Caleb (7 page)

16

One evening, as Jardine was refilling his glass with whiskey, he noticed Caleb gazing at his father’s books on the shelves of the study.

“You still big on reading, Caleb?” he asked.

“Yes, Master.”

“Well, you help yourself,” Jardine said with an expansive gesture. “Read any of them you like. Not here, of course. Take ’em up to that room of yours. Mind you take care of them. Daddy was a great reader, and I always thought I might look at some of them. But I never seem to get around to it. Now, I suppose it’s too late. You go ahead. It’s either you or the paper beetles, and I think you might make more of them.”

After that, Jardine would occasionally ask Caleb what he was reading and why. On long winter evenings this often led to Caleb sitting in front of the fire in the study and reading to Jardine from his father’s books.

“Christ, Caleb,” Jardine would say, “I never knew there was so much in those damned books. Read me some more.”

As spring blossomed, Jardine became restless again, and he took to disappearing for days at a time, secure in the knowledge that Caleb would keep the plantation running. The house girls were pretty well trained by now, so Caleb was able to spend some part of each day out with the slaves getting the fields ready for the spring planting. Big Mose knew what do to, and Caleb did not interfere with his authority. But he liked to know what was going on.

One day Caleb rode out on the wagon that took lunch to the slaves in the fields. “Any problems?” he asked Mose.

“No,” said Mose, “except those two darkies Massa borryed from the Bentleys ain’t worth shit. But we doin’ all right.” Caleb turned to go back to the wagon, but Mose added, “Tell me something.”

Caleb turned back. He and Mose hadn’t exchanged more than a dozen words of personal conversation since he’d moved into the house. “Yeah?”

“What are you doing?”

“Same as you. Working for Master.”

“You know what I mean. You’re educated. I’ve seen you with those books, doing that writin’ in that flimsy thing you carry around. Cassie and the house girls tell us things. We know you ain’t no ordinary slave. You can’t be plannin’ on staying here—not after Boston and Paris and God knows where.”

“You’re right, Mose,” Caleb said. “I’d be away from here if I could. But my face is just as black as yours, and there are three big states between this farm and a place where a black man can walk down a city street without some white face wondering why the hell he isn’t wearing a dog collar—and doing something about it. I might have it better than you people in the fields, but I’m still a slave. In five minutes, Master could have me back sweating for you in the cotton, or he could sell me away to somewhere a hell of a lot worse than this place.”

“He could,” Mose agreed.

“So, I’m just doing my job,” Caleb said, “and trying not to worry about things I can’t change right now.” He turned toward the wagon again. “Right now, I’m going to go see what those house girls are up to while my back is turned.”

17

On one of his increasingly extended trips away, Jardine came back with a new slave in the back of the buckboard. When Caleb came out to greet him, she was climbing out of the wagon. She stared at Caleb uncertainly. Unlike the girl on the platform the day Jardine bought Caleb, this was no teenager. Nor was she high yellow. She was a full-grown woman, looked to be twenty-three or twenty-four, and her skin suggested satin lightly tinted with tea: definitely not white but not approaching black, either. Her nose was a thin blade hinting strongly at Indian blood, and her peculiar blue-gray eyes could have come from anywhere. The woman’s body was mature, but not overripe. If she were a peach, Caleb thought, you’d want to get your teeth into her right away.

Caleb could see that Jardine wanted to help her down but did not dare to do it. “Caleb,” he said as casually as he could, “this is Missy. She’ll be working in the house with the girls. I believe she’s got some skills. You find out about that.” With a look back at Missy that was meant to be casual and masterly, he strode into the house, leaving Caleb to unload the wagon and then get the boy to take it around to the barn.

“You got things?” Caleb asked Missy.

“Just this,” she said, holding up a worn bag sewn from an old coat her former mistress had thrown out.

“All right,” Caleb said blankly. “Just grab a hold of that bag of flour and follow me.”

When Caleb entered the back kitchen with Missy, the house girls bunched in a defensive semicircle and looked at her as if she were a stray cat in a hen house.

“This is Missy,” he told them, echoing Jardine’s words. “She’s going to be working with you girls in the house.”

“We don’t need no more help!” said Drusilla, one of the house girls. She often acted as unofficial spokesgirl for the rest
.
She respected Caleb, but she wasn’t afraid of him. She had a tongue on her.

“Well, you’ve got it,” Caleb said, adding sharply, “and we might need more help here in the house if I decide to send some of you girls back out to the fields.” He looked directly at Drusilla, who was just as black as Caleb and nearly as tall. She dropped her eyes first. “After you-all get the wagon unloaded, show Missy where you sleep.”

