Caleb walked into the reception room, which was empty except for the open coffin standing on sawhorses in the middle of the room. The coffin lid stood propped behind the front door. It seemed like every flower on the property had been picked, and Miss Nancy, dressed in the white peau de soie dress in which she had been married, was covered with flowers to just above her waist. Her hands lay crossed on a bed of pure white roses.
From the side of the coffin, Caleb looked down on the face of the woman who had shown him so much kindness in the months he’d been at the plantation. Though Dulcie had done her best with powder, Miss Nancy’s face was still gray-yellow, showing the ordeal she had been through. She looked like an exhausted little girl.
“I’m sorry, Miss Nancy,” he said. “I did the best I could.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say. Turning, he walked through the door to the back of the house.
Big Mose and Hector had dug a grave beneath a big horse-chestnut tree in the family plot, which was halfway up a slope. It was a very small funeral. Only Jardine, the doctor, and the slaves were there. Big Mose and Hector stood ready to lower Miss Nancy into the grave. Caleb stood behind Jardine, who had not seemed to notice him when he came shakily downstairs. Sukey held the newborn baby to her breast. Since the nearest minister was close to thirty miles away, Doc Hollander thought it was up to him to say a few words.
Dr. Hollander moved to the foot of the grave, where a crude cross leaned against a tree stump, ready for erecting. Holding his big beaver-skin hat in both hands, he glanced down at the closed coffin lying on planks over the grave.
“We all knew Miss Nancy as a kind, warm, compassionate, and loving young woman, and we will miss her more than we can know at this time. But Miss Nancy is with God now, and she feels no pain. She is looking down on us from a better place, secure in the knowledge that we will take good care of the son she left behind, the finest gift she could have given this world.” He looked up at the assembled slaves and Jardine. “If you loved Miss Nancy, show her you honor her memory by living the best lives you can.” Taking a small black Bible from his coat pocket, he read the twenty-third psalm in a warm and mournful voice. Several of the women began to sob. Finishing the reading, Hollander closed the Bible and signaled the men to lower the coffin.
As Big Mose and Hector struggled with the ropes, Jardine seemed to wake up and notice what was happening.
“Stop!” he cried. “Don’t! Wait! You can’t—” He stumbled toward the two men who were slowly lowering the coffin, but Caleb stepped forward and took a firm grip on his arms. Jardine spun around, broke free, and looked at Caleb angrily.
“You! What are you doing here?” Jardine demanded. “You killed her, you black bastard! Get away! Get out of my sight!”
When Dr. Hollander moved forward to grab hold of Jardine, Caleb backed away from the gravesite. “I’m sorry, Master,” he said as he turned around and walked down the hill toward the house.
Hollander turned Jardine back toward the grave, and the last thing Caleb heard as he walked away was the hollow thud of earth striking the lid of the coffin.
12
That day, ordered by Jardine, Caleb moved back into the hut he’d shared with Big Mose. Early the next morning, he went to work in the fields. He was more isolated from the other slaves than ever. Though the outside world was told that Cassie helped deliver the baby just before Miss Nancy died, the slaves knew that no one had been in that locked bedroom with the mistress but Caleb. Miss Nancy had died, and Caleb had walked out of there with a living baby. There was talk of magic—white and black. But nobody talked about it to Caleb. They were warier than ever of this funny-talking outsider and left him strictly alone beyond the plainest necessary communication.
Caleb had been back in the fields for just over a month and had not seen Jardine even once. The house slaves said that he wasn’t at Three Rivers much, that he spent all his time in Cassatt or another town in the area. He even went as far afield as Camden, the county seat, and when he came back he was so drunk that he had to be carried from the buggy and put into bed. Each time, as soon as he recovered, he was off again. Once he came back with a red-haired woman who the house slaves said was from Charleston. But after a few noisy days, he was gone again, and so was she. The baby, named Boyd after his father, remained with Sukey and had no idea that he wasn’t as black as the other baby who shared her swollen breasts.
In the meantime, life stood still at Three Rivers. The slaves did the minimum work necessary, tended their own little gardens, fished in the rivers and the lake, and waited for the plantation to snap out of its dreamlike state. For Caleb, this was a good time. While he’d been up at the big house, Miss Nancy had lent him several books from the library of old Mr. Jardine, and he now spent his free hours reading and wondering if he was ever going to escape. He thought about lighting out while Jardine was away or drunk, but what Miss Nancy had said about the dog packs stuck in his mind. One day, a group of whites had ridden onto the plantation, many hounds snapping around the heels of their horses, demanding to know whether anyone had seen two slaves who had disappeared from a farm a dozen miles away on the other side of the turnpike. All the Three Rivers people had been forced to line up while an angry little man wearing a black hat stalked up and down the row, hitting a whip against his boot and peering closely at their faces.
Finally, late one afternoon, Jardine came home again, and this time Dr. Hollander was with him. They disappeared into the house, but within an hour, the doctor was outside again and heading toward the slave quarter. He found Caleb reading beneath a lime tree.
“What are you reading, Caleb?” the doctor called. He stopped and leaned against the rail fence.
Caleb got up and closed the book. “Something about the Roman Empire, sir,” he said, holding up the book.
