by Anthology
VII.
Northup holds his arm out over the gunwale like Moses preparing to part the waters.
Don't let the mouth alarm you, he says. Takes some getting used to, I'll readily admit.
The wake stops a few yards short of the boat, and the leading ripples plash quietly against the side. Then a gout of water bursts up right next to them and out of it thrusts a fleshy column, water runneling down its sides. Like the tail of an enormous snake. The top of it's more rounded than a snake's tail, but it's scaly all over and glistens.
The thing thrashes up and down, like a horse resisting the bridle. Splashes of water fly all over.
It rears back and bulks tall, and a good two feet of it drop over the side of the boat, where it rests, quivering.
Chambers jumps up. The boat rocks.
It all goes so quickly!
Three slits along its sides flare and lapse, flare and lapse, like the gills of a hooked fish. The three slits widen. They flap open. The inside's bright green. And lined with teeth, rows of teeth, spiraling rows of teeth. And out of the—. It must be a mouth. Out of the mouth a dozen—tongues?—tentacles?—whips?—a dozen little lashes of flesh in as many colors and—
—quite casually—
—as if he's done it many times before—
—Northup thrusts his hand into the writhing.
He looks up at Chambers, his hand nearly engulfed in a frenzy of caressing whiplets. And he smiles! He holds up the other hand, as if to say, wait, wait, you'll see.
Two more tentacles emerge from the rings of teeth. Their tips flicker like snake tongues, forked, but fast, much faster, the motion a blur in the air. Dost…fare…well…friend…sings a piercing little voice like the whine of a mosquito.
Chambers seizes the oar from the bottom of the boat, wrenches it out of its lock, and brings it down with all his strength on the snake looped across the gunwale. The blade skids against solid flesh and he beats it again and again then another oar smacks black against his skull and his eyesight narrows and darkens and he drops the oar. He staggers back. Sky and water swap places and the water blooms green and someone wrenches his arm and tugs him, he's facedown in the bottom of the boat.
A deep thud from below the boat; the boards (Chambers could swear) strike his jaw like a blow and he sits up like a jack-in-the-box. Water wells up and sinks. Circles of waves with the boat at their center flee outward.
Somewhere deep inside his fury and panic, Chambers hears Northup shouting: Hell's teeth in a bucket of blood, man! How could you! Why could you! What's come over you?
Northup grasps Chambers's lapels and hauls him upright against the bench. He sits down on the other bench and stares at him. Chambers blinks back tears. His belly's heaving and he swallows hard. He's panting.
Northup says: For sure your heart is a furtive, terrified, and small one.
And he says: Not to worry, he won't be returning today.
And he says: I say "he," but probably it's nonsense to apply that word to him.
And he says: Always seemed impertinent to ask.
Chambers's hands are nervously rummaging about, as if they're someone else's hands, touching rope, wood, wet, a bucket handle, moss, the oar, a nailhead. Moss?
He looks down. Strewn around him: hundreds of wet rounds, like seedpods or ragged coins. He picks one up and immediately flings it down, for it's warm as flesh and as yielding, its surface plush as velvet.
Ah, Northup says. The eggs, you know.
Chambers levers himself off the bottom and onto the bench.
It's not done to a purpose, Northup says. He strews his spoor as he goes. Not usually so many, though.
Chambers says: And from these small notions such monsters hatch…
Northup says: Oh, they don't hatch. Just swell up for a day or two, turn all leathery, crack open, and dry up. Seems this world lacks some vital necessity.
This world? Is there some other?
Northup spreads his open hands, then lets them fall back to his knees.
Chambers's jaw flaps open: No! You can't mean—these Hellish creatures—
No just God has any use for a Hell.
He says it with an air of quoting someone irrefutable.
Chambers says: Spare me your heresies. Not Hell, then, but certainly not Heaven. Where then?
Northup waves one hand skywards.
He says, Elsewhere, elsewise. I don't pretend to understand. I like to think—
He smiles as if at a private joke.
