Soul Catcher (12 page)
It wasn't that he didn't love the South, for he did, with all his heart and soul; he loved its hills and mountains and woods, its slow-moving muddy rivers and tangled swamps, its deep swales and lush green lowlands, the vibrant insect ticking that filled a summer's night with life. He loved the land of the South as both home and country, and, too, as a way of thinking and being. He just never took to the notion of farming, of being tied down to a certain plot of earth, bound by dirt and growing seasons. He much preferred to fish and hunt, to scour the fields and woods behind their land, to ride a good horse across into the mountains to the west of their farm. He'd started hunting when he was eight, when his father gave him his grandfather's old Kentucky musket, the one he'd used in the Revolution. He could hardly raise the cumbersome thing then, but he soon learned to shoot it, to become an excellent marksman, to track game through the deepest hollows and thickest woods, to hunt deer and bear, wild boar and catamount, turkey and coon and possum. He was also a superb horseman, several times having won races at the county fair.
Cain and his brother had received a passable education. In addition to their mother's having read to them every night when she was alive, their country schoolmaster, the white-haired Mr. Tyler Beauregard, taught them enough Latin to read Cicero and Virgil, enough Shakespeare and Milton to smooth the rough edges of their rustic upbringing, enough Johnson and Dryden and Pope to have developed a critical ear for their native language. Before bed, Cain would read Scott's tales of medieval knights, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, the adventures of Cooper's Natty Bumppo. He imagined a life filled with daring, one that was open to vast possibilities. After reading the accounts of Nelson at Trafalgar or the brave stand of those at the Alamo, he and his brother would act out scenes of heroism in the hayloft, falling finally amid a hail of imagined bullets and equally imagined glory. Cain could not have told you precisely what that other life would look like, except that it would be filled with gallant and noble deeds and that it would not follow the dull routine of a farmer.
When Cain and his brother were older, they'd sometimes accompany their father the sixty miles to the big city of Richmond, to sell cattle or tobacco or to buy supplies or to purchase another field hand as the Cain farm grew and prospered. After the tedious business of life had been conducted, Mr. Cain would permit, albeit reluctantly, his sons to taste some of the city's entertainment and culture. They'd be allowed to go to the theater or a museum or to the lecture hall to hear someone speak on the subject of efficient slave management. But Cain much preferred to visit Hoynby's, a bookseller on Grace Street near the Capitol. There he'd spend a pleasant hour or two walking up and down the aisles, touching the musty-smelling books, reading passages of Tom Jones or a young author named Dickens, debating whether to spend his meager savings on a copy of Chapman's Homer or the collected works of Coleridge. Once when Cain visited the city, he attended a production of Macbeth with Edwin Booth playing the title role; another time he had gone to the Exchange Hotel, to hear a Mr. Edgar Allan Poe lecture on "The Poetic Principle."
As the brothers got older and traveled to the city by themselves, in addition to the culture, Cain took in the more illicit attractions the city had to offer: the horse races and gambling houses, the faro banks and cockfighting pits, the taverns and houses of ill-repute down near the James River. His brother TJ, sober and hardworking, took after their father and was disinclined to engage in such activities. Cain loved his brother, but as they grew older he had less and less in common with him. TJ, though, remained loyal, never telling their father about his brother's escapades, sometimes even lying to cover for Cain's mistakes. When Cain was sixteen he became enamored of an Irish whore named Eileen McDuffy, a lovely girl with flaming red hair and sparkling green eyes. Beneath all the debauched behavior, Cain had an uncorrupted romantic spirit; the fact that Eileen McDuffy had made a living by selling her body to men only made him love her all the more intensely. He wanted to save her, to carry her away. He'd write her letters, grand, youthfully hyperbolic missives, in which he quoted Byron and Shelley, and to which, of course, she never responded. He ached for her so much that one night, he got on his horse and rode all the way to Richmond and demanded that she see him. When he was told that she was busy with another client, he left and tried to comfort his broken heart in the tavern. Drunk and wielding a pistol, he returned to the brothel and went among the rooms, searching for Eileen McDuffy, yelling out that he loved her. A couple of men who worked there finally grabbed the young Cain and tossed him out into the muddy street on his ear.
