Sorcerer's Apprentice Read Free Page B

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.
    â€œSuh?” 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.”
    The old man’s face shattered. “I was gonna marry that woman!”
    â€œNaw.” Mingo frowned. From out of his frown a huge grin flowered. “You say—I’m quoting you now, suh—a man needs a quiet, patient, uncomplaining woman, right?”
    Moses croaked, “When did I say that?”
    â€œYesstiday.” Mingo yawned. He looked sleepy. “Go home now, boss?”
    â€œNot just