Venus, he says.
Chambers scoffs: Venus! You might as well say Mars. Or Jupiter.
Yes! Northup says with a peculiar enthusiasm. Or the Pole Star!
VIII.
Northup often spent time on the lake shore, because sometimes he needed to be there, and because he wished to establish that his presence was not unusual. Probably most folks assumed he was smuggling whiskey, and laughed at his pose as an abstemious hemi-demi-semi-quasi-Quaker. He often said: I am myself a burnt-over district.
He picked up a flattish stone and flung it spinning at the water. It smacked the surface and leapt up one two three four times and vanished, plunk, at five. Not bad. He looked around for another suitable rock.
At first he thought it was a log washed ashore—blackened, slick with wet and rot, a clutter of stones and sticks tangled around it. The water surged and retreated in the onshore wind. His boot heels crunched dimples into the shoal of pebbles. Those angles of rocks, that arrangement, the broken driftwood—it almost resembled, it seemed to be—oh it must be: it was a word. L O V E.
And then the log opened its eyes.
All six of them.
Not a log but a serpent, an enormous—
(Everything that is in Nature, the Universall Friend once told the two boys, Stutley and Samuel (the only other boy even close to Stutley's age) she'd caught beating a little black grass snake with sticks, is of Nature and thus partakes of some measure of God's benevolence. She fixed her eyes on each boy in turn and continued: In some cases, to be sure, alas, it is a distressingly small measure. But this creature—she looked into its eyes dangling before her own and with a flick of her arm tossed it into the tall grass—is not venomous and serves God's will by eating the vermin that would otherwise eat the maize belonging to God's servants. She turned. And now, my small gentlemen, with that lesson well learned we shall proceed with our schoolwork. And with the two of them in tow she strode across the field, long black clergy-cloak flapping behind her and the two boys making faces at each other.)
He stood frozen to the spot.
The serpent bucked back and shook itself, flung out multiple whipping arms, and flapped and flipped up and down in a frenzy of motion. Like an epileptic fit. Was it ill? It fell down and lay still.
Now the stones and driftwood read H O M E.
Northup's knees just gave out on him, his legs went limp and he sat down right there on the rocks. Terror dwindled quickly, though, swamped with astonishment and, as that too ebbed, with, what else, it must be curiosity—
He found a stick and scratched into the mud ∃ ∧ O ⅂.
And the serpent whistled. A high keening, like a winter wind through pine trees, and somehow communicating the utmost melancholy. It reared back again and rapidly rearranged its sticks and stones to read F R E E.
A scurf of scales rose and fell on the broken water, blank to the horizon.
IX.
Back at the farmhouse, Chambers paces up and down the parlor.
How long? he asks. How long?
How long what? Northup asks.
How long has God's good earth been infested with these—these—monstrous vermin?
Northup sighs, shakes his head.
How long? Chambers asks.
A lifetime. Fifty years or more.
Fifty years!
Northup nods.
What hope, then, in ridding ourselves of them? What hope of surviving the onslaught? What hope for our children, our families? What hope for the f
uture of us all?
Northup says: What in Heaven's name are you going on about?
The beasts! The creatures! Already they have killed a man—
Killed who? Northup asks.
Your man, they killed your hired man, I saw the body myself.
Northup says: You forgot his name already.
Chambers says: It's hardly important.
Northup stands up and stalks out of the room. Chambers hears him in the pantry, stomping around, glasses and crockery rattling and knocking. After a while it gets quiet and he comes back with a bottle and two glasses.
He hoists the bottle and says: Don't usually indulge, but this is not a usual circumstance.
He sets the bottle down hard on the parlor table. The top-heavy Argand lamp there cants and steadies, and its train-oil reservoir tilts a shadow across the wall.
Armagnac hors d'âge, he announces. You might say the good stuff. Dutch merchant whose son I went to school with gave it to me—oh, years ago. Dead now, I imagine.
