Sorcerer's Apprentice (2 page)

“Yes?” She brightened. “Go on.”

He didn't explain how he felt.

Moses, later on the narrow, root-covered road leading to Isaiah Jenson's cabin, thought Harriet Bridgewater wrong about Mingo and, strange to say, felt closer to the black African than to Harriet. So close, in fact, that when he pulled his rig up to Isaiah's house, he considered giving Mingo his farm when he died, God willing, as well as his knowledge, beliefs, and prejudices. Then again, maybe that was overdoing things. The boy was all Moses wanted him to be, his own emanation, but still, he thought, himself. Different enough from Moses so that he could step back and admire him.

Swinging his feet off the buckboard, he called, “Isaiah!” and, hearing no reply, hobbled, bent forward at his hips, toward the front door—“H'lo?”—which was halfway open. Why could he see no one? “Jehoshaphat!” blurted Moses. From his lower stomach a loamy feeling crawled up to his throat. “Y'all heah? Hey!” The door opened with a burst at his fingertips. Snatching off his hat, ducking his head, he stepped inside. It was dark as a poor man's pocket in there. Air within had the smell of boiled potatoes and cornbread. He saw the boy seated big as life at Isaiah's table, struggling with a big lead-colored spoon and a bowl of hominy. “You two finished al-raid-y, eh?” Moses laughed, throwing his jaw forward, full of pride, as Mingo fought mightily, his head hung over his bowl, to get food to his mouth. “Whar's that fool Isaiah?” The African pointed over his shoulder, and Moses's eyes, squinting in the weak light, followed his wagging finger to a stream of sticky black fluid like the gelatinous trail of a snail flowing from where Isaiah Jenson, cold as stone, lay crumpled next to his stove, the image of Mingo imprisoned on the retina of his eyes. Frail moonlight funneled through cracks in the roof. The whole cabin was unreal. Simply unreal. The old man's knees knocked together. His stomach jerked. Buried deep in Isaiah's forehead was a meat cleaver that exactly split his face and disconnected his features.

“Oh, my Lord!” croaked Moses. He did a little dance, half juba, half jig, on his good leg toward Isaiah, whooped, “Mingo, what'd you do?” Then, knowing full well what he'd done, he boxed the boy behind his ears, and shook all six feet of him until Moses's teeth, not Mingo's, rattled. The old man sat down at the table; his knees felt rubbery, and he groaned: “Lord,
Lord, Lord!”
He blew out breath, blenched, his lips skinned back over his tobacco-browned teeth, and looked square at the African. “Isaiah's daid! You understand that?”

Mingo understood that; he said so.

“And you're responsible!” He stood up, but sat down again, coughing, then pulled out his handkerchief and spit into it. “Daid! You know what daid means?” Again, he hawked and spit. “Responsible—you know what
that
means?”

He did not; he said, “Nossuh, don't know as I know that one, suh. Not Mingo, boss. Nossuh!”

Moses sprang up suddenly like a steel spring going off and slapped the boy till his palm stung. Briefly, the old man went bananas, pounding the boy's chest with his fists. He sat down again. Jumping up so quick made his head spin and legs wobble. Mingo protested his innocence, and it did not dawn on Moses why he seemed so indifferent until he thought back to what he'd told him about chicken hawks. Months ago, maybe five, he'd taught Mingo to kill chicken hawks and be courteous to strangers, but it got all turned around in the African's mind (how was he to know New World customs?), so he was courteous to chicken hawks (Moses groaned, full of gloom) and killed strangers. “You idjet!” hooted Moses. His jaw clamped shut. He wept hoarsely for a few minutes like a steer with the strangles. “Isaiah Jenson and me was friends, and—” He checked himself; what'd he said was a lie. They weren't friends at all. In fact, he thought Isaiah Jenson was a pigheaded fool and only tolerated the little yimp in a neighborly way. Into his eye a fly bounded. Moses shook his head wildly. He'd even sworn to Harriet, weeks earlier, that Jenson was so troublesome, always borrowing tools and keeping them, he hoped he'd go to Ballyhack on a red-hot rail. In his throat a knot tightened. One of his eyelids jittered up, still itchy from the fly; he forced it down with his finger, then gave a slow look at the African. “Great Peter,” he mumbled. “You couldn'ta known that.”

“Go home now?” Mingo stretched out the stiffness in his spine. “Powerful tired, boss.”

