Robin turns over and sees that his wife is asleep. They are back to back.
9
RAVEN QUICKSKILL WAS SITTING in a house with black shutters on Free Street in Emancipation City. It is an eighteenth-century schoolhouse he is “watching” for a few months. The owners, Sympathizers to the Cause, had left for a resort in another state, and knowing that he was a “fuge,” as a person of his predicament was called, had asked him to watch it. That’s the way it was in the fugitive life. Minding things for Abolitionists and Sympathizers to the Cause. They had left some plants, which he tended. And some cats. He was sitting in a rocker, reading a book about Canada, about the plentiful supply of gasoline, the cheap, clean hotel rooms that could be had in Toronto and Montreal; the colorful Eskimo sculpture that could be bought in the marketplace; the restaurants specializing in lobster; the scuba diving, the deep-sea fishing.
There was a knock at the door. He opened it on two men. They were dressed in blazers and wore grey slacks, black cordovans. They were very neat. One was medium-sized, the other, squat, short. The short one was carrying a briefcase.
“Mr. Quickskill?” the man with the briefcase asked.
“That’s me.”
“We have orders to repossess you,” said the medium-sized one. He sneezed. Removed a handkerchief and blew his nose.
Quickskill was thinking. It was three years since they had sent him a bill. He’d been moving ever since. They’d found him.
“Here’s my card,” the medium-sized man said, sneezing again.
“Have a cold?” Quickskill asked, reading the card. The card said NEBRASKA TRACERS, INC. “I have some vitamin C in the cabinet.”
“Hey, Harold,” the man with the briefcase said, “that might help. Vitamin C.”
“Would you gentlemen come in,” Quickskill said, escorting them into the room of Shaker furniture. They walked across the waxed hardwood floors and sat down. “Can I offer you something?” he asked, cool.
“No,” they said.
Quickskill clasped his hands on a knee, lifting his feet off the floor a bit. “Now, you gentlemen said that you were going to repossess me.”
“Your lease on yourself has come to an end. You are overdue. According to our information, Mr. Swille owns you,” the short one said, reaching into his briefcase. “Here’s the bill of sale. You see, Mr. Swille sees you as a bargain. Bookkeeper, lecturer, an investment that paid off. He’s anxious to get you back, and since there are a lot of invoices and new shipments piling up, he says a man of your ability is indispensable.”
“Uncle Robin is performing that function now. He needs Uncle Robin in the house. Robin’s overextending himself,” the medium one said. “He’s reading and writing now. Seems to have begun to assess his condition. One of the white house slaves, Moe, reported that the old codger had taken to philosophizing. Swille says he’s concluded that the missing invoices and forged papers will be ignored. He blames the whole thing on your misled humanitarian impulses.”
“And if I don’t want to return to Virginia, then what?”
“We’ll have no choice but to foreclose,” the short one said.
“Look,” the medium one said, “I hate doing this but … but it’s the law.”
“Even Mr. Lincoln said that what a man does with his property is his own affair,” said the short one.
“Yeah, Lincoln,” murmured Quickskill.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing.”
“You’re lucky, if you ask me. Why, that poem you wrote …” the short one said.
“How did you know?” It had been nearly three winters since Beulahland Review promised to publish it. Maybe Swille owned Beulahland too.
“Mr. Swille gave us a copy. You know, if we weren’t his employees, we’d circulate it ourselves,” the short one said.
“Regardless of the copyright?” the medium one asked.
“Oh, I forgot. That’s the law. We must obey the law, though he doesn’t come within the framework of Anglo-Saxon law. Justice Taney said that a slave has no rights that a white man is bound to respect.”
“Is it autobiographical?” the medium one asked Quick-skill.
“I’m afraid it isn’t,” Quickskill answered.
“See, I told you. They have poetic abilities, just like us. They’re not literal-minded, as Mr. Jefferson said. I knew that he couldn’t have possibly managed all of those things. Sneak back to the plantation three or four times. Know about poisons,” the medium one said. “That would have been too complicated for a slave.”
“You see, Mr. Swille, we’re students at a progressive school in Nebraska. We’re just doing this job to pay for tuition in graduate school. We’ve even read your poetry,” said the short one.
“You have?”
“Yes. The Anthology of Ten Slaves, they had it in the anthropology section of the library,” the medium one said.
“I’m a Whitman man, myself,” the short one said.
“Really?” Quickskill said. “Isn’t it strange? Whitman desires to fuse with Nature, and here I am, involuntarily, the comrade of the inanimate, but not by choice.”
“I don’t understand,” they said together.
“I am property. I am a thing. I am in the same species as any other kind of property. We form a class, a family of things. This long black deacon’s bench decorated with painted white roses I’m sitting on is worth more than me — five hundred dollars. Superior to me.”
“Fine thought. Fine thought. You see, I told you they can think in the abstract,” the short one said.
They were looking at the painting on the wall. Abraham Lincoln, armed with a gun swab, fighting the dragon of rebellion who has the face of a pig. A short pipe-smoking man has chained Abe’s leg to the tree of “constitutionality” and “democracy.” Lincoln became dictator after Fort Sumter. Told Congress not to return to Washington until the Fourth of July.
“Excuse me, I forgot the vitamin C,” Quickskill said.
“Of course,” the short one said. “Thanks for remembering.”
They picked up a copy of a first edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As Quickskill walked into the bathroom, he heard the short one say, “I hear she made a pile on this book.”
Quickskill, the property, moved past the bowl, the sink, and to the window. He opened it quietly. He climbed out and jumped, landing on the ground of an alley. He went by the open window, ducking. The men could be seen talking. He started to run. It was easy for him to run, and he was fast. He had burned the fat from his waist running through the streets of Emancipation City. Nebraskaites. Nice, clean-cut killers. Human being-burglars. Manhandlers. Always putting the sack on things. Putting anacondas in the Amazon in a sack. Trapping a jaguar with dogs, then lassoing the jaguar from above, lifting the jaguar, then lowering the jaguar into a net. Sacking things. Jump on the armadillo from a horse and sack the armadillo. Well, they aren’t going to sack me, Quickskill thought. Nebraskaites. Now he understood Elymas Payson Rogers’ poem:
But all the blind Nebraskaites
Who have invaded human rights,
Will at the North in every case
Be overwhelmed in deep disgrace.
When their eventful life is o’er,
No one their loss will much deplore;
And when their kindred call their name,
Their cheeks will mantle o’er with shame;
But soon their names will be forgot,
The memory of them all shall rot.
And let their burying places be
Upon the coast beside the sea;
And let the ever-rolling surge