Tom Piazza - A Free State

Tull tapped on the skin twice with his fingers; the head was taut. He reached and took the instrument out of the slave’s hands and set it across his own lap. Enoch watched him. With the nail of his right index finger, Tull snapped down on a string; the sound was muted and died out very quickly. He snapped down again, twice, and plucked the short high string. Even in the small shop room it was a quiet sound. Tull played a little tune, a jig, thirty seconds at most, and then, finished, handed the banjo back to Enoch.

“Your master said Joseph played for dances.”

“Yes, he was very good at playing for the dances.”

“Nobody could hear this thing over a pair of shuffling feet, let alone a room full of dancers.”

Enoch was quiet.

“What banjo would he play for dances?”

Enoch was quiet.

“The reason I’m asking, Enoch, is because Master said that Joseph lit out with a banjo you had made for him that he used to play for dances. He kept it in the house where he lived with his mother, and it was gone.” A muscle in his neck was rigid. “Are you going to tell me the truth?”

“It was just like mine I got in back.”

“Then let me see yours, Enoch.” Staring at him.

The slave walked to the back of the room, twisted a small piece of wood that kept a door closed on a rude hutch, and pulled out something that looked more likely.

“Bring it here.”

The slave handed Tull a larger instrument; the body had been made not from a gourd but from a grain sifter, a rigid wooden hoop. A larger skin had been stretched taut across it and held in place by a couple dozen tacks around the outside perimeter. The neck was a section of a table leg, planed down flat on one side to about a third of the original width, and left round underneath. It was a well-made instrument; the hoop was over a foot wide.

“You made this yourself?”

“Yes.”

Along the rim Enoch had inlaid crude wood marquetry in a herringbone pattern. At the top, where the strings were attached — four, this time — the head had been inlaid with a harlequin pattern of marquetry, and on the back side of the head a man’s face had been carved, quite skillfully, into the wood. Laid into the fingerboard itself, next to the side peg for the short string, was a tiny metal horseshoe, maybe half an inch long. Pewter, Tull thought, or maybe lead.

“Joseph can do this kind of work, too? He does woodworking?”

“Joseph can do a little. I taught him some.”

Tull righted the instrument in his lap and played a bit, as he had played before. This time the sound was considerably louder and fuller. Tull stopped playing, stood up, and started for the door, carrying the banjo.

“Much obliged, Enoch,” he said. “You can keep the other one.” He stepped out through the door with the banjo and walked to where Atticus stood waiting under an oak tree.

“Come on, take me to the mother.”

The house in question was compact but, again, nicely tended. Slightly larger than your normal run of cabins, even for favored house slaves. Raised two feet off the ground on piers. Still, not all that much more than a shack, Tull thought. Some flowers planted out front, struggling.

“Wait here,” Tull said.

Two wooden planks were steps up to the door. Tull opened the door without knocking.

The woman at the table, combing out some sort of yarn. At the unannounced entry, seeing the banjo in his hand, gasped. An expression, then, of dread, as if he were a poisonous snake.

Tull sized her up, figured her to be in her mid-thirties. She was still good-looking, but probably past her usefulness for the old drunk in the mansion. A boy maybe ten years old stood by a small stone fireplace where a fire was going despite the heat. She watched Tull with high alert and fear. She knew, he thought.

“You know what I’m here for.”

“Coley go in the other room now.”

Tull smiled at her, at the comedy of mistaken identity. “I’m not here on a buying trip, ma’am.”

“Coley, you hear me.”

The boy stepped backward into an adjacent room.

Tull saw her take in his hat, his turned eye. No; she knew.

“I think you got it figured out,” he said.

She was silent; he could hear the doors being locked inside her. Battening down the hatches. The dread and fear joined now by an attempt to steel herself. Tull knew the routine, the familiar stops along the way.

“I don’t want any unpleasantness,” he said. “I want to know where your boy ran off to.”

She sat staring at him.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll ask you one more time. Where’d your boy run off to? Your boy Joseph.”

“You not going to find him,” she said.

“I didn’t ask you,” Tull shouted, his face suddenly mottling red, “if you thought I would find him. I asked you where he ran off to.” Tull saw her breathing a little faster, the face still impassive. He let himself settle for a moment, then he said, “Before I ask you a third time, you think about this. Joseph can come back, alive. He’ll get a whipping, but it’s not going to be too bad because his daddy loves him.” He saw her frown; that was good. “And he’ll be alive, and you will have your boy with you.”

“He won’t come back.”

Tull leaned across the table and slapped her hard across the face with the flat of his hand. “You shut your fucking mouth unless you’re going to tell me where he is.” He didn’t like getting angry; it was a loss of control, and the only antidote was to use it to dominate a situation absolutely. He felt himself getting sexually aroused — another way of losing control. It made him angrier, harder.

He stood up and walked around the table to where she was; with his right forearm he pushed her yarn and tools off the table. She got out of her chair, grabbling at the dowel stick for the yarn, and as he grabbed for her she caught him on the side of the head with it. It had no effect. She screamed, and as Tull jerked her bodice down, ripping the fabric, the boy Coley ran into the room, crying. Tull had his knife drawn and was holding the sharp edge against her nipple and she was weeping.

“Philadelphia,” the boy yelled, crying and pushing at Tull’s leg. “Joseph said he going to Philadelphia.”

Tull looked at the boy, across the woman’s body. He was holding her down by the neck, with the nipple still pinched between his thumb and the knife. He looked at the boy directly and calmly in the eye. “Are you telling the truth?”

“Leave Mama be. Joseph said he gone to Philadelphia and bring us there to be with him.”

Tull kept his eyes locked into the boy’s until the boy shut his eyes and collapsed in sobs. Leaning down now and looking directly in the woman’s face, he said, “You raised that boy right.” Then he squeezed her nipple, hard, between his thumb and the knife blade and cut off the tip and flicked it away. She called out to her God as Tull wiped the blood off his knife onto her dress and stood up.

“I think you’re about finished nursing babies anyway,” he said. “If I’m wrong at least you got one tit left.”

He picked up the banjo from where he had leaned it against the wall and stepped out into the beautiful, hot afternoon.

Night. Not the barn, not the ravine, not the skiff tied in the rushes. He touched the wall. Somewhere outside, distant, a shrill voice arguing. All dark.

Henry slid his legs over the edge of the narrow pallet and put his feet against the floor, felt for the matches, lit one, and the small room bloomed dully with murky light and twitching shadows. Slowly, slowly, he rejoined himself, and his pulse settled, slowly. The tiny room in the entrails of Lombard Street, with its built-in drawers and cabinets — done by a riverboat man, so he’d been told.