Mary dozed off and was awakened in the middle of the night by loud talking. At first she thought that someone had come into the room. Then she realized that the old man himself was proclaiming. He lay on his back, his eyes open but seeing something invisible. He was talking in English, but she could not follow his gibberish. Putting a hand to his forehead she found him very warm. At her touch he shook his head, seemed to wake from his trance, and then darted his eyes about the room. He gradually focused on her, and his face grew sullen and snappish.
“You will burn the fire,” he said. “Open a window. It’s burning up in here.”
“The room’s not hot, Master,” she said. “You’ve caught a fever.”He set his jaw. “Don’t you talk back to me, you black beetle. You do what I say, or I’ll have you whipped.” His frail, stretched face had frightening command.
“Oh, yes, Master,” she said and walked slowly around the bed to the window. Pausing with her hands on the window frame she looked at Nichols and saw that his eyes had closed. “The rain has stopped, Master,” she said, “but the wind is blowing fierce. River might come up.”
Nichols made no reply.
“You’ve been sleeping,” she said, “since dinnertime. I’ve been right here with you. Master Martin came up to see how you were. So did Master Brady. They’re sleeping now.” When she saw that he had forgotten about the window she walked back around the bed and began to wipe his face. “This cloth cool enough, or should I get another one?” she asked.
He was sweating profusely and beginning to tremble. As she watched, his breath came faster, and she heard a catch, a slight gurgle, at the bottom of each one. Moving with quick and surprising grace, Mary plucked the dinner bell off the table and rang it four times. Then she pulled all the covers up to Nichols’s neck, in order to sweat him. A low moan came from his throat.
Martin came in with just a pair of trousers pulled on, his bare, broad chest crowned with a dark golden haze of hair. “Is he worse?” he asked.
“He’s coming to a crisis,” Mary said.
“How soon?”
“I can’t tell that, honey. Sometime before the morning. Sometime soon. I wish the preacher were here. That would give him a lot of comfort.”
“I can’t help that,” he said curtly. “You’ll just have to do the best you can.”
Martin stood over his father, still not touching him. The old man looked like he had already gone, with his bloodless skin stretched tight over his face. The breathing grew more labored, leading to a spasm of loud choking and gasping. For an instant the old man’s breathing stopped, and Martin held his breath with him.
Then the old man softly sucked in air again. The breathing grew steady, regular. Mary kept on wiping his face, and she was humming some tune.
She glanced up at Martin. “It’s not yet, honey,” she said. “It will take some time.”
The rain was slashing at the windows again, as though trying to get in. Feeling cold, Martin told Mary to build a fire and watched her as she brought wood and skillfully blew the coals into a blaze. He put out a hand to feel his father’s forehead and was startled by the heat.
Martin thought he should sit with his father, especially if the old man was finally dying. He had done so with his dog. Yet he was in many ways more intimate with his dog. Standing over this strange and vehement mask of his father, he could feel his own helplessness as though it sucked all the oxygen from the room. He would do no good; he would sit here hating it, begrudging his father his death. The old man did not want him. He wanted the preacher. The warmth and softness of his bed still clung to Martin’s sleep-hungry memory.
“A lot to do tomorrow,” he said at last. “I’d better get some sleep. You do whatever you can, Mary. Catherine, you stay and help her.” He spoke to a slave girl who had silently appeared. “Anything you need, you just get it. Call me if it’s … necessary.”
“That’s right,” Mary said. “You sleep now, Master. I only wish that preacher was coming.”
“Now shut up about that,” he said, and went out.
Catherine, a lean, long-legged young woman, lay down by the fire and slept in a blanket, while Mary dozed in a chair next to the bed. She woke occasionally to put wood on and to check Nichols’s breathing, but he slept quietly and might have seemed to recover except for the persisting fever.
Sometime in the early morning hours Mary got up and saw that his eyes were open, watching her.
“Sing for me,” he said. “Sing ‘Harvest Time.'”
She did so, in a low, dark voice. “Louder,” he said, and she poured out the melancholy words of intense longing. When she was done she saw that he had closed his eyes, and she wondered whether he had gone back to sleep.
“Gates of Pearl,” he croaked, and she sang that. He was quiet then, and she went to touch his cheek. It was still hot, hotter if possible. Yet his breathing was quiet, except for a slight muzziness when he breathed in.
“Is the preacher coming?” he asked without opening his eyes. When she did not answer, he repeated the question, then said, “I told you to have them call the preacher!”
“The river is up,” she answered. “The preacher can’t come.”
She thought he would roar, but he remained silent. He opened one eye and looked at her. That one brown, staring eye seemed to be the only living part of his face, creased and yellow as it was. “Can’t come, huh?” he said. “Did anybody go?”
