The Known World (2004 Pulitzer Prize)

by Edward P. Jones

  The shot first hit one of Mildred’s knuckles, splintering it, and then traveled on into her chest, sending her back into the house some two feet, her gun falling loudly in the doorway and scaring the dog, who trotted to the back of the house. As soon as the shot blew Mildred’s heart to bits, she was immediately standing in that doorway. It was late at night and she had been somewhere she could not remember. She went into the dark house and up the stairs and found the door to Henry’s room open. Caldonia was beside him in the bed and she told Mildred that Henry had had a hard time going to sleep but now he was resting quite well. Henry did not stir as his mother looked down on him and Mildred was grateful for that. She left the room and found Augustus in their bed, also asleep, and she got in and made herself comfortable in his arms. The wind was coming through the window just the way she liked it. Good sleepin weather, she always said. But where in the world had she been? Had she been in the garden? Had she been to the well? She closed her eyes and pulled Augustus’s arm closer about her and closed her eyes. She could not remember if she had left the front door open. It did not matter because all their neighbors were good people.

  Skiffington and Counsel were silent for a very long time and Skiffington prayed, but once again, the words failed him. Counsel looked at Skiffington, who dropped his rifle, and in the time it took for the rifle to reach the ground, Skiffington’s horse took a few steps away from Counsel and his horse. “What have I asked except civility and righteousness?” Skiffington said. “John?” Counsel said. “John?” “I rise in the morning,” Skiffington continued without hearing Counsel, “and I asked nothing of that nigger, except what is proper and right. No more than that do I ask of any nigger. No more. Who can say I asked for more, Counsel? Name that person this moment who says I asked for more than civility and righteousness for righteousness’ sake. That person has no name because that person does not live. Are civility and righteousness so dear that I cannot have them?” Counsel said, “John? Do you hear me, John?”

  “Counsel, I want you to go in there and bring that murderin nigger out here so we can take him to his owner, to his right and proper owner. This has gone on long enough. Every bit of this has gone on long enough.”

  “John?”

  “Do what I say, Counsel. Uphold the law the way you have been sworn to do, the way we have been sworn to do. Go in and bring that murderer out here. Do what I say or you will be in a wrath of trouble. Act, damn you!”

  Counsel dismounted and took out his pistol. He should marry the boardinghouse woman and turn his back forever on being somebody’s deputy, especially deputy to a man he knew he was better than. He stood a foot or more from Mildred’s body and raised his head high and higher to avoid seeing her. Skiffington said, “Counsel, we cannot leave her there like that. I know who that woman is. I know her name. I know her husband.” Counsel held up one foot to step around Mildred but as he did he realized he might step into blood, so he had to look down. Her eyes were not closed and he asked God why he hadn’t done that one small favor for him and closed them. He took a giant step past her. He went through the first floor and his eye caught the green curtain on the side window blowing prettily from a breeze he hadn’t enjoyed out in the front. That was the nature of houses, good breezes from the side and hellish nothing coming in the front and back. He went out to the kitchen. It was such a clean house that no one would have thought a nigger lived there. A bowl of apples sat on the table, and one of them was tilted so that the long stem was pointing directly at Counsel, a kind of suggestion that it should be eaten first. The dog cowered at the back door and when he turned and saw Counsel, the dog began peeing. He opened his mouth to bark but there was no sound. Counsel looked at the dog for nearly a minute, then he went and opened the door for it, and after he had shut it, he thought for the first time since entering the home that he was in the house with a man who had murdered three people. He gripped the pistol tighter.

  “Counsel! What are you doing? Bring him out!”

  Counsel went back through the kitchen, staying to the side of the front room to avoid Skiffington seeing him. The problem was that the boardinghouse woman was not wealthy. Near the stairs he noticed the rack of walking sticks and found it impossible not to admire them. He reached up and touched one and turned it to better see what Augustus Townsend had carved. If the boardinghouse woman wasn’t barren, he might get one child out of her. One boy was all he needed. Up and down the stick were houses, each amazingly different from the others, big and small houses, foreign houses like in the books in the burned library in North Carolina. Where had a nigger seen such things? The beauty of the walking stick kept him there, and, as if to release its hold on him, he tapped the most foreign-looking of the houses with the barrel of his gun and then looked toward the stairs. The boardinghouse woman said she was thirty-seven, but the lines on her upper lip seemed to tell him something much older.