The doctor looked at the title page and whistled. “You understand this stuff?” he asked.
“Some of it,” Caleb said. “I mostly skip the big words.”
“I would, too,” laughed the doctor. “And a lot of the small ones, too.” Then his tone changed. “How are you doing, Caleb?”
“I’m all right, sir.”
“You know that your master is home again?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He’s in a bad way, Caleb,” the doctor said. “If your master keeps on this way, he’s going to drink himself to death. Or dash his brains out falling from his horse. He’s out of control.”
Caleb just looked at him.
“He needs you up at the house,” the doctor said. “Cassie and those fool house girls can’t do a thing with him. The place is going to wrack and ruin. Do you want to come back and work in the house, Caleb?”
“Yes, sir,” Caleb said. “Does the master want me back there?”
“Well,” Hollander said, “he doesn’t know it yet, but yes, he does.”
“Does he still blame me for Miss Nancy’s death?”
“Caleb,” the doctor said, “he knows you didn’t kill Miss Nancy. He thinks he did, but he’s got to blame somebody else. Do you understand that?”
“No, sir.”
“I’ve read about it in books,” Hollander said, “but that doesn’t mean I understand it, either. Where are your things, Caleb?”
“In that hut over there, sir,” Caleb said, indicating his quarters.
“Well, get them,” the doctor said. “This is moving day.”
At Dr. Hollander’s suggestion, Caleb moved into a small room at the top of the house in order to be close by when needed.
13
Thanks to the medication Dr. Hollander gave him, Boyd Jardine slept for two days and two nights. When he awoke, the doctor had gone back to town, and Caleb was standing by his bed with a bowl of hot water and a towel. A breakfast tray was on the bedside table. Jardine started to rise up angrily, but then fell weakly back onto the pillow.
“Bring me wh
iskey,” he demanded.
“There’s none in the house, Master,” Caleb said. “Dr. Hollander took it.”
Jardine considered this for a moment. “Then get me some wine.”
“The wine cellar is locked,” Caleb told him. Before Jardine could protest, he added, “And the key is lost. We’ve looked everywhere.”
“Isn’t there anything to drink?” Jardine asked plaintively.
“Lime juice and water, Master,” Caleb said with a straight face.
Jardine thought again and absentmindedly stroked his jaw, encountering nearly a week’s growth of stubble. “Give me that, then, and get me my shaving things,” he ordered. “And get the hell out of here!”
“Yes, Master.”
In the following weeks, Three Rivers returned to normal—or as normal as it would ever be without Miss Nancy. When he got his strength back, Jardine went back to work with a fury, driving the slaves—who had come to appreciate the pace of the slowed-down plantation—with a sharp tongue and a heavy hand. From dawn to dusk he was out on the big roan making sure that the winter crops were in and that the cotton fields were being prepared for spring. The slaves knew that the easy days were over. Jardine drove himself even harder than he drove the slaves and came back to the house every night exhausted but tense, his dark-rimmed eyes snapping with repressed anger.
Under Caleb’s direction, the house began to function again. Cassie and the house girls learned that he was at least as exacting as Miss Nancy had been and much less likely to accept an excuse for slipshod behavior. They hated him in the kitchen, but they did what he said. The bakery, the brewery, and the household garden all returned to a productive state. Sukey and little Boyd moved into the house. Her own baby remained in the quarter, to be visited every day.
When Jardine threatened to have the wine-cellar door broken down, Caleb miraculously found the keys, and Jardine once again began drinking too much. Almost every night he fell asleep at the dinner table and had to be carried up to bed. But the more Jardine drank, the more determinedly Caleb, waiting on the table, watered down every glass after the third one.
One evening, when the burgundy had not struck him with the lethal force he was expecting, Jardine raised his fifth glass of wine to the oil lamp and peered into its pale depths.
“What is this, Caleb?” he asked.
“Rosé, Master,” Caleb said.
“Rosé?” Jardine exclaimed. “What do you know about rosé?”
“Old Master drank it in Boston and when we were in France.”
“France? What the devil were you doing in France?”
“Old Master took us there when I was fifteen and young Master was thirteen,” Caleb said. “Old Master believed in travel. He said it was educational.”
“Oh, he did, did he?” Jardine mocked. “And I suppose he took you to England and Germany and Italy and all those places, did he?”
“Yes, Master.”
“Yes, Master,” Jardine mimicked. “You’re a lying black bastard, Caleb.”
“No, Master.”
Angrily, Jardine raised the riding crop that lay by his right arm, but then he thought better of it. “All right, Caleb,” he said heavily, “tell me about . . . tell me about Paris.”
“What about it, Master?”
“All about it,” Jardine said angrily. He could not quite appreciate the irony of this black—a creature he could sell or even kill if he chose to—claiming to have been to all the places he himself had never had a chance to go.
Caleb, still standing by the table, began telling Jardine about the Paris he’d seen as a fifteen-year-old.
“What are you doing?” Jardine snapped.
“Telling, Master,” the confused slave said.
“Well, I don’t like being talked down at,” Jardine slurred. “Either I’m going to have to stand up, or you’re going to have to sit down.”
