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Any time bad news had to be given the old man, his oldest son, Martin, Jr., would get Mary to tell it. Somehow she could get the old man to see the will of God in unpleasant matters. Nichols was a pious Methodist, though there was no Methodist church in Triana. He couldn't abide the Presbyterians or the Baptists, so went to no church at all. Yet he remained a Methodist, firmly.

Every day Nichols told Mary to send for the Methodist minister in Huntsville. Go now, go now, get the preacher. She said, right away, yessir, she would do it. He would hear her toiling down the stairs, breathing hard. Each step took half a minute; he would listen to the familiar squeak of each floorboard and grow furious knowing she could ignore his orders. After she had gone his mind would wander, however, and he forgot his need. The next day he would remember in a spasm of anxiety and ask again. She said the same thing, yessir, she would do it, right away.

In reality the minister had already come, riding into the yard on a frozen January morning, his nag's hooves making hard, metallic raps on the stiff ground. He had glanced at the old man with his practiced eye and knew he was not yet ready to go.

"When I'm needed, send word for me," he told Martin, Jr., and the young man understood. It was a day's ride to the plantation from town and back; the minister could not come until death was imminent.

The old slave Mary did not tell this to the old man; there was no need. "The preacher will come," she told him. "Don't you worry. He is a good man, that one. He will surely come."

Nichols was afraid to die, not that he doubted in the least that he would be united with his Savior when he awoke, but that he felt alone. None of his children had professed religion. He wanted to talk with someone who knew what he was talking about, and it would never have occurred to him that Mary qualified. He had that peculiar blindness of slaveholders: he would talk with Mary about his land, his children, his departed wife with an intimacy that no neighbor would ever gain, yet he thought of these conversations as no conversation at all, but more like thinking out loud to himself. He was, by his own accounting, quite alone at the end.

Mary noticed his cough in the late afternoon. A succulent fruitiness had replaced the ordinary dry hack, and when Mary put her hand to Nichols's forehead she found it warm and moist as a July afternoon. Mary sighed and shook her head. "What are we going to do with you?" she said, as though speaking to a child, and then turned to go downstairs.

She was not afraid of death, she had nursed it a great deal, and as far as she was concerned Martin Nichols was only one more puny man before the awesomeness of God. She was a Christian and, regardless of what she might think of Nichols's character, wanted to well guide him over the river. She could let go of this old man, to whom life had bound her, only when he was safe in the Savior's arms.

Descending the stairs she heard the rain hammering against the windows, as it had all afternoon. Martin the son was in the library, his feet up to the fire, his face sulky and mean. Even for him the weather was too wet, and being trapped inside left him restless and moody. Mary noted the squeezed lemons, the sugar, and the rum by the fire near his feet. All his father's threats and imprecations were no longer able to control his drinking in the house. She stood in the doorway, humming under her breath, waiting for some time before he noticed her.

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January (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44