  “Counsel!”

  “I’m going to look upstairs now, John.”

  “Then do it and bring him!”

  The stairs did not creak. One more strange thing about the nature of houses—some creaked, some did not, and there wasn’t any use thinking you could say which was which just by looking at them. A two-story nothing in Mississippi had stairs that didn’t make a sound. His destroyed house was one of the finest in North Carolina, in the South, and all the stairs in it had creaked, even the ones going up from the kitchen in the back that were used mostly by the servants and his children. All of them people of light feet.

  On the second floor he looked in each room and as he neared the last, Mildred and Augustus’s bedroom, his disappointment grew. If the slave was not here, there would be no living with John’s rage. He stood in the middle of the couple’s bedroom and cursed. “Counsel! We can’t leave Mildred laying there like that.” Counsel opened the top drawer of the dresser beside the door and moved things around with the barrel of his gun and then he heard a clinking. In the folds of a small bolt of yellow cloth he found five twenty-dollar gold pieces. He laughed and looked around, then laughed some more and put the money in his pocket. He went through the rest of the drawers, tore the bed apart, stamped on the floor to see what boards might be covering some hiding place. He found no more gold, but he knew there was more, knew that those two niggers had been out here with a white man’s riches. He looked again around the room, but now with a new eye, the eye of a man who knew salvation and deliverance were very close by. He needed time to search the house, the land, and he did not have that time right then. “Counsel!” There might or might not be enough to share with another man, but he did not want to risk telling Skiffington. His cousin might say it was not theirs to have. There might well be enough to get him where he was before the devastation in North Carolina. No, it would be best not to tell John. What does God’s monkey John Skiffington know about money and need and the loss of family?

  He went down the stairs and tried to keep the coins from making a sound and stood at Mildred’s head.

  “Where is he, Counsel?”

  Somehow, Counsel found it an odd question and he answered, without thinking, in an odd way: “I found him not.” He put his pistol in his holster and reached down and picked up Mildred’s rifle, now as bloody as the floor around her, and pointed it at Skiffington. “Stand back, Counsel. You best stand back and away.” Counsel fired into Skiffington’s chest, and though Skiffington leaned forward only a few inches, Counsel could see the wound was a mortal one. But because John Skiffington was a large man, Counsel Skiffington shot him again. The second shot singed the ear of Skiffington’s horse before it entered the man and the horse reared up, but the man’s weight seemed to force it down and the horse, once back on the ground, shook its head over and over and Skiffington slid to the side, trying to hold on because something told him that holding on was the only way he could be saved.

  Skiffington was entering the house he had taken his bride to. He ran up the stairs because he felt there was something important he had to do. He found h
imself in a very long hall and he ran down the hall, looking in all the open rooms and wanting to stop but knowing he did not have time. He passed them all, from the one with his mother cooking his supper to the one with his father talking to Barnum Kinsey. Minerva sewing. Winifred in her nightgown with her arms open to him. But he did not stop. At the very end of the hall there was a Bible tilting forward, a Bible some three feet taller than he was. He got to it in time to keep it from falling over, his hands reaching to prop it up, his open left hand on the O in Holy and his open right hand on the second B in Bible.

  Counsel had not moved. He was thinking of how he would explain everything to everyone, and it was a simple matter in his mind—the Negro woman had shot his cousin and the sheriff had shot her in return, before he, Counsel, could even raise his gun. And he would be right—it was to be a simple case for everyone and most of them accepted his word.

  Skiffington fell. His horse tried to step away from him once he hit the ground, but it could not go far because Skiffington’s right foot was caught in the stirrup, and so the horse was caught between wanting to be away from a dead man and wanting to be near its master. Counsel reached back and dropped the rifle, then wiped his hands on the parts of Mildred’s clothing that were not bloody. At the sound of the rifle hitting the floor Skiffington’s horse stopped moving. Counsel’s horse had remained in its place all along, moving not one inch. Counsel heard the stairs creak and looked over to see a Negro watching him, his hands up. Counsel took out his pistol and waved him over with the gun. “You the Moses we’ve been looking for?” Counsel said. Moses came over, nodding his head all the while. “Where are the other two?” Counsel asked, meaning Gloria and Clement, and Moses said he didn’t know about any other two, that he was alone, he and Mildred. So, Counsel thought, he had been hiding somewhere secret and that made him happy because it meant there were places where the gold could be.

