Edward Jones - The Known World

He went down the stairs and tried to keep the coins from making a sound and stood at Mildred’s head.

“Where is he, Counsel?”

Somehow, Counsel found it an odd question and he answered, without thinking, in an odd way: “I found him not.” He put his pistol in his holster and reached down and picked up Mildred’s rifle, now as bloody as the floor around her, and pointed it at Skiffington. “Stand back, Counsel. You best stand back and away.” Counsel fired into Skiffington’s chest, and though Skiffington leaned forward only a few inches, Counsel could see the wound was a mortal one. But because John Skiffington was a large man, Counsel Skiffington shot him again. The second shot singed the ear of Skiffington’s horse before it entered the man and the horse reared up, but the man’s weight seemed to force it down and the horse, once back on the ground, shook its head over and over and Skiffington slid to the side, trying to hold on because something told him that holding on was the only way he could be saved.

Skiffington was entering the house he had taken his bride to. He ran up the stairs because he felt there was something important he had to do. He found himself in a very long hall and he ran down the hall, looking in all the open rooms and wanting to stop but knowing he did not have time. He passed them all, from the one with his mother cooking his supper to the one with his father talking to Barnum Kinsey. Minerva sewing. Winifred in her nightgown with her arms open to him. But he did not stop. At the very end of the hall there was a Bible tilting forward, a Bible some three feet taller than he was. He got to it in time to keep it from falling over, his hands reaching to prop it up, his open left hand on the O in Holy and his open right hand on the second B in Bible.

Counsel had not moved. He was thinking of how he would explain everything to everyone, and it was a simple matter in his mind-the Negro woman had shot his cousin and the sheriff had shot her in return, before he, Counsel, could even raise his gun. And he would be right-it was to be a simple case for everyone and most of them accepted his word.

Skiffington fell. His horse tried to step away from him once he hit the ground, but it could not go far because Skiffington’s right foot was caught in the stirrup, and so the horse was caught between wanting to be away from a dead man and wanting to be near its master. Counsel reached back and dropped the rifle, then wiped his hands on the parts of Mildred’s clothing that were not bloody. At the sound of the rifle hitting the floor Skiffington’s horse stopped moving. Counsel’s horse had remained in its place all along, moving not one inch. Counsel heard the stairs creak and looked over to see a Negro watching him, his hands up. Counsel took out his pistol and waved him over with the gun. “You the Moses we’ve been looking for?” Counsel said. Moses came over, nodding his head all the while. “Where are the other two?” Counsel asked, meaning Gloria and Clement, and Moses said he didn’t know about any other two, that he was alone, he and Mildred. So, Counsel thought, he had been hiding somewhere secret and that made him happy because it meant there were places where the gold could be.

The idea that Moses had killed Priscilla his wife and his son Jamie and the madwoman Alice died with John Skiffington, and that was where it stayed for many years.

Counsel said to Moses, “Are you sure you’re alone?”

“Yessir.” Moses looked over at Mildred and it was all he could do to stop from going to her. She had asked him not one question, just gave him a home. “We,” she had said, “will find a way to get you out of this here mess.”

“Open your mouth,” Counsel said. Moses did and Counsel stuck his pistol far back into the man’s throat and Moses tried to wiggle away but Counsel stayed with him. He took Moses by the shirtfront and held him. “I don’t want to kill two in one day but I’m not above doing it.” Moses coughed around the pistol. “You keep everything you know just as locked in as your words are locked in right now. You hear what I say?” Moses, in pain, gagging, nodded his head as much as he could. “If you ever say a word, I will shoot you down like a dog. And you can see right here that that’s something I will do.”

This nigger, Counsel decided, has never killed anyone. What had John been thinking?

Counsel withdrew the gun and motioned Moses to the door, and Moses bent down to Mildred, touched her bloody hair. Moses stood back up. Counsel, seeing his victory approaching after all those years, began to feel generous. He said to Moses, “Tell her good-bye in any way you see fit.” The dead woman, after all, had opened the door to that golden victory. Was there a prayer Job had offered to God after he put his servant back a million times better than Job had been before the devastation? Thank you, O Lord. I cannot forget what I once had, but I will not resent you so much when I think of those old days and my dead loved ones.

“I don’t wanna leave Miss Mildred out here on the floor like this, Mister,” Moses said.

Counsel sighed and shrugged his shoulders. Moses bent down again to Mildred. In less than a half hour, when Counsel began to realize that he did not have all the time in the world, he would regret the generosity. But now he holstered the pistol and stepped out onto the porch. He didn’t care about the rifle beside Mildred because all the power it had was now soaking in John Skiffington.

In less than two hours, many miles down the road from where Mildred and Augustus Townsend had lived, Counsel on his horse would come upon Elias and Louis, the bastard son of William Robbins and future husband to Caldonia Townsend. Counsel would also come upon the patrollers Barnum Kinsey, Harvey Travis and Oden Peoples, a full Cherokee man. All of those men would be on horses. Counsel was to greet them with the appropriate grieving face of a man who just had his relative killed. Tied to the pommel of Counsel’s horse would be a rope that led back some five feet to the tied hands of Moses, the slave and former overseer, who alone would be walking.

After Counsel told them what had happened at Mildred’s, Travis would say over and over, “John is dead. Is that what you tellin me? John is dead.” When he had accepted what Counsel said, Travis said to the gathering, “We can’t bring John back, but we have right here the reason for this whole mess,” and he would point to Moses. “We have a nigger here who got it into his head that it was proper for him to run away. He got it into his head and now the sheriff of this county is dead. A good and upstanding sheriff. I say we make it so he never gets it into his head to stroll away again.”

“What are you meaning?” Louis said. He was a Negro but the white men and Oden all knew that he was William Robbins’s Negro, which made him special.

“Fix him right here in the road,” Travis said, looking at Moses. “Let him remember every day what he done to John Skiffington. Fix him so he won’t run again.”

Louis said, “That slave does not belong to you for yall to do with as you please. He is not your property. He is not yours.”

Travis said, “He is the reason our John is dead. That makes him everybody’s property.”

“Sure he belongs to us,” Counsel said. “Would we be out here in this hot sun if he hadn’t decided he had a right to run away?”

“Just leave him be,” Louis said. Barnum was silent; something in his heart told him there were many lies about what Counsel said. But John was dead and that was the one big truth. Elias was also silent. He was sitting on a gray mare, which Caldonia said came with his new position as overseer. Celeste had said nothing to him that morning. Less than an hour later on that road, as the group of men and horses moved toward Caldonia’s place, Elias would falter and be unable to ride. As he fell farther and farther behind, Louis, surprised at how close they had become in the last few days, would go back to him, dismount and help Elias off his horse, and both men would walk with the reins in their hands, Louis telling Elias all the while that they should take all the time they needed. “There’s no hurry now.” At that point in the road, most of the day was behind all the horses and their men, as was the sun.