Caleb

by Charles Alverson

  Jardine poked at the pillow with the swagger stick he carried and revealed something beneath it. Leaning down, Jardine picked up a book. It was coverless, tattered, and water stained, but, by God, a book. Jardine riffled through the pages. He was no expert, but it seemed to be some kind of story set in England in the last century. The people in it were called Bennet. He shoved the book carelessly into the side pocket of his jacket.

  Two days later, Jardine rode out into the fields where the blacks were chopping the denuded cotton stalks and signaled Big Mose to give them a rest. As usual, Caleb went off by himself to sit by one of the small rivers that gave the plantation its name. Jardine rode over to where he sat.

  Caleb got to his feet—not gladly, but quickly enough. Jardine leaned over the pommel of his saddle.

  “Caleb, you missing anything?”

  Caleb looked up at him. “Yes, Master.”

  “And what would that be?” Jardine asked with a sly smile.

  “A book, Master.”

  “A book?” Jardine pretended amazement. “What would you be doing with a book?”

  “I got it on the barge. Traded my dinner to a boy for it.”

  “You went without dinner for a book?”

  “Yes, Master.”

  A sudden, astonishing thought came to Jardine. “Caleb,” he demanded. “Can you read?”

  “Yes, Master.”

  “And write?”

  “Yes, Master.”

  Jardine reckoned he might as well go the whole hog. “And cipher?”

  “Yes, Master.”

  Jardine thought for a long moment. “How much is six and seven?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Ninety-one take away eighteen?”

  “Seventy-three.”

  “Eight times forty-three?”

  This took a few moments longer. “Three hundred and forty-four.”

  Jardine paused to calculate that last one in his head and decided to take Caleb’s word for it. He moved on to the supreme test.

  “Uh . . . two hundred and fifty-six divided by thirteen?”

  Caleb had to think a long time about that. “I’m not sure, Master,” Caleb said, “but I think it’s nineteen and a bit.”

  Jardine didn’t say anything else. He just pulled on the reins and spurred his horse away from the brook. He called to Big Mose, “Get ’em back to work!” and rode toward the house. When he was behind a big line of live oaks, Jardine reined in his horse. Pulling out his little notebook and a pencil, he calculated the long division he had given the slave.

  Nineteen point six nine, he worked out, before getting mixed up carrying the naught.

  “Son of a bitch!” Jardine exclaimed and spurred the roan toward the house.

  Jardine found Nancy in the big food larder doing an inventory of the bottled goods.

  “Nancy!” he exclaimed. “You’ll never guess what’s happened.”

  “I probably won’t, dear,” she said calmly.

  “I’ve only bought myself a genius for five hundred and fifty dollars!”

  “You told me you paid four hundred and fifty for Caleb,” she reminded him.

  “Never mind that,” Jardine said. “Do you know what that boy can do?”

  Nancy kept a straight face. “Play the banjo?”

  “No! Goddamn it, Nancy, I’m serious. Caleb can read. I found a book in his hut. Look!” He waved the tattered book at her. “And write. And cipher like a goddamn bookkeeper! Long division! In his head!” He pulled out his notebook and shoved it before Nancy’s eyes. “I checked. Look!”

  Nancy took the notebook from his hand and confirmed his figures.

  “In his head?” she asked.

  “Yes! Did you ever hear anything like it?”

  “And you’ve got him chopping cotton,” Nancy said, the devil dancing in her soft gray eyes.

  “Well, how was I to know?” Jardine demanded. “These damned slaves never tell you anything except things you don’t want to hear.”

  5

  Caleb didn’t hear anything more from Jardine for over a week—though he did find the book where Nancy had shoved it back under his pillow. But then one evening at just about sundown, Dulcie came to the door of Caleb’s hut and said, “Marse wants to see you in the horse barn.” Caleb shoved the book under his mattress and left the hut.

  Jardine was waiting for him, whacking the side of his boot with the swagger stick. He liked to think it made him look like an army officer. “Caleb,” he said.

  “Yes, Master?” It made Jardine a little nervous that this new slave didn’t call him Marse or Massa like the other slaves, though he didn’t really feel that he could complain about it.

  “Where did you learn to read and write and all that?”

  “When I was a boy, Mr. Staunton had a tutor for Brent, and he taught me, too.”

  “Mr. Staunton? Brent?” Jardine asked angrily. “Who are they?”

  Caleb was a quick learner. “Old Master and Young Master,” he said.

  “That’s better. Where the hell were they?”

  “Boston, Master.”

  “Boston?” Jardine exclaimed. “No wonder you’re so goddamned uppity. I spent most of a year in Boston myself. At Harvard College.”

  “Yes, Master.”

  Jardine was a little disappointed at Caleb’s lack of response to this bit of information, but he plowed on. “Caleb, I’m thinking of moving you up to the house. I’m too busy to look after the accounts book, the business side of the plantation, and all that. Do you think you could do that?”

  “Yes, Master.”

  “Well, if I bring you up to the house, don’t think you’ll be sitting on the seat of your pants all the time. No, you’ll do anything Miss Nancy tells you to do and generally make yourself useful. You’ll live over the coach house with Andrew, my coachman, and eat with the house slaves. That sound good?”