“No, Master,” she said. “Master Martin said he would go in the morning.”
“Am I going to be alive in the morning?”
“Of course you are, honey. It’s almost morning now,” she said. She had not meant to say honey, but the word had slipped out. She had been with him since he was a boy. But he seemed not to notice.
“Mary, you tell me the truth. As God is your witness, will I be alive in the morning?”
“Only God knows these things.”
He opened both eyes and looked at her fiercely. “Tell me,” he hissed.
“You’re asking me to tell what only the Lord knows. This fever is going to come to the crisis pretty soon, and then we’ll know.”
“You’ll know what?”
“Whether this fever is going to kill you.”
“And if it does, will the preacher make it in time to pray for me?”
“Maybe he won’t,” she conceded.
For a moment he was still, thinking of that. Then he said, weakly, “Sing for me. Keep singing.”
“What do you want me to sing?”
“All the church music. Sing them all.”
So she did, singing of Jesus and the Bible and heaven and most of all the judgment, one hymn after another. He seemed to be sleeping, but whenever she paused for long he opened his eyes and looked at her with outraged disapproval.
She noticed a slight tremor in his hand. She lifted it into her own, lightly holding its birdlike claw. While she sang “Servants of God” she felt the trembling increase. When the hymn was done she stood beside him, pulling the blankets over him. He said something, and she had to put her ear by his mouth to hear him repeat, “I’m cold.”
She shook Catherine awake, took the blanket off her, and told her to build up the fire. Wrapping the extra blanket around the old man, she began to sing again. When Catherine had the fire blazing she squatted in front of it, her arms wrapped around her knees, swaying slightly.
The chills came on violently, and the old man’s rasping breath grew louder, like the sound of a crosscut saw run slowly over an oaken board. Mary mopped at his brow, but he signaled for her to stop. “Pray,” he gasped. “Pray for me.”
His hands were jumping with the shakes, but she held her hand across his while she reminded God of all the great things she could think of from the Bible: Moses, and David fighting Goliath, and Jeremiah and the word like fire, and Ezekiel’s bones, and Paul and Silas singing in prison. She could not read the Bible, but she had heard. She summoned all those men into the room to testify to the greatness and power of God.
The old man had his eyes closed, and though his hands and chin were still shaking violently, he seemed more at rest when she was done. In fact, a tight smile came on his lips, a little tan rosebud of a smile, like a private joke. He opened one eye again, a dark, staring eye in the colorless parchment of his face, and then both eyes. Slowly, unmistakably, he winked at her. He said something, words that came out in a cough she could not understand, setting off a fit of choking and gasping for air. When he had stopped strangling, though his breathing came harder and his face beaded with perspiration, she asked him to repeat it. The little smile came back on his lips. “You’ll be free,” he said in a voice so low it was barely audible on her ear next to his lips. “This morning.” She heard it clearly. Then the smile disappeared, and he shut his eyes tightly, as though summoning all his strength for the battle.
She was suddenly wide awake and trembling ever so slightly herself. Could he be fooling? He was a cruel man, but at this time?
She sang again as she tended to him, a whole different species of song, about trumpets and Beulah Land and the Great Glad Day. He did not open his eyes again. His breathing grew gradually louder, his shaking more violent, until very early in the morning he began to spasm. Mary quietly told Catherine to wake the boys. Sister was gone, in Huntsville.
When Martin and Brady and Thomas, the middle son, came in, Mary released the old man’s hand. “You can talk to him,” she said as they held back. “He might hear you yet.”
But none of them said anything, nor did they come near. The only sound was the old man’s heavy, staggering breath. It was an awful, sickening interlude that seemed to go on eternally.
Finally Thomas said, “Good-bye, Daddy,” and turned quickly away from the bed. He was the most talkative of the three, a young man full of himself and his opinions, but even he was quiet in the face of what stretched before them.
“Listen to that rain come down,” Brady said. He was the only one with a shirt on. A soft, gray suspicion of morning came from the window, lighting three young, magnificent torsos, strengthened by riding and running and fighting, three potent young men standing around a shape that must once have looked like theirs.
The old man’s body lurched. The low, long death rattle came out. By the time Thomas had reached his father’s side the breathing had stopped.
After a long minute Martin reached over to close the old man’s eyes. “I wish I’d had a chance to say good-bye when he could hear me,” he said. “Did he say anything, Mary? Any last words?”
“No, Master,” she said. “He was comfortable, I believe, and he didn’t say much. I was just singing hymns for him.”
