Not long before Moffett arrived, Elias opened his eyes and saw a boy watching him. When the boy saw him open his eyes, he came closer, asking, “You want some water?”
Elias closed his eyes again and did not answer because he did not want to spare anybody’s neck.
“You want some water?”
He nodded without opening his eyes and he heard the boy leave. When he did not return, Elias thought he had been having fun with him, and he found some peace in that. He soon heard Moffett’s preaching voice, the words indistinct. When he opened his eyes again, the boy was standing before him, a chipped, discarded porcelain cup in one hand and a large piece of hoe cake in the other. “The preacher here,” the boy said with a smile, as if that was the news Elias most needed to hear. “I useta hear him when I was over the other place.” Three days ago Henry had bought Lot Number Four, a group of three slaves, and the boy had been one of them. Elias took the bread in his hands and ate, and in between bites, the boy put the cup to his lips and he drank.
“My name Luke,” he said when there was no more water.
“I know,” Elias said, looking at a fly alight on his hand and edge toward the bread. The boy smiled and turned the cup upside down and shook it. “I know.” The boy stood and ran out and returned quickly with more water. He sat before Elias and since the bread was gone, Elias held the cup in his hands. “You want some more hoe cake?” Luke said. The man shook his head. “I know a song bout Jesus. I can sing it.” Elias shook his head again. Moffett, Sunday after Sunday, had but one theme-that heaven was nearer than anyone realized and that one step away from the righteous path could take heaven away forever. “Hang on,” he liked to say, “just hang on, cause heaven is right over there. See it. See it. Close your eyes and see it.” His ending words were that they should obey their masters and mistresses, for heaven would not be theirs if they disobeyed. “One day I want to sit with yall and eat peaches and cream in heaven. I don’t wanna have to lean over and look way way down and see yall burnin in them fires of hell.” Luke and Elias could not make out his words and so they just listened to the way his words came into the barn and bounced around. The sparrows were no longer flying, just chirping somewhere above their heads. Elias could see them in his mind, arranging the straw and turning around and around on it to make a place smooth enough to be a home to the eggs. At last Luke said, “I was born on Marse Colfax place… You know that?”
Elias said, “I know. I know that.” Dropping the cup into his lap, he leaned his face into his hands and began to cry. On the worst days he had ever had, he had always been able to see himself as one day living free. But now…
“Is all right,” Luke said. “I’ll sit with you. Is all right. I’ma sit with you till all them hants leave you alone. I ain’t afraid of no hants.”
Moffett, after the services, sat with Henry and Caldonia in their dining room, eating bread and cheese and a tea that was more honey than anything else. He claimed anything sweet eased his gout. Now and again in their lives Caldonia and Henry would go down to the services with the slaves but generally the sitting with Moffett would pass in their minds as a kind of service, as communion with God. After the meal, Moffett sat with his feet propped on a stool Zeddie the cook had brought in from the back for him. The stool, padded, was used for little else and had become known as the Reverend Moffett stool.
Henry said little, thinking about what he would do with Elias.
“You are away from us this day, Henry,” Moffett said at one point. He had been paid the $1 for conducting the services the moment after he entered the house. In his early days of preaching, before the gout, he had been paid 3 cents for every slave he preached to, but the county had been wealthier then. Now, few white slaveowners employed him, many preferring to simply read to their servants out of the Bible. The few black slaveowners had begun to believe that their own salvation would flow down to their slaves; if they themselves went to church and led exemplary lives, then God would bless them and what they owned. And one day they would go to heaven, and so would their slaves. So why pay Moffett to help do what they could manage for nothing?
“He hasn’t been sleeping well,” Caldonia said. “I believe, Reverend Moffett, he works too hard and it shows with all those headaches. Sleepless nights. ‘Rest up, Henry,’ I’m always telling him. ‘Rest up.’ Perhaps you could supplement my words, Reverend Moffett. Remind him that God would not be happy to see us work ourselves to death.” She and Henry had been married three years and seven months.
“He certainly wouldn’t,” Moffett said. “Laziness is one sin, Henry, but working too much is also a sin. Why do you think God put such emphasis on Sunday, on resting. Keep the Sabbath holy is just God’s way of telling us not to overtax ourselves. Make God happy, Henry, and tax yourself just enough to pay your bill.”
“Precisely,” Caldonia said.
“I do,” Henry said. “I do rest up. It’s just that my wife doesn’t see all the times that I do.” Watching Moses tell him that Elias was gone, he had decided that a whipping would not be enough, that only an ear would do this time. He had just not decided if it should be the whole ear or only a piece, and if a piece, how big a piece?
“Oh, for goodness sakes, Henry!” Caldonia said. “You might get Reverend Moffett to accept that, but I know better.”
Moffett shifted in his chair and put one foot over the other on the stool. He had two more services to conduct that day and he would be late for both. Henry used him because he remembered him from his days as a slave at William Robbins’s, had liked to listen to him after his parents were gone into freedom and there was only Rita, his second mother, to care for him.
Moffett left.
Henry watched him ride off in his buggy and decided then that he would send for Oden Peoples, the Cherokee, the next day. He told Caldonia once they were back inside, in their parlor.
“That,” she said, “seems too great a punishment, Henry. Too much for such a small crime.” She was on the settee and he was at the window on the left side of the room.
“It ain’t that small, Caldonia. It’s a bad apple in the barrel, right down at the bottom, not even at the top where you can pick it and throw it away. Somethin gots to be done,” he said. Sometimes he talked the way Fern had tried to teach him and sometimes he did not. He was especially “deviant and lazy,” as she called it, when he was tired and uncertain. Caldonia sensed the exhaustion now and went to him, putting her arms around his back. Marriage, too, meant the end of loneliness, but Robbins had said nothing about that.
“Let him try one more time to do what’s right, Henry.”
“I cain’t. I just cain’t.” As a boy at Robbins’s plantation, he had known a man whose right ear had been cut off after he ran away a second time. When the man, Sam, wifeless, childless, was old and running was not so much on his mind anymore and he had time to gnaw on his unhappiness, he liked to grab small children to scare them, putting the earless side of his head close to the child’s face until the child screamed to be let go. The wound had blossomed into a terrible mushroom of scar tissue and was as different from the other side of his face as heaven from hell. “Go find my ear!” the old man would holler as he shook them. “Go find my ear, I say, and be quick about it!” One boy had fainted. Another child’s father had beat Sam but still he did not stop grabbing hold of children. Henry himself had been grabbed a few times, but one day, when he was twelve, he found himself not afraid anymore, wondered where the fear had gone as Sam pulled him closer to the side of his head and the mushroom once again threatened to open up and become large enough to pull him in. He was held long enough to study the brown smoothness of the scar that invited him to reach over and touch. Henry even had time to peer into the ear hole partly covered over with gray hair and brown smoothness and wonder how much sound such an ear could take in.