  “Yes, Master.”

  “All right,” Jardine said. “Get back to your hut. I’ll let you know what I decide.”

  “Thank you, Master.” Caleb turned and started to walk away from the barn, but Jardine stopped him.

  “Caleb! How long you been a slave?”

  “All my life, Master.”

  “No, I mean down here. Down south.”

  “Almost five years.”

  “And you never told anyone that you could read and write and that?”

  “No, Master.”

  “Why the hell not? Do you like working in the fields?”

  “No, Master.”

  “Then why not?”

  Caleb thought carefully before he answered. “I didn’t plan to stay a slave.”

  Jardine didn’t like the sound of that, but it wasn’t enough of a challenge to stir things up—not just yet. “Well, you’d better get used to it,” he said. “Go back to your hut.”

  “Yes, Master.” Caleb turned to leave, but again Jardine stopped him.

  “Wait! You’re not teaching any of the rest of my people to read and write, are you?”

  “No, Master.”

  “Well, don’t. There’re more than enough book-learned slaves around here to suit me. You remember that.”

  “Yes, Master.”

  6

  Before the week was out, Caleb was working in the plantation office at the back of the house.

  Now that he was no longer working in the fields, Caleb was able to get a clearer picture of the Three Rivers plantation and its people. The house itself, a substantial three-story wood-framed building, was about fifty years old. A veranda wrapped around three of its sides, and fluted wooden pillars flanked its big front door. The house was set in about three hundred acres of prime cotton land, which was worked by some twenty slaves. The field slaves, their wives, and a dozen children lived in whitewashed wo
oden huts scattered around a cookhouse. A series of barns containing livestock and farm equipment separated the huts from the house. The six house girls ate in the kitchen but slept in an annex at the back of the house.

  Caleb moved his few belongings into the loft above the coach house. Miss Nancy gave him some of Jardine’s father’s cast-off clothing, which had been in storage since the old man died four years before. As Caleb began to settle into the routine of the house, his biggest challenge was getting the books in order. Since taking over the plantation upon his father’s death, Jardine’s method had been to throw all the paperwork into a big box. He’d figured he would find the time to get it organized one of these days.

  Caleb set to work, and within a month the books were in order. For the first time, Jardine knew whether Three Rivers was making money and why. Caleb told him that he was paying too much for seed and manure, that he had money in the bank in Charleston not drawing any interest, and that Jed Carter down Oaksley way owed him money that was long overdue.

  “You know, Nance,” Jardine said in bed one night, “I was right. That boy is a goddamned—”

  “Don’t swear, Boyd.”

  “Well, he is a marvel,” Jardine said defensively, “and we might never have known it. What did we ever do without him?”

  “We managed,” said Nancy mildly.

  “Don’t you like him?” Jardine demanded suspiciously. “Is he causing you problems here in the house? I’ll—”

  “Far from it, Boyd,” Nancy said firmly. “Caleb’s turned out to be very useful around the house. I just don’t think he’s the second coming of Jesus Christ, that’s all.”

  “Now who’s swearing?” said Jardine triumphantly.

  Caleb was more than just useful, Nancy had discovered over the past weeks. He was an extremely well-trained house servant. Unlike Cassie, the house girl, he knew how to lay the table perfectly, with every piece of silver and crystal in order and the damask table napkins folded at each place like little caps. He knew which wine to serve and when, how to make beer, which spice went with which meat, and much of the other household minutiae that Nancy would have learned from her mother had she not been orphaned so young. Instead—though she hoped he didn’t realize it—Nancy was learning from Caleb. In her sewing room, she kept a big lined-paper book that was filling up with the useful information she’d gleaned.

  Jardine didn’t notice the difference, but Mrs. Rafe Bentley, on one of her visits to Three Rivers, commented, “My dear, I must compliment you on your table arrangements. I haven’t seen anything to match them this side of New Orleans. And how do you get your silver gleaming so?”

  “Hickory ash, household soda, and hard work,” Nancy was able to tell her, thanks to Caleb.

  One day as they were going over the household accounts, Miss Nancy asked him, “Caleb, we haven’t talked about this, but what you said to my husband that day on the wharf, the day he bought you—did you mean it?”

  “Yes, Miss Nancy,” Caleb said without looking up from the account book.

  “Do you still mean it?”

  “No, Miss Nancy.”

  “But you still want to be free, Caleb?”

  “Yes, Miss Nancy. I always have. I always will.”

  7

  When Nancy was about eight months pregnant, she cut herself on a bit of old wire in the bottling room, and blood poisoning set in. Helplessly, Jardine watched her turn pale and then as yellow as old lard. Her girlish gaiety faded away, and she seemed to sink into the big old bed as if she would disappear into the mattress. The poison spread up her left arm until it was dark gray streaked with virulent yellow all the way to the elbow. A fever raged in her that cold compresses and herbal medicines did little to fight.

  “I’m all right, darling, really,” she told Jardine. “Just tired. I’ll be better tomorrow.” But he had seen too much blood poisoning to believe her.