Missy turned out to be a good worker. She’d obviously been trained well and knew most of the household tasks. Though the other girls openly shunned her, preferring to work together and leave Missy to do the single-handed jobs, Caleb had no criticism to offer about her willingness or skills. Jardine didn’t even mention her again until Missy had been at Three Rivers for nearly a week.

One morning after breakfast as he was getting ready to ride to the fields, Jardine asked with studied casualness, “That new girl, Caleb, how’s she settling in?”

“All right, Master.” Caleb told Jardine only what he thought he ought to know.

“No trouble with the other girls? She’s a good worker?”

Caleb ignored the first question. “She knows her job, Master,” Caleb said, “and she seems willing enough.”

“That’s good,” Jardine said absently. “That’s good. Where’s my riding crop?”

“Here, Master.” He picked the crop up from the floor beside Jardine’s place at the table and extended it toward Jardine. For a brief moment both had their hands on the slim whip and had the same thought, but neither voiced it.

18

After Missy had been at Three Rivers for nearly a month, Jardine told Caleb that she might help him by waiting on the table. Missy spent the afternoons—when the girls were usually off—learning some of the finer points of table service from Caleb.

“I hope you’re paying attention,” Caleb told her. “If you mess up Master’s dinner, you’re going to be back sweeping floors and folding sheets.”

“I won’t mess up,” she told him coolly. “I learns fast.”

And she did. Under Caleb’s close supervision, Missy soon became a skilled table servant, quick but not hurried, unobtrusive but always there when needed. She developed the sixth sense a waiter needs to anticipate, rather than just react to demands.

Jardine was very pleased, and Caleb didn’t mind having the work taken off his hands. But he watched Missy very carefully—not out of jealousy or fear for his position, but because he had learned that if you don’t control things, things will sure as hell control you. Before long, Jardine suggested casually that it seemed a waste of Caleb’s time to watch Missy serve breakfast and lunch. The girl had the routine down perfectly. Caleb agreed and retreated during Jardine’s daytime meals to the little windowless storeroom that he had turned into his private office. There he read some of the old books that had quietly migrated from Jardine’s study. By very convenient coincidence, the door to that storeroom stuck badly. If any of the house girls forgot to knock—a practice that Caleb encouraged without much success—he had plenty of time to stick his book out of sight before the door was fully open. Thanks to Missy, Caleb was making good progress through the collection of books.

A couple of weeks later, Jardine suggested that it might be more convenient if Missy moved from the annex she shared with the other house girls into an empty room at the top of the house. It was at the opposite end of the rough and uncarpeted corridor leading to Caleb’s room, but it was reached by a different stairway from the back of the house, and a door had long ago been installed in the middle of the corridor, isolating the room. Caleb had never known the door to be unlocked.

The house girls cleaned and refurbished the long-vacant little room, but they didn’t do it cheerfully. You could hear their nonverbal but expressive grumbling halfway down the back stairs. Aware of the legitimacy of their grievance, once the girls had made Missy’s room livable, Caleb gave them a basket of food from the kitchen, and allowed Andrew to drive them up to the lake in the wagon. Being realists, the girls accepted this as scant compensation for indignity above and beyond the call of duty. As they left, Drusilla and Caleb exchanged a look that couldn’t be put into a thousand words.

Missy moved into the little room with the big bed and very quickly transformed it. Raiding the castoffs in the attic with a free hand, without realizing it she turned the room into a fair approximation of a harem. As a finishing touch, a band of red crepe around the oil lamp created an atmosphere of cozy decadence.

The day Missy moved into her new room, Jardine left for a long weekend at the Bentley’s place six miles away. This was possibly the last thing that he wanted to do at that particular time, but Jardine had learned as a boy that what Mrs. Rafe Bentley wanted, Mrs. Rafe Bentley got. And what she wanted that particular weekend was for Jardine to meet her second cousin from down Savannah way. So he would meet her second cousin. With a sigh and a blank look at Caleb that was returned just as blankly, Jardine got up on the best gig and headed for the Bentley’s plantation.

With Jardine gone, Three Rivers went slack. Not as slack as it would have gone without Caleb there, but if there was one thing slaves knew, it was how to make the most of an opportunity. Instinctively, Caleb knew that it would be futile to take too much notice. Anticipating the inevitable, he told Cook and the house girls that if they got things in good shape by Friday afternoon, they needn’t be seen again until after Saturday lunch. It would not have done his authority any good to have to go looking for them in the quarter Saturday morning. He hoped he wouldn’t have to go looking for them Saturday afternoon. He was counting on Drusilla to see that he didn’t.