He pushes the cork out with his thumb and pours. He hands one glass to Chambers, who tosses it back and falls into a fit of coughing. Northup swirls his own glass thoughtfully, gazing into the amber whorl, then lifts the glass to his lips and sips noisily. He smiles, and sets the glass down.
Survival seem likely? he asks Chambers.
Winded, hand pressed to his chest, Chambers nods.
More? Northup asks.
Chambers shakes his head.
Northup takes another sip.
Pleasure is the principle pursued here, he says, not mere intemperance.
He continues: Now, as for our friend in the lake. Been there long as I've been alive. Longer, maybe. Plenty of time to wreak all the havoc a soul could fear, if havoc was wished for. If my understanding's good, we've as long again to go before any hope of rescue. Yes, rescue. Don't be a fool, Chambers. Sit down.
Chambers has leapt to his feet and is heading for the door.
Northup says: I'm no more an enemy than I've ever been. Which is to say, I hope you see, hardly at all. Sit down.
Chambers stammers: They—they've—you have—
Northup says: There is no "they," Chambers. There's only the one. Sit down.
Chambers is fumbling at the door, which Northup has had the foresight to latch.
A party, a hunting party, a team of hunters to search out—
Northup goes over to him, puts his arm over his shoulder, and brings him back to the chair. James, James, he says. Sit down, old friend, he says. Have another brandy.
He pours. Chambers sips this time.
He sets the glass down and comes out with: Tentacles! You put your hand in—
But he can't complete the thought, his mind just veers away from the recollection.
Northup says with an air of great patience: He recognizes me by taste. Can't see too well out of the water. Of course he's got good eyes, and up close he can see very well indeed, better than us probably, but at any distance…Which is also how you managed to surprise him with that oar.
Chambers says, How long have you—?
Northup says, Many years. I spend a deal of time on the water, you know.
Yes, Chambers says. About that…
Northup lifts his eyebrows at him.
Chambers says, It might seem a little awkward, to deal with your former student as an officer of the law—
Not at all, Northup murmurs.
But duty is duty, and I know what mine is.
Chambers takes another drink. Northup refills his glass.
Chambers says, Now, I know you did not kill him. Yes, I know that because I know you. And you say the…the…
Visitor, Northup suggests.
The—visitor—has not killed him, whatever I might believe about it. I accept your word on that point. And yet I have a body that's washed ashore, and even a dead Negro requires an explanation.
He half-drains his glass.
Not a mark on him, he adds. Good stuff, this.
Yes, Northup says.
Well, Northup says.
Truly, you didn't know? Northup says. And all this time, James, I thought you were looking the other way.
Looking away? From what? When?
Now it's Northup's turn to drain his glass. It was a placard, he says. That I saw in Erie City. I mentioned it to Amos, casual like, that one George Cramer was offering two hundred dollars reward for the whereabouts of a certain Nebuchadnezzar, not a name I knew. Can you believe it, I said. I thought it preposterous. But he flew into a panic, wouldn't listen to me, threw his belongings into a bundle and out the door. I—
He refills his glass.
You remember how cold it was this past winter. He determined to walk across the ice. It was foolhardy. He wouldn't heed me, and the ice proved, it seems, less sound than he believed. He must have drowned, and without any help or hindrance from our visitor. Who I can't doubt was not even aware of his presence above.
A long pause. The firelight flickers on the ceiling, orange and gold laced with shadow.
Chambers says, You go to Arkwright on Tuesdays?
Northup nods.
Chambers says, I believe it likely that the jury will return a verdict of death by misadventure. He lowers his gaze, and adds: Even without your testimony.
Northup says, Thank you.
But he adds: There is a class of people who, accustomed to the manipulation of power on behalf of themselves and their friends, grow to believe that that power is theirs as an aspect of the natural order of things. Soon they do not care what it takes to perpetuate their power; whatever it may be, they will do it. You are not like that, Chambers. But take care that you do not become so.