  Outside, Jardine told Caleb, “I’m going to ride to Wisshatchie for Dr. Hollander. I’ll be back late tonight. You and Cassie look after Miss Nancy, you hear? If anything happens to her, I’ll—” Jardine stopped. He knew he was wasting time. Jumping on the big roan, he spurred away from the house toward the turnpike. Caleb turned back and walked into the house feeling helpless.

  Boyd Jardine always was a strong believer in luck, but that day his luck ran out. Rainfall had been heavy recently, and when he got to the Ossingamee River, he saw that it was in flood. The mule ferry had turned over and sunk. Time after time, he forced the roan to plunge into the fast-running river only to have it lose the fight against the water and begin to be swept downstream. Finally, tethering his exhausted, heaving, and lathering horse to a rowanberry bush, Jardine sat down and cried like a boy of seven, not a man of twenty-nine.

  Back at Three Rivers, the shadows of evening were falling when Cassie came running into the little office, where Caleb was trying to make a stubborn column of figures add up twice in a row.

  “You better come,” she gasped. “Miss Nancy . . . she’s worse . . . she’s . . .”

  “What can I do?” Caleb demanded. “Master’s coming with the doctor.”

  “You just better come,” she insisted. “You better.”

  When Caleb got up to the big bedroom at the front of the house, he saw that Cassie was right. Miss Nancy was totally yellow now, and she seemed to have shrunk to the point where only the pitifully small bump of her pregnancy stood out underneath the covers. In contrast to the bright white pillowcase, her face looked like one of the little yellow apples that grew out near the horse barn. It was dwarfed by her rich chestnut hair, which fanned out across the pillow.

  “Caleb,” she said, “is my husband—”

  “He’ll be back, Miss Nancy,” Caleb said helplessly. “It won’t be long now.”

  “I’m so weak, Caleb,” she said faintly. “I feel so weak.”

  “Can I get you anything, Miss Nancy?” Caleb asked, wanting more than anything to escape from that room, with its terrible odor of decaying flesh.

  “No,” she whispered. “Yes, get me a sip of water. From the nightstand. Please.”

  Caleb filled a china teacup from the earthenware crock and held it toward Miss Nancy. “Please,” she said. “I can’t—”

  Sitting down on the bedside chair, Caleb supported her head with his left hand while he put the cup to her cracked lips. Her skin felt hot to his touch and her neck limp and boneless. He poured a trickle of water carefully into her open mouth until she started to cough.

  “Enough,” she croaked. “That’s better. That’s much better. Thank you.” Caleb eased her head back into the groove of the pillow.

  Caleb started to get up, but she stopped him with a hand that felt as though it were on fire. “Please,” she said. “Please stay. Sit, sit.” She tried to raise her head. “Cassie,” she said to the house slave, who was hovering behind Caleb wringing her hands and praying, “I think I could eat something. Could you make me some soup?”

  “Yes, Missy, right away!” Cassie said and fled through the bedroom doorway.

  When she was gone, Nancy looked up at Caleb, who had sat back down on the bedside chair. “Caleb,” she said faintly but evenly, “I think I’m dying.”

  “Miss Nancy—”

  “Please listen. I’m so weak, but I feel no pain. I think I’m beyond pain now, Caleb. I don’t think I can hold on until Mr. Jardine gets back with the doctor.”

  “You can do it, Miss Nancy.”

  “I don’t think so, Caleb,” she said. “Poor Boyd. You will look after him for me, won’t you?”

  “Miss Nancy,” Caleb couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “He’s not a bad man, Caleb. Be patient. Help him. He’ll need it.” Her small right hand still gripped his wrist. There was no strength in it.

  “I’ll do what I can,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said, so fa
intly that Caleb could barely hear her. “I’m so sorry . . .” Her voice faded away.

  “Miss Nancy—”

  “. . . about the baby . . . my baby . . . I just know it’s a boy. Boyd so wanted a son . . . and I so wanted to . . . to give . . .”

  Her fingers released his wrist, and her hand fell limply to the mattress.

  8

  “Miss Nancy?”

  Her eyelids, the yellow of old ivory, had closed, and her sharp little chin seemed to be tucked into the frilly top of her white lace nightgown. Her left arm, which lay on the bedcover, was almost black. Caleb picked up her right arm to feel for a pulse, but there was none. He tried pressing two fingers to her childlike throat. Nothing. Finally, in desperation, he went to the dresser, picked up the silver-filigree hand mirror, and pressed it to her slack lips. Again, he put the mirror to her mouth. Nothing. Miss Nancy was dead. There was no way out of it.

  Caleb was leaving the room to go tell Cassie, when he looked back at Nancy’s slim body with its incongruously distended stomach. There was a baby in there, he thought. Perhaps a live baby.

  Caleb left the room and met Cassie as she was coming up the stairs with a tray covered with a white cloth.

  He made up his mind. “Take that back downstairs, Cassie,” he said. “Miss Nancy doesn’t want it.”

  “But—”

  “You do as I say. And keep that fire on. Put a pot of water on the stove. As soon as it boils, you bring me a big bowl of it and put it down by the door. Don’t you come back in here until I tell you. Understand?”