The Prophets(77)

By the time Elizabeth began to tremor and bleed, not respond to Paul’s or his father’s voice, and soon, not respond at all, both boy and man silently agreed that the only way to honor her was to name everything that belonged to them after her, which was another kind of immortality. Jonah called it the Elizabeth Plantation. He committed himself to it—accumulating slaves, hiring hands, raising animals, and planting cotton damn near to the horizon—as though the “plantation” part of the name was merely a formality.

Then, when Jonah became as tired as Elizabeth had, when his hands wouldn’t stop twitching and fevers had left him parched and drained, he, too, offered himself up in tribute to the land that was his by legal right, if not by the blood fact that it had already claimed his wife.

Paul liked to think that his mother and father were both looking down on him, protecting him, magnifying his favor in the eyes of God, because look at what he had done: he had built upon the foundation they left to him and had gathered the enormous wealth that they had twisted their bodies seeking. His parents were comfortable; they had provided him a decent life and he couldn’t remember a single hungry day. But they were never this, not even with full access to the law of the land—and beyond the law, the very ethos of it—that said, No one can stop you; take as much as you damn well please!

As God had passed destiny down to his father, and his father down to him, Paul saw it as his duty to ensure that Timothy also received this Word. For in the beginning, before all else, there was the Word and the Word wasn’t merely with God: the Word was God. The first utterance, the primary incantation, the initial spell that willed itself into being from nowhere, turned nothing into everything, and had, itself, always been there in its potential, needing only to express itself through action for existence to exist. A power so grand that all it took was a breath to make the unreal real and pull the seen from the unseen.

When Timothy first came back home, Paul had brought him out to the same spot his father took him to, pointed to the same treetops, smiled at the same horizon, spun with the same openness. And when his hand landed on Timothy’s shoulder, Paul felt the same unexpected giddiness that he was certain was the thing that took Jonah from choke to laughter. But when Timothy looked up at him, the boy’s eyes were blue with worry and there was no awe. There were no jolts of joy reverberating between them. There was only the distinct scent of cotton blossom heavy in the air and the wind blowing at the tops of both of their heads.

Looking to the dark clouds in the distance, before looking back up at his father, Timothy asked, “Rain?”

Rain. Paul sat at the dinner table later that night staring at Timothy. As evening surrounded them, he looked at his son with the candles giving off only enough light to see him, and so shadows swayed on all of their faces, and the eyes of the servants glowed. Would it have been astute to point out that the expanse of the land itself—which stretched from river to woods, from sunup to sundown—was living proof of his righteousness? That ownership was assuredly confirmation?

Of what?

Of things being precisely the way they were supposed to be.

Timothy ate delicately as Paul watched. Maybe Ruth was right. Maybe his education should have been here, in the bosom, if not of Abraham, then of Elizabeth, where his hands, like Paul’s hands, could know the soil so that they need not ever touch it again. Timothy, instead, spoke of bitter winters the likes of which Mississippi couldn’t imagine; of righteous men who spoke eloquently of liberty; and of niggers unchained, of which he had heard, but hadn’t seen.

He had cultivated the most curious art form, and Paul was, in spite of himself, impressed by the divine hand his son showed. But that was just it: there was no mention of God. And there was no veil upon him that might have evinced contemplation of such matters. The North had done its job, perhaps too well.

As everyone had left the table and the slaves had cleaned it, Paul sat in his chair. Something had kept him there and he tried to determine what it was. He hadn’t, this time, remarked on where Maggie placed the cutlery. He paid no special attention to the tablecloth or its rigid corners. He said nothing when, while chewing, he bit into something hard—like a bone, but burned and circular, in the fowl that Maggie and Essie had jointly placed before him. He had carved it himself, so he had no one but himself to blame.

And yet, he didn’t want to move. He sat there as candlelight had become dimmer and dimmer still. He rubbed his eyes. He pulled his watch out of his pocket. It was attached to his waistband by a gold chain. It was only eight o’clock. He wasn’t tired but had no desire to get up.

When it came, it came from somewhere unexpected. It started not in the cave of his chest, as he imagined it would, but in the pit of his stomach. A rumbling had just begun to form as he clutched himself. The feeling was familiar. He wondered if he would make it to the outhouse in time or if he would have to call Maggie in with a bedpan. How unseemly to have to unfasten one’s britches in one’s dining place, ass exposed in the same room where one feasts, the two scents mixing in unfriendly ways such that one might be unable to separate them ever again. No, he couldn’t do that.

He managed to get up from the table. He rushed into the kitchen, past Maggie—who didn’t look at him, but bent her head as she was supposed to—and past Essie, whose back was facing him, taking the lantern they lit so that they could make quicker work of cleaning, making his way to the back of the house. He burst through the door, bounded down the steps and rushed to the left of Ruth’s garden, to the solitary red outhouse in the cusp of trees.