Joe loosened his hands, said something that seemed like, You gonna tell your owner? Ann lolled back on the bed, gasping.
“She’s still alive,” Martha said.
Sarey Rose knew that strangling didn’t kill necessarily at once. The violent fluctuation in brain blood pressure did damage.
Then the slave concubine came up without the baby, with towels and water. She and her father let Joe go.
Martha said, “So are they going to kill her?”
“She dies in a day or two,” Peter said.
“Aftermath of his choking her, throwing her about,” Sarey Rose said.
The slaves seemed familiar with the concept. The woman looked at Ann, who was still gasping as though the air had clotted in her windpipe. Her father spoke. She left and came back with wet towels and rice powder.
Ann tried to fight the black woman as she washed Ann’s throat bruises and lay down a dusting of powder over Joe’s nail marks.
Martha said, “I’ve got to consult a physician.”
Peter said, “She’s not hurting Ann further. She’s just trying to disguise what happened.”
Sarey Rose said, “Maybe Joe was fucking all Flint’s women.”
“God, that’s ugly,” Martha said.
Sarey had known how ugly she’d been before the sentence left the air. But then maybe the slave woman thought it’d have a better chance of getting freed if Miz Ann was dead. How many slave concubines had the hope that the master would free them for bearing his children? What proportion of slaves who bore their masters’ children did get freed? It must have happened just enough to make the dream a common hope. Or maybe just being treated better was enough.
Whatever, Miz Ann wouldn’t run off to the mountains with her white-trashi lover. And, like so many contemporary uneducated white-trash men, Joe killed his lover when he couldn’t have her the way he wanted to have her. “Uneducated,” Sarey said out loud.
“What?” Peter said.
“I’ve got a distant kinsman who killed his ex. White trash still do that when they’re dumb and uneducated.”
“Kill their lovers?” Martha said.
“So now we know about the past,” Sarey Rose said. “It was stupid.”
“We weren’t just malleable work folk,” Peter said. “We had our own agendas.”
“Bunch of uneducated wishful thinkers, all of them,” Sarey Rose said.
Martha said, “So Flint came home just in time to bury her. Her mother comes tomorrow to see her, but everyone wants to cover up why the overseer was in her bedroom. Her people were better than Flint, even.”
“But you’re half my kin,” Sarey said. “Do we need to watch through the end?”
Martha looked at Peter. He said, “We’d prefer that you don’t.”
Sarey Rose walked out. She’d been excluded again. Not by blood links this time, but by her own rudeness. She put her hands in the pockets of her new jacket, feeling overdressed and lumpish.
She sat down under the ancient catalpa tree and leaned her head back against it and told herself she was good at what she did. Told herself over and over.
And the Civil War came, and Joe hid out in a deserters’ camp and came back when it was over, and the ex-slaves wouldn’t let him on the property, and Ann’s son went away forever and Joe married, and the lineage spread up to Sarey Rose and Martha, and the past twisted them in knots. How many layers of ancestor, of family lies?
Sarey Rose thought, Someday, we’ve got to forget it all. Because we can’t really know.
In the parking lot of the restored plantation house, two kids traded off on a portable computer linked to the rest of the modern world by modem, sending, reading, giggling, pushing the laptop at each other. Sarey Rose wondered if anyone in the future cared enough about the dead to watch them.