  The idea that Moses had killed Priscilla his wife and his son Jamie and the madwoman Alice died with John Skiffington, and that was where it stayed for many years.

  Counsel said to Moses, “Are you sure you’re alone?”

  “Yessir.” Moses looked over at Mildred and it was all he could do to stop from going to her. She had asked him not one question, just gave him a home. “We,” she had said, “will find a way to get you out of this here mess.”

  “Open your mouth,” Counsel said. Moses did and Counsel stuck his pistol far back into the man’s throat and Moses tried to wiggle away but Counsel stayed with him. He took Moses by the shirtfront and held him. “I don’t want to kill two in one day but I’m not above doing it.” Moses coughed around the pistol. “You keep everything you know just as locked in as your words are locked in right now. You hear what I say?” Moses, in pain, gagging, nodded his head as much as he could. “If you ever say a word, I will shoot you down like a dog. And you can see right here that that’s something I will do.”

  This nigger, Counsel decided, has never killed anyone. What had John been thinking?

  Counsel withdrew the gun and motioned Moses to the door, and Moses bent down to Mildred, touched her bloody hair. Moses stood back up. Counsel, seeing his victory approaching after all those years, began to feel generous. He said to Moses, “Tell her good-bye in any way you see fit.” The dead woman, after all, had opened the door to that golden victory. Was there a prayer Job had offered to God after he put his servant back a million times better than Job had been before the devastation? Thank you, O Lord. I cannot forget what I once had, but I will not resent you so much when I think of those old days and my dead loved ones.

  “I don’t wanna leave Miss Mildred out here on the floor like this, Mister,” Moses said.

  Counsel sighed and shrugged his shoulders. Moses bent down again to Mildred. In less than a half hour, when Counsel began to realize that he did not have all the time in the world, he would regret the generosity. But now he holstered the pistol and stepped out onto the porch. He didn’t care about the rifle beside Mildred because all the power it had was now soaking in John Skiffington.

  In less than two hours, many miles down the road from where Mildred and Augustus Townsend had lived, Counsel on his horse would come upon Elias and Louis, the bastard son of William Robbins and future husband to Caldonia Townsend. Counsel would also come upon the patrollers Barnum Kinsey, Harvey Travis and Oden Peoples, a full Cherokee man. All of those men would be on horses. Counsel was to greet them with the appropriate grieving face of a man who just had his relative killed. Tied to the pommel of Counsel’s horse would be a rope that led back some five feet to the tied hands of Moses, the slave and former overseer, who alone would be walking.

  After Counsel told them what had happened at Mildred’s, Travis would say over and over, “John is dead. Is that what you tellin me? John is dead.” When he had accepted what Counsel said, Travis said to the gathering, “We can’t bring John back, but we have right here the reason for this whole mess,” and he would point to Moses. “We have a nigger here who got it into his head that it was proper for him to run away. He got it into his head and now the sheriff of this county is dead. A good and upstanding sheriff. I say we make it so he never gets it into his head to stroll away again.”

  “What are you meaning?” Louis said. He was a Negro but the white men and Oden all knew that he was William Robbins’s Negro, which made him special.

  “Fix him right here in the road,” Travis said, looking at Moses. “Let him remember every day what he done to John Skiffington. Fix him so he won’t run again.”

  Louis said, “That slave does not belong to you for yall to do with as you please. He is not your property. He is not yours.”

  Travis said, “He is the reason our John is dead. That makes him everybody’s property.”

  “Sure he belongs to us,” Counsel said. “Would we be out here in this hot sun if he hadn’t decided he had a right to run away?”