For a time his father cast a blind eye on such practices by his son, figuring it was merely a necessary part of growing up, of his worldly education, something all young men needed to get out of their system before they settled down to the serious matter of family and farm and responsibilities. But as this sort of behavior continued, the senior Cain worried that Augustus was habitually inclined to a life of debauchery and dissipation. When he came across a draft of a love letter to this Eileen McDuffy, he realized the time had come to lay down the law. He forbade Cain to see her again and wouldn't let his son go to Richmond anymore; he tried to stanch the flow of money into his hands, feeling that without funds he couldn't enjoy such amusements as gambling and faro banks and whoring; and he tried to occupy every minute of his waking day with work. By working him to the bone he felt he'd be too dog-tired for the other business.
At the same time, he also tried to give him more responsibilities on the farm and to get him used to seeing that this was his rightful vocation and his legitimate future. In short, his fate. He would seek his counsel before purchasing a new stud bull or ask whether they should clear and put under plow ten more acres of woodland down near the river.
He also began to press for the match, which had until then been implicit, between Augustus and the pretty daughter of his next- door neighbor, a wealthy plantation owner named Throgmorton. Sometimes of an evening, his father would pour young Cain a bourbon and they would sit on the back porch, which looked west out toward the more impressive plantation of their neighbor. James Throgmorton was said to be the wealthiest man in five counties; his farm was some two thousand acres of the richest land in all the Piedmont, requiring over a hundred slaves to work it. It was no secret that Mr. Cain had long held out the hope that his elder son would someday marry Alexandra Throgmorton and that their two properties might be merged into an estate that would be of truly impressive proportions. His father might lift his glass toward the west and say to Cain, "Someday, Augustus, if you play your cards right, this will all be yours." Yet these were not the sort of cards that Cain wished to play, not the hand he would want to be dealt. Instead of rejoicing, Cain looked upon such a prospect as a man sentenced to life imprisonment would look upon his cell. He shuddered at the thought that his life would become just like his father's, parceled out into growing seasons and ledger books. When he told his father that while he was fond of Alexandra he did not love her, Mr. Cain said that fondness was a start, that love would follow.
"But I won't ever love her, Father," he said to Mr. Cain.
"Son, this world isn't guided by love," he said. "Besides, you can always run off to Richmond and have some fun with that whore of yours anytime you've a mind to."
Though he wanted to tell Mr. Cain that all of it--Alexandra and her father's estate, his future here running a farm--wasn't what he wanted, he could only manage in defense, "She wouldn't make me happy."
"What you need to understand, Augustus, is you don't get to pick the life you want. Life picks you," his father advised. "Besides, Throgmorton owns over a hundred slaves."
Cain wanted to tell him that he didn't need a single slave for the life he had imagined for himself, but, of course, he didn't. His father wouldn't understand. To Mr. Cain, owning slaves was something both highly desirable and equally honorable. He used to bring his boys to the auctions in Richmond. Cain was seven or eight when he'd seen his first auction. His father would inspect the Negroes on the block, feeling their arms and legs, estimating the amount of work each could perform, forcing their mouths open to inspect their teeth the way one would a horse--all of this as much intended for the education of his sons as for the appraisal of the slave's value. "That one's lame in the knee," he'd whisper to the boys. Or, "They got that buck all fattened up but he'd got scrofula." One morning they went to Odd Fellows Hall, where they held auctions. A sign out front read:
.
Yardly & Scruggs
Auctioneers for Sale of Fine Negroes
Auction today at 10 in the morning
Porters Always Available
.
