feel bad for us to be sold apart. It would feel bad.” Elias knew what he was saying and he knew that if his master blessed it all, he would never again dream of being on that road. “I would hate to lose a good wife and Celeste would hate to lose a good husband. We would hate bein separate.”
“I want you happy, Elias. And I want to make Celeste happy. So you get back now and both yall be happy.”
“Thank you, Master.”
Zeddie had been stoking the fire in the stove and now she left off that and opened the door for Elias. He went out. Henry went through his house and came out the front door in time to see Elias walk down to the fields. Elias was the only human being about, and the way to the road was closer than the way to the fields. Henry went down the stairs and followed Elias, who went straight to the fields and took up his work, just as he had done before supper, which was now over for every slave in the field. Henry could see Celeste limping up the rows, limping and fast at work, and she was in one part of the fields and her husband-to-be was in another part. Elias did not look at her and she did not look at him. Moses waved to Henry and Henry waved back.
Henry stood watching Elias for some time, and in all that time Elias did not look at Celeste. His feelings were all the looking he needed, Henry realized. And he realized, too, that what was happening was better than chains. He had them together, bound one strong man to a woman with a twisted leg, and there was not a chain in sight. He could not wait to tell William Robbins. Henry went back the way he came, back to the house, and he put in his big book the day he had decided that Elias and Celeste would marry, wrote it in the flowing script that Fern Elston had taught him when he was twenty years old.