  “Just leave him be,” Louis said. Barnum was silent; something in his heart told him there were many lies about what Counsel said. But John was dead and that was the one big truth. Elias was also silent. He was sitting on a gray mare, which Caldonia said came with his new position as overseer. Celeste had said nothing to him that morning. Less than an hour later on that road, as the group of men and horses moved toward Caldonia’s place, Elias would falter and be unable to ride. As he fell farther and farther behind, Louis, surprised at how close they had become in the last few days, would go back to him, dismount and help Elias off his horse, and both men would walk with the reins in their hands, Louis telling Elias all the while that they should take all the time they needed. “There’s no hurry now.” At that point in the road, most of the day was behind all the horses and their men, as was the sun.

  Moses, still behind Counsel and his horse, said to the white men and to Louis, “Please, yall, don’t hurt me like that. Please.” He called out to Elias, “Please, don’t let em hurt me. Please, tell em to let me be, Elias.”

  Elias could see Celeste standing in their cabin doorway, waiting for him. He needed Celeste now. He needed Celeste to tell him right and point him toward home. How had he come to forget just where he was in the world? He worried at that moment that something would happen to him on that road with the white men raging and that he would never see his family again. After Moses, Elias knew he would be next, and then Louis, the son of a black woman. And if they needed more, the white men would jump on the Indian, who wasn’t as white as he always thought he was.

  Counsel and Travis and Oden got off their horses. Moses turned to run but Counsel took the rope he had tied Moses with and pulled him back. Barnum, on his horse, said, “He ain’t the one that hurt John. He ain’t the one. And besides, it look like he done learned his lesson.” Oden looked at Travis and the two men laughed.

  With Counsel and Travis holding the still-tied Moses, Oden bent down and put his knife, in two swift back and forth motions, through Moses’s Achilles’ tendon. “Please,” Moses kept saying, “let me be.�
�� He tried to get Elias’s attention, and he tried to get Louis’s attention. “Please let me be.” Moments after the cutting, Oden applied his blood-stopping poultice to Moses’s wound and the slave collapsed, screaming in agony.

  Barnum rode away, rode toward his home and his family. There was not anything in Virginia for him anymore. He had been treading water all his life in Virginia—not enough water to drown him, but just enough to always keep his feet and britches wet. He was many miles away before he heard Moses stop screaming.

  Hobbling anyone left a mark in the dirt for someone to always take note of, and that would be the case with Moses. A person knowing anything about the science of hobbling wouldn’t take note of the mark in the road for very long. But a person ignorant of the science of hobbling might well bend down and wonder for the longest why a barefoot man would walk full on one foot and then tiptoe along forever on the other foot.

  Back in Mildred’s house two hours earlier, Moses said some words over her body but he knew what he was saying was not enough. He had never really listened all the way to a funeral speech and so was at a loss to say the proper thing. Had I only listened, he berated himself as he cleared the kitchen table of everything. He put the bowl of apples on a chair and took off the tablecloth. He knew he was grateful to her and so as he worked he thanked Mildred for helping him and then he picked up her body and laid her out on the table. He closed Mildred’s eyes. A slower death would have given her all the time she needed to lie down and close her own eyes. Moses covered her body with the tablecloth and began thinking of more words to say. “You know, Moses,” she had said only the day before, “I love a good tablecloth. I would rather have a good tablecloth over a good quilt any day. The bed could go naked for all I care, but I got to have my tablecloth for my meals.”

  Not long after John Skiffington’s murder, Barnum Kinsey took his family to Missouri, where his wife had people. Barnum died not long after they crossed the Mississippi River, in a town called Hollinger. His oldest child from his second marriage, Matthew, stayed up all the night before he was buried, putting his father’s history on a wooden tombstone. He began with his father’s name on the first line, and on the next, he put the years of his father’s coming and going. Then all the things he knew his father had been. Husband. Father. Farmer. Grandfather. Patroller. Tobacco Man. Tree Maker. The letters of the words got smaller and smaller as the boy, not quite twelve, neared the bottom of the wood because he had never made a headstone for anyone before so he had not compensated for all that he would have to put on it. The boy filled up the whole piece of wood and at the end of the last line he put a period. His father’s grave would remain, but the wooden marker would not last out the year. The boy knew better than to put a period at the end of such a sentence. Something that was not even a true and proper sentence, with subject aplenty, but no verb to pull it all together. A sentence, Matthew’s teacher back in Virginia had tried to drum into his thick Kinsey head, could live without a subject, but it could not live without a verb.