Sorcerer's Apprentice Read Free

(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.”
    â€œGo 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.”
    â€œMingo?” The African shook his long head, sly; he touched his chest with one finger. “Me? Nossuh.”
    â€œWhy 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?”
    â€œWhat 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.”
    â€œMassa Green, he owns Mingo, right?”
    â€œRight,” snorted Moses. He rubbed the knob of his red, porous nose. “Paid good money—”
    â€œSo 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,