Not because he wanted to go home did Moses leave, but because he was afraid of Isaiah's body and needed time to think things through. Dry the air, dry the evening down the road that led them home. As if to himself, the old man grumped, “I gave you thought and tongue, and looka what you done with it—they gonna catch and kill you, boy, just as sure as I'm sitting heah.”

“Mingo?” The African shook his long head, sly; he touched his chest with one finger.
“Me?
Nossuh.”

“Why the hell you keep saying that?” Moses threw his jaw forward so violently muscles in his neck stood out. “You kilt a man, and they gonna burn you crisper than an ear of corn. Ay, God, Mingo,” moaned the old man, “you gotta act responsible, son!” At the thought of what they'd do to Mingo, Moses scrooched the stalk of his head into his stiff collar. He drilled his gaze at the smooth-faced African, careful not to look him in the eye, and barked, “What're you thinking
now?”

“What Mingo know, Massa Green know. Bees like
what
Mingo sees or don't see is only what Massa Green taught him to see or don't see. Like Mingo lives through Massa Green, right?”

Moses waited, suspicious, smelling a trap. “Yeah, all that's true.”

“Massa Green, he owns Mingo, right?”

“Right,” snorted Moses. He rubbed the knob of his red, porous nose. “Paid good money—”

“So when Mingo works, it bees Massa Green workin', right? Bees Massa Green workin', think-in', doin'
through
Mingo—ain't that so?”

Nobody's fool, Moses Green could latch onto a notion with no trouble at all; he turned violently off the road leading to his cabin, and plowed on toward Harriet's, pouring sweat, remembering two night visions he'd had, recurrent, where he and Mingo were wired together like say two ventriloquist's dummies, one black, one white, and there was somebody—who he didn't know, yanking their arm and leg strings simultaneously—how he couldn't figure, but he and Mingo said the same thing together until his liver-spotted hands, the knuckles tight and shriveled like old carrot skin, flew up to his face and, shrieking, he started hauling hips across a cold black countryside. But so did Mingo,
his
hands on
his
face, pumping his knees right alongside Moses, shrieking, their voice inflections identical; and then the hazy dream doorwayed luxuriously into another where he was greaved on one half of a thrip—a coin halfway between a nickel and a dime—and on the reverse side was Mingo. Shaking, Moses pulled his rig into Harriet Bridgewater's yard. His bowels, burning, felt like boiling tar. She was standing on her porch in a checkered Indian shawl, staring at them, her book still open, when Moses scrambled, tripping, skinning his knees, up her steps. He shouted, “Harriet, this boy done kilt Isaiah Jenson in cold blood.” She lost color and wilted back into her doorway. Her hair was swinging in her eyes. Hands flying, he stammered in a flurry of anxiety, “But it wasn't altogether Mingo's fault—he didn't know what he was doin'.”

“Isaiah? You mean Izay-yah? He didn't kill Izay-yah?”

“Yeah, aw no! Not really—” His mind stuttered to a stop.

“Whose fault is it then?” Harriet gawked at the African picking his nose in the wagon (Moses had, it's true, not policed himself as well as he'd wanted). A shiver quaked slowly up her left side. She sloughed off her confusion, and flashed, “I can tell you whose fault it is, Moses. Yours! Didn't I say not to bring that wild African here? Huh? Huh? Huh? You both should be—put to sleep.”

“Aw, woman! Hesh up!” Moses threw down his hat and stomped it out of shape. “You just all upsetted.” Truth to tell, he was not the portrait of composure himself. There were rims of dirt in his nails. His trouser legs had blood splattered on them. Moses stamped his feet to shake road powder off his boots. “You got any spirits in the house? I need your he'p to untangle this thing, but I ain't hardly touched a drop since I bought Mingo, and my throat's pretty dr—”

“You'll just have to get it yourself—on the top shelf of the cupboard.” She touched her face, fingers spread, with a dazed gesture. There was suddenly in her features the intensity found in the look of people who have a year, a month, a minute only to live. “I think I'd better sit down.” Lowering herself onto her rocker, she cradled on her lap a volume by one M. Shelley, a recent tale of monstrosity and existential horror, then she demurely settled her breasts. “It's just like you, Moses Green, to bring all your bewilderments to me.”

The old man's face splashed into a huge, foamy smile. He kissed her gently on both eyes, and Harriet, in return, rubbed her cheek like a cat against his gristly jaw. Moses felt lighter than a feather. “Got to have somebody, don't I?”