Just then, they saw a line of Negroes being led into the hall. They were bound hand and foot by chains, and connected by a length of rope tied to a metal collar around their necks. The slave trader conveying them from the holding pens on Lumpkin's Alley to the auction block in Odd Fellows was screaming at them. He whipped them savagely with a short cat-o'-nine-tails because they'd been moving too slowly. One old woolly-headed Negro who shuffled with a bad limp seemed to bring out an especial hostility in the slave trader. He flogged the old man mercilessly, calling him every foul name he could think of, this despite the fact that women and children were passing by within earshot.
"That fellow ought to be taken out and horsewhipped himself," Mr. Cain said to his sons. It wasn't so much that his father was averse to using corporal punishment with slaves as it was that he thought it should be used sparingly, and then only when necessary, the way you might use a corrective to purge something bad from your system or a hard bit in the mouth of an overly rambunctious horse. His father showed the same outrage when he heard stories of a slave owner having relations with a slave woman or siring a mulatto child. Cain's father considered it the lowest form of indecency, an affront and violation not so much to the Negro race as it was to the white race, which debased itself by such an act. His own visits to the woman at the boardinghouse were, he obviously felt, of a completely different order, she being white and--at least for a price--willing. But to coerce a woman supposedly under your care and guardianship to such a thing was, to Mr. Cain's view, a corruption of everything decent and noble in the southern character.
His father owned one slave named Darius, an incorrigible buck who ran off many times. This slave seemed out to prove all of Mr. Cain's theories about Negroes' need for guidance and a strong hand. Each time he ran, Cain, a good tracker and horseman, would hunt him down, with Darius sometimes getting as far as the Blue Ridge Mountains, a day's hard ride to the west. They didn't need to hire slave catchers or the patty rollers who patrolled the county roads on horseback, looking for runaways, not when the young Cain himself could do a better job and for no cost. Besides, he secretly looked forward to the boy's running, for it broke up the monotony of farm life. He got a reprieve from the tedium of looking at the backside of a mule, and he considered hunting Darius an "adventure," more sport than anything else. He didn't even use hunting dogs, or the specially bred Cuban "Negro" dogs that some, like Mr. Pugh, the farmer down the road, raised to hunt human prey. Cain thought dogs an unfair advantage, sort of like shooting fish in a barrel. He could follow a trail in a blinding rainstorm, through swamp and bottomland, into thickets of rhododendron and laurel so dense and tangled you couldn't ride a horse but had to crawl on hands and knees. He knew each swamp and swale, holler and ridge, cave and corner of the county that Darius would try to hide in. Sometimes the Negro would make the Blue Ridge, and Cain would track him there, occasionally not finding him for weeks. Eventually, though, he always did. When
Darius was apprehended, he gave up without incident, smiling and fawning, wagging his head as if it were indeed just a game to him as well, and he rode peacefully back to Nottoway Chase behind Cain on the horse, without need of shackles or rope, and without the least coercion.
"When the hell you going to learn, Darius?" Cain had said to him, though privately he wished he wouldn't stop.
"Reckon when I's too old ta run, massa," replied the Negro, who was twice Cain's age.
Of course, for Darius his attempts at freedom had their more serious repercussions. Once returned, he would be lectured by Cain's father in front of the dozen other slaves, and maybe be given ten or twenty good ones with a silk cracker. Mr. Cain didn't administer punishment out of vengeance or spite or anger as some masters might, but calmly, even attentively, as a means of his edification, the way a schoolmaster might cane one of his students. He would say to his son, "He that knoweth his master's will and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes." Cain looked upon Darius's attempts at fleeing his father's farm in two more or less contradictory ways. On the one hand, he agreed with his father, seeing Darius's behavior as a childish willfulness, a stubborn, self-destructive force he could not understand, a mental aberration in the Negro character that needed to be curbed with firm resolve. Why would someone want to run away from a place where all his needs were taken care of, where he only had to do what he was told and life would unfold agreeably for him.