James Birney’s carriage rolled into the Nicholses’ yard, shuddering to a halt by the front door. Birney looked around with bemusement. This was not what he thought of as the planter’s life. The house had a brick first story, to which an ugly second story of wood had been added in a makeshift fashion, as had two unmatched wings made from rough-sawn planks. There were no gardens, no fruit trees, only mud and weeds. From behind the house several slave women and a swarm of children watched him carefully.
At one side of the yard was a long mound of red dirt, as yet unmarked: old Nichols’s grave. Next to it was a marble cross, which Birney had never noticed; that would be Mrs. Nichols’s grave. Three or four simple wooden crosses marked the burial places of slaves.
A black man dressed in shapeless, dirty clothing came jogging out of a sagging shed that served as the carriage house. He moved with a little trot that seemed a child’s imitation of a pony’s gait but propelled him more slowly than a long-legged stroll would have. He was already talking to the horses, not to Birney. “Hey, boy, hey, you are a fine looker, a fine looker. I’ll have you for breakfast, I will.” Birney saluted the man and got out of the carriage. Before he had reached the house the black man had begun unharnessing the horses, talking to them all the while in a high singsong.
In the parlor Birney found the four Nichols children, all in their Sunday best and looking irritable and uncomfortable. They stared at him, dismayed.
“Are you all right?” Martin, the oldest, asked.
“Just muddy,” Birney said, “and I received a small cut on my leg. I am sorry to delay you, but I will have to clean myself.”
He had suffered an accident while maneuvering his team through a muddy backwater; the lead horse’s rein caught on a stump, and Birney had been forced into the water to untangle him. Fortunately he had brought another suit in his bag.
He was taken to a bedroom upstairs where servants brought water and soap and scooped up his muddy clothes. An ancient black woman, broad as a schooner, attended to him. Birney recognized her, though he did not know her name.
“You came to read the will?” she asked in a deep, slow voice.
He knew what was in her mind and loathed it. It would be in all of the slaves’ minds. Some would be sold. All would have new masters. A slave knew no time so fearful as the death of a master. Often enough they would be divided regardless of family; even a mother and her children might be torn apart.
Birney was quite sure that he alone knew what was in the will, for Nichols had worked it out with him secretively, demanding that he tell no one. “I’ve been troubled by the old man, by old John Wesley’s writings,” Nichols had explained. “He always wrote that it was evil, did you know that? I’m a Methodist.” He had stopped at that, musing on the all-important fact of Methodism.
“It’s my family,” Nichols went on. “My boys. It stains them all, you know, even if they’re good boys, which mine certainly aren’t. Both those older boys are with the nigger wenches already. I can’t keep them away, when they see every white man in the county followed around by little nappy-headed copies of himself.”
Birney had found the conversation distasteful in the extreme. What old Nichols said was unfortunately true. There were mixed-race slaves on every plantation, and with some it was disgracefully obvious that the master or his sons had made dark imitations of themselves.
“Do you have children here?” Birney asked the old black woman kindly. That would be her great anxiety, to be sold away from her children.
“Yes, Master,” she said. “I have six children. And two more dead.”
“They’re all here?”
“Yes sir, thank the Lord. Master Nichols kept us together; he wouldn’t sell any. Some of my grandchildren live away. George, my oldest, married a girl from the Fanchers’. He has three children there who look just like him.”
The Fanchers lived downriver several miles. It was common for slaves to marry from other plantations, but they suffered most when a master died, for the new master might live at too great a distance for the couple to be together. Often the master insisted that they take new partners, whom they could breed with freely. There was no profit in having slaves married to someone too far distant to comfortably reproduce.
“It might be Master Fancher would sell that girl,” Mary ventured, not looking at Birney. “If you were looking for a good worker you could depend on my George.”
Birney was kind enough not to laugh at her. He felt sorry for her, but also repulsed by her plea. Birney did not care for servants who presumed on him. He was an impeccably honest man who tried to behave honorably toward his own slaves, but he did not see it as his duty to care for other people’s. “No, Mary,” he said, “I don’t need any more servants. I have too many mouths to feed already.”
Mary helped him to put on his boots, and she held a mirror while he straightened himself. Just as he was leaving she gripped his arm. “Did Master do what he said?” she asked in an urgent, low voice. When he did not answer, she swiftly let go of his arm and looked down at her feet.
“I don’t know what your master said to you,” he said coldly. “But you’ll know soon enough what he did.”It was common enough for slave owners to promise servants that they would be given freedom, although they often failed to act on their promises. Nichols had told Birney that he had made no such promises, but he must have done so to this poor woman. Perhaps he had said it and then forgotten, but this old black woman had treasured the word in her heart ever since. What a pity, Birney thought, that any human creature should be born a slave.Continued on next pageReprinted with permission of Thomas Nelson Publishers.
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