In the common room, Moses rifled through the cupboard, came up with a bottle of luke-warm bourbon and, hands trembling, poured himself three fingers' worth in a glass. Then, because he figured he deserved it, he refilled his glass and, draining it slowly, sloshing it around in his mouth, considered his options. He could turn Mingo over to the law and let it go at that, but damned if he couldn't shake loose the idea that killing the boy somehow wouldn't put things to rights; it would be like they were killing Moses himself, destroying a part of his soul. Besides, whatever the African'd done, it was what he'd learned through Moses, who was not the most reliable lens for looking at things. You couldn't rightly call a man responsible if, in some utterly alien place, he was without power, without privilege, without property—was, in fact, property—if he had no position, had nothing, or virtually next to nothing, and nothing was his product or judgment. “Be damned!” Moses spit. It was a bitter thing to siphon your being from someone else. He knew that now. It was like, on another level, what Liverspoon had once tried to deny about God and man: If God was (and now Moses wasn't all that sure), and
if
He made the world, then a man didn't have to answer for anything. Rape or murder, it all referred back to who-or-whatever was responsible for that world's make-up. Chest fallen, he tossed away his glass, lifted the bottle to his lips, then nervously lit his pipe. Maybe…maybe they could run, if it came to that, and start all over again in Missouri, where he'd teach Mingo the difference between chicken hawks and strangers. But, sure as day, he'd do it again. He couldn't change. What was
was
. They'd be running forever, across all space, all time—so he imagined—like fugitives with no fingers, no toes, like two thieves or yokefellows, each with some God-awful secret that could annihilate the other. Naw! Moses thought. His blood beat up. The deep, powerful stroke of his heart made him wince. His tobacco maybe. Too strong. He sent more whiskey crashing down his throat.
Naw!
You couldn't have nothing and just go as you pleased. How strange that owner and owned magically dissolved into each other like two crossing shafts of light (or, if he'd known this, which he did not, particles, subatomic, interconnected in a complex skein of relatedness). Shoot him maybe, reabsorb Mingo, was that more merciful?
Naw!
He was fast; fast. Then manumit the African? Noble gesture, that. But how in blazes could he disengage himself when Mingo shored up, sustained,
let be
Moses's world with all its sores and blemishes every time he opened his oily black eyes? Thanks to the trouble he took cementing Mingo to his own mind, he could not, by thunder, do without him now. Giving him his freedom, handing it to him like a rasher of bacon, would shackle Mingo to him even more. There seemed, just then, no solution.

Undecided, but mercifully drunk now, his pipebowl too hot to hold any longer, Moses, who could not speak his mind to Harriet Bridgewater unless he'd tied one on, called out: “I come to a decision. Not about Mingo, but you'n' me.” It was then seven o'clock. He shambled, feet shuffling, toward the door. “Y'know, I was gonna ask you to marry me this morning”—he laughed; whiskey made his scalp tingle—“but I figured living alone was better when I thoughta how married folks—and sometimes wimmin with dogs—got to favoring each other…like they was wax candles flowing tergether. Hee-hee.” He stepped gingerly, holding the bottle high, his ears brick red, face streaky from wind-dried sweat, back onto the quiet porch. He heard a moan. It was distinctly a moan. “Harriet? Harriet, I ain't put it too well, but I'm asking you now.” On the porch her rocker slid back, forth, squeaking on the floorboards. Moses's bottle fell—
bip!
—down the stairs, bounced out into the yard, rolled, and bumped into Harriet Bridge-water. Naw, he thought. Aw, naw. By the wagon, by a chopping block near a pile of split faggots, by the ruin of an old handpump caked with rust, she lay on her side, the back fastenings of her dress burst open, her mouth a perfect 0. The sight so wounded him he wept like a child. It was then seven-fifteen.

October 7 of the year of grace 1855.

Midnight found Moses Green still staring down at her. He felt sick and crippled and dead inside. Every shadowed object thinging in the yard beyond, wrenched up from its roots, hazed like shapes in a hallucination, was a sermon on vanity; every time he moved his eyes he stared into a grim homily on the deadly upas of race and relatedness. Now he had no place to stand. Now he was undone. “Mingo…come ovah heah.” He was very quiet.

“Suh?” The lanky African jumped down from the wagon, faintly innocent, faintly diabolical. Removed from the setting of Moses's farm, the boy looked strangely elemental; his skin had the texture of plant life, the stones of his eyes an odd, glossy quality like those of a spider, which cannot be read. “Talky old hen daid now, boss.”