Caleb remained poised.
“And I’m not about to stand up,” Jardine said finally, “so sit you down there by the sideboard and tell me all about Paris—if you can.”
Dragging the images from his memory, Caleb described the Paris he had known ten years before: the gas-lit, cobbled streets, the beautiful but filthy River Seine, the village of Montmartre, and the gaudily dressed prostitutes lurking half in light and half in dark.
Jardine, who’d managed to get drunk despite the diluted wine, exclaimed, “And I’ll bet you liked looking at those white whores, didn’t you?”
“Not just white girls, Master,” Caleb, who was enjoying telling his tale, said. “Black girls, too.”
“Slaves?”
“No, Master, free blacks from Martinique, Haiti, all parts of Africa.”
“Damn me,” Jardine said. “I didn’t know that was allowed. I suppose you felt a bit like a free black yourself, didn’t you?”
“Yes, Master.”
“I knew it!” Jardine said. “And I’ll bet you sneaked off with some of those girls.”
“I was only fifteen years old, Master.”
“All the same, if you’d spoken French, you would have tried.”
“But I did speak French—a little. Brent and I had lessons before we went to France.”
“You’re a damned liar, Caleb! If you speak French, say me a little of it. Go ahead!” Jardine said.
Caleb thought for a long moment, pulling the words from the depths of his brain. Finally, he said, “Oui, Maître, je parle français, mais seulement un peu.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Yes, Master, I speak French, but only a little.”
“That’s enough,” Jardine said gruffly, jumping up and throwing down his linen napkin. “Get this table cleaned up.” As interesting as listening to Caleb had been, Jardine still felt aggrieved that a slave had been to all the places he would have gone had he not been called home at the end of his first year at Harvard because his father was ill. And to top it off, Caleb—a slave!—spoke French. That was too much!
But from time to time, Jardine would demand that Caleb tell him more about his European travels with Mr. Staunton and Brent. But Caleb didn’t raise the subject himself, and he was always ready to break off when Jardine showed signs of boredom or weariness.
14
As the months passed, Jardine began to recover. He spent less and less time up at the old graveyard staring at the rosewood marble tombstone he had imported for Miss Nancy’s grave. And, as Caleb got a better grip on the running of the plantation, Jardine traveled farther away and stayed away for longer periods of time.
One Saturday he rode over to Surrattsville for some quarter-horse racing and didn’t come back until Sunday evening. He had half a dozen strangers with him whom he’d met at the races. Caleb set Cassie to work getting a ham out of the larder and ordered the house girls to prepare the guest rooms while he served drinks in the big reception room. Within an hour, Caleb and Sissie, one of the house girls, were serving a cold supper in the dining room.
The wine flowed freely, and even after the food had been removed, no one showed much sign of wanting to leave the big oval table. Stories about the weekend’s races and those of days past continued. Caleb was unimpressed with Jardine’s guests. They were flamboyant city dwellers with pale faces and cheap but showy clothes. The women were pretty in a shallow way, but they showed too many teeth and too much breast in gowns that would have been more suitable for a hotel lobby than a plantation dinner. They looked like flashy flowers on the edge of fading. One of the wives, a sallow woman in her thirties with powdered white breasts and fantastic red hair, kept trying to catch Caleb’s eye with a suggestive smile. He determinedly kept his eyes down, avoiding her gaze. Finally, realizing that she was wasting her time, the woman thrust her wine glass at Caleb and snapped, “You, boy, fill me up!” The guests laughed.
More than a little drunk and
enjoying himself, Jardine called to Caleb, “Bring the brandy! And if you ladies don’t mind, we’ll smoke our cigars in here. Caleb, bring a box of the Havanas and some cigarillos for the ladies.”
In a few moments, Jardine and his guests were all puffing away and talking with more enthusiasm and noise than sense. Caleb stood in the corner of the dining room in case he was needed and ignored the redhead as she pointedly plunged a half-smoked cigarillo into a full glass of brandy.
The conversation turned to plantation life versus life in the cities, such as New Orleans and Mobile, and then to the difficulties of getting and training good servants.
“I’ll say this for you, Jardine,” shouted the husband of the redhead. “You’ve got yourself a good slave here.” He pointed his cigar at Caleb. “If I was you, I’d have some chains on his ankles to make sure of keeping him. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a supper served with such style, even by white help over in Mobile.”
“Caleb’s a useful boy,” Jardine allowed, knocking back the rest of his brandy and holding up his glass to Caleb for a refill. “And what’s more, he’s been to Paris and even speaks more than a little bit of that French.” Caleb retreated to the corner again.
“That’s ridiculous,” cried the redhead.
“Mr. Jardine,” trilled a corpulent blonde wearing paste diamonds on her near-naked bosom, “you simply cannot expect us to believe that.”
“Jardine, old fellow,” said one of the guests, “you might as well tell us your pigs can fly as claim that this slave can parlez the français. Really, I think it must be the brandy talking.”
Jardine was suddenly angry. His face turned pale. “Oh, yes?” he challenged. “I’ll show you.” He waved an imperious arm. “Caleb, get your black ass over here!”
Caleb Page 4