There follows a passage of time punctuated with the purl of poured liquor, the clink of glasses.
Eventually, Chambers says: Rescued?
Northup says: Yes. He comes from a long-lived race but all he can do here is wait.
X.
He calls himself Jonah now, a story so terrible that he's never told it to anyone because no one could believe it. Amos Walker was never his name; that's just what he called himself to strangers, a name for using on the long road northward. He chose for himself the name Jonah, from the Bible, and the surname of a man who had been kind to him. The name he was given at birth—not by his mother—nor had he ever known his father—was, he's come to understand, a cruel one, and contemptuous. And a mouthful, too; even his own mother called him Nebs, his childhood friends Nezzer. Just the one name, like an animal.
He shivers and pushes at the door again. It's firmly shut. Winter had been cold in Virginia, too, of course, but it's harsher here, more ice, more snow, especially south of the lake. His mind veers away from that thought with a practiced swerve, a neat turn, and he crosses to the hearth and plucks a twist of tallow-dipped straw from a little basket there, holds it to the guttering fire, and breathes on it gently to puff its smolder into flare. It's colder here than he's used to—but then it was cold in Pennsylvania, and colder still crossing the ice.
For a second his hand shakes again and he nearly drops the twist. This won't do, not at all. He pinches off the crumb of soot crusted to the tip of the wick and presses the little flame against it. The candle stub smokes and catches, brightness rising from its wick like a smile. A thread of smoke bends and wafts. He closes the lantern's glass door. There. That's good. Warmth and light. He hangs the lantern up on its hook, its pierced-tin back against the wall, and prods the fire higher.
He sits down at the little deal table under the lantern, pushed up against the wall, and picks up the penknife. He has a cracked cup stuck full of the right kind of feathers, and he takes one, strips the barbs off with the knife, and plunges the tip into the hot ash under the logs in the hearth.
No, Canada's no paradise. His neighbors aren't as friendly with a colored man as they might be with a white one, for sure, but Americans are worse, apart from a few, and he's had much to endure. Only for that—bad usage—and he'd still be in
America, though he does not regret coming here. No, he was forced away. He pulls the quill out and sets to cleaning the end, softened now, with the dull back edge of his knife. Then he polishes it with a bit of brick he keeps for that purpose.
He's well contented here, yes, a man now as God intended that he should be—that is, born equal and free, a wholesome law unlike the southern laws that put men, made in the image of God, on a level with brutes. O what will become of my people—for a moment all the sickness of his own thoughts bears down on him—where will they stand on that day? Let the oppressed go free, go free.
He is staring blankly at the fire, his task forgotten.
And I will come near to you in judgment, a swift witness against the false swearers, and against those that oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow (his mother was a widow, she never spoke of it but he knew why), and the fatherless (a blankness).
He looks down at his hands, at the quill, the knife: a choice to be made.
But he knows that he will not meet those men again in this life; and, indeed, despite his anger, he hopes that they might still repent of their evil, and let their property go free. He does still hope for their salvation, but he does not believe they will.
He trims the lower third of the quill, twists it round in his fingers, cuts off the tip at a slope, then turns it again and slits it. He nicks the sides and trims them off, tests the tip against his thumb, and trims a little more. Placing the tip on his thumbnail, the knife somewhat aslant, he cuts the end of the nib not quite off, nimbly flips it around, and pulls the blade clean through. He inspects the new pen and, satisfied, lays it down.
He opens the bottle of ink he bought in town; an extravagance, perhaps, but in the past summer, besides having a good kitchen garden, he raised (for cash sale) 316 bushels potatoes, 120 bushels corn, forty-one bushels buckwheat, a small crop of oats (for the hogs), seventeen hogs, and seventy chickens (whose eggs he sells at the weekly market, while the occasional ailing hen goes into the pot). His rent for his cabin this year is fifty dollars, and next year he hopes to build and so avoid that expense. If he'd known how well he'd get along, he'd have left America ten years sooner.