Slave owner! Wilkie shouted. White devil! Get your filthy paws off the woman’s conscience. She’s seeing at last that it’s time for action. Time to swing up on some justice.
The Blood of the Soul of this poor Negro here lies upon you, Sam said, not deigning to speak directly to his dark companion, and the guilt of his Barbarous Impieties, and superstitions, and his neglect of God, if you are willing to have nothing done toward the salvation of his soul. Despite what you think, to convert one Soul unto God is more than to pour out Ten Thousand Talents into the Baskets of the Poor.
You listen to me, you cracker spook, Wilkie said, I’m not going to be taken in by your love-thy-servant nonsense. If a man speaks the language of brute force, you can’t come to him with peace. Why good night, he’ll break you in two, as he has been doing all along. You have to learn how to speak his language and then he’ll get the point. Then there’ll be some dialogue. There’ll be some communication. There’ll be some understanding.
Oh, who can tell, Sam called out, his indignation rising, but that this Poor Creature may belong to the Election of God! Who can tell, but that God may have sent this Poor Creature into your hands, Charlotte, that so One of the Elect may by your means be Called and by your Instruction be made Wise unto Salvation! The Blackest Instances of Blindness and Baseness are admirable Candidates of Eternal Blessedness. Though it be caviled, by some, that it is questionable Whether the Negroes have Rational Souls, or no, let that Brutish insinuation be never Whispered any more. They are men not beasts. Withhold knowledge of the Almighty from them and they will be destroyed.
At her heels they raged, traipsing after her down the hallway, down the back stairs, and into the kitchen, to the window above the sink full now of dishes.
Over the grass a morning mist hung. Its tendrils stretched under the maples and down the hill. Ten minutes or more she stood there waiting, until at last she saw Fanning come out of his front door, dressed not in a suit today, as he usually was, but in jeans and a sweatshirt. She watched with relief as he got in his car and drove up to the road. She was not, after all, in the business of killing.
Yesterday, after saying her goodbyes to Henry, she had seen in her mind’s eye the mansion burning, and felt, in anticipation, its heat on her skin, the heat she remembered from the bonfires they used to have in the back field when they came up for Thanksgiving and dragged the fallen branches out of the woods and burned all the raked leaves, only how much greater would the heat be when it was an entire house consumed, wood and nails and glass and a thousand substances besides? Again now, she saw the fire, and then the charred frame and then that, too, crumbling, and from the blackened earth saplings rising, drinking sun and rain, thickening in nature’s time to the testaments of endurance that trees became, shading again the river and the trout, the cardinals and the blue jays and the orange-winged butterflies flitting through a summer dusk, when she and Henry had played by the riverbank before being packed in the car and driven back to Rye, only years later to discover, at night in her dorm room, Milton’s pentameter describing what the two of them had lost:… whereat
In either hand the hastning Angel caught
Our lingering Parents, and to th’ Eastern Gate
Led them direct, and down the Cliff as fast
To the subjected Plaine; then disappeer’d.
She let the tap water run until it chilled the bones of her fingers and then she filled a glass for herself and the dogs’ bowls. They lapped them quickly dry and were back at her side in no time.
They say overcome your enemies with your capacity to love. What kind of an idea is that? Wilkie asked. He’s not going to be overcome by your love. I’ve never called on anybody to be violent without a cause.
There is a court somewhere kept, where your pride shall be judged, Sam warned. And it is not here in the False Church of this earth.
“I have not for one day believed in your God.”
No, sure. And so in Great Folly you shall one day wander down to the Congregation of the Dead.
She took a box of matches from the ledge of the stove and beneath the sink found a canvas bag.
Sam and Wilkie followed her into the breezeway.
To concentrate just once more, she thought. That’s all that it would take. And indeed, as she stepped down the ramp onto the floor of the barn, she began to feel as she’d imagined she would, reading those stories in the papers over the years of the environmentalists and the anti — free traders who broke the law in the name of some greater justice, the anticipation of the act clarifying experience, rescuing it from the prison of language, the inward purpose blessing the otherwise desultory with meaning. And yet, for that very reason, she’d always considered such extremism adolescent. Too simple. Willful in its ignorance of the world’s complexity. And so deadly earnest. And yet how judgmental she had been. What, after all, was wrong with earnestness? Weren’t Fanning and his kind earnest? Weren’t all the polluters earnest, the physical and the cultural? And did anyone ever impugn or mock them for it? No one ever thought to. Avarice was never shackled by a concern for authenticity. It didn’t care about image or interpretation.
The sit-down lawn mower, its paint cracked and axles rusting, stood where the family Jeep once had. Beyond it was the ladder to the loft, where the wooden tea crates full of Eric’s books were still stacked, having remained there ever since they’d followed Charlotte up from New York. She didn’t come in here much anymore, and for good reason.
Along with the cans of primer under the back shelf, she found tins of turpentine that she’d purchased a few years back, intending to call someone about doing the shutters and trim. She placed them in her bag with the matches.
My second wife, my dear friend Elizabeth, died of the measles on the afternoon of November 9, Sam started in again.
“For heaven’s sake, can’t you shut up!”
Ten days after giving me the twins, Eleazer and Martha. Oh, to part with so desirable, so agreeable a Companion, a Dove from such a Nest of young ones too! Oh! the sad Cup, which my Father appointed me! And when five days hence my maidservant succumbed, I tested the Lord’s patience by imagining the malignancy to have gone up over us. Then the twins died. The sixth and seventh of my children to be taken up by the Almighty. And when a week later Jerusha too fell sick I begg’d the Lord for the life of my dear pretty daughter. I begg’d that such a bitter Cup, as the Death of that lovely child, might pass from me. But she too went to our Savior. And I died in life unto this world as all sinners must preparing for the world to come, knowing the Lord is in thy Adversity! Fifteen children I fathered. Thirteen I buried. Such a record of woe as no man should have to bear, my cross but a dry sort of a tree. But never did I despair of the Lord’s infinite wisdom or cease in the business of Worship. And you stand here aggrieved by the bitter fruit of one sinful lust? One loss of a man not your husband?
“Damn you!” she shouted, pushing him aside with her knee.
Why it is useless for you to deny that it is in the shadow of his going that you have arrived here at this foolery, allowing your spirit to shape itself thus. What, after all, are your great Politics but a woe without end? What is your pessimistic liberal blather but the Bible’s own warning of the Apocalypse shorn of the just Consolation of Heaven? You have decried this world as any of the Lord’s preachers might, and lived as if in the End Times, yet every day you have succumbed to the pride of earthly wisdom, the pride of thinking of yourself as above the Savior’s flock. And in your condescension you violate your own philosophy of tolerance. Yes, yours is a metaphysical pride. The pride of human knowledge.