Jonathan waited; he could hear rats scramble across the floor of George’s dungeon-like personality.
‘You get in my way, know that?’ George’s voice slid into rage. ‘You’re a tobacco worm in my field, see? A man got to squash worms. I don’t care how long it takes, or what it takes, but I’m bigger than you and I’m better than you – every which way you look at it – and I’m going to destroy you. Get me?’
The work on the house continued. They cleared a piece of land upstream. They dug the cellar, mixed and poured the concrete. They split shingles and tiled the roof. They built the staircase. Early the following summer, they piled pots, pans, blankets and bedding straw into the old crate that served them as a table, lugged it over the ground, and installed themselves in the new house.
It was understood that Jonathan was no part of this ceremony. A slave is a slave: when the gentry becomes gentry, a slave lives in slave quarters. Jonathan ate supper at the wooden house, worked there afterwards on tobacco plugs, sitting beside Cathern to study with her; but when the Stokes went to bed, he went out to the old sod hut alone. He tried to make out to himself that he had become the owner of a house, but he couldn’t hang on to the idea for long – not sharing the dirt floor with the animals like that. The animals lowed, chewed, farted, shat and let loose sudden, hot torrents of urine. He made himself a bed of hay and carved a small box to keep the McGuffey First Reader safe from the filth around him, and doubtless to keep it safe from the intensity of his own hatreds, too. He himself was thin – the Stokes didn’t feed him enough – but his hatreds were fat; without gods to back him, he fed his prayers on these hatreds: prayers of stature, dark, forbidding, encrusted with the power of a powerful imagination that had no other outlet. Night after night he prayed as fervently as Moses in Egypt for a plague; his own plague this time, not worms, something new, some horror so great that the very thought of it would blister the skin – a plague to come and wipe out the lot of them. He would bear it himself, and joyfully, just to hear the Stokes scream in agony.
8
Why bother with a special plague? Life itself is a plague – ‘a sexually transmitted disease with a hundred percent mortality,’ as R. D. Laing put it in a television interview not long before his own death. All Jonathan had to do was wait, and he’d have had the pleasure of watching Alvah and Wify suffer the tortures of the damned: this is what old age and the far edges of life are all about. But what could he have known of things like this? What do any of the young know? Death for them – when they think of it at all – is a box-office hit of a tragedy, elegantly plotted, somberly choreographed, with the world weeping in the stalls. No wonder we worship them; they’re so magically blind. My uncle Atlas’s telephone rang periodically throughout our morning’s taping; a geriatrician gets more calls than any other kind of specialist. I forgot to turn off the recorder once. ‘Jesus H. Christ,’ Atlas is saying into the receiver, ‘that poor bitch. Yesterday I cleaned fecal matter out of her clear up to the cervix. Why don’t we stitch her up entirely? What use has she got for a vagina? The damn thing’s hanging out on the sheets.’