Even the old wear themselves into the grave taking care of them that like sweating.” When Basket and Berry crossed the deck he ceased and looked up at them. His eyes were querulous, bleared; his face was myriad with tiny wrinkles. “He is fled also,” he said.
“Yes,” Berry said, “he is gone.”
“I knew it. I told them so. It will take three weeks, like when Doom died. You watch and see.”
“It was three days, not three weeks,” Berry said.
“Were you there?”
“No,” Berry said. “But I have heard.”
“Well, I was there,” the old man said. “For three whole weeks, through the swamps and the briers—” They went on and left him talking.
What had been the saloon of the steamboat was now a shell, rotting slowly; the polished mahogany, the carving glinting momentarily and fading through the mold in figures cabalistic and profound; the gutted windows were like cataracted eyes.
It contained a few sacks of seed or grain, and the fore part of the running gear of a barouche, to the axle of which two C-springs rusted in graceful curves, supporting nothing. In one corner a fox cub ran steadily and soundlessly up and down a willow cage; three scrawny gamecocks moved in the dust, and the place was pocked and marked with their dried droppings.
They passed through the brick wall and entered a big room of chinked logs. It contained the hinder part of the barouche, and the dismantled body lying on its side, the window slatted over with willow withes, through which protruded the heads, the still, beady, outraged eyes and frayed combs of still more game chickens.
It was floored with packed clay; in one corner leaned a crude plow and two hand-hewn boat paddles. From the ceiling, suspended by four deer thongs, hung the gilt bed which Issetibbeha had fetched from Paris. It had neither mattress nor springs, the frame crisscrossed now by a neat hammocking of thongs.
Issetibbeha had tried to have his newest wife, the young one, sleep in the bed. He was congenitally short of breath himself, and he passed the nights half reclining in his splint chair. He would see her to bed and, later, wakeful, sleeping as he did but three or four hours a night, he would sit in the darkness and simulate slumber and listen to her sneak infinitesimally from the gilt and ribboned bed, to lie on a quilt pallet on the floor until just before daylight. Then she would enter the bed quietly again and in turn simulate slumber, while in the darkness beside her Issetibbeha quietly laughed and laughed.
The girandoles were lashed by thongs to two sticks propped in a corner where a ten-gallon whisky keg lay also. There was a clay hearth; facing it, in the splint chair, Moketubbe sat. He was maybe an inch better than five feet tall, and he weighed two hundred and fifty pounds.
He wore a broadcloth coat and no shirt, his round, smooth copper balloon of belly swelling above the bottom piece of a suit of linen underwear. On his feet were the slippers with the red heels. Behind his chair stood a stripling with a punkah-like fan made of fringed paper. Moketubbe sat motionless, with his broad, yellow face with its closed eyes and flat nostrils, his flipperlike arms extended. On his face was an expression profound, tragic, and inert. He did not open his eyes when Basket and Berry came in.
“He has worn them since daylight?” Basket said.
“Since daylight,” the stripling said. The fan did not cease. “You can see.”
“Yao,” Basket said. “We can see.” Moketubbe did not move. He looked like an effigy, like a Malay god in frock coat, drawers, naked chest, the trivial scarlet-heeled shoes.
“I wouldn’t disturb him, if I were you,” the stripling said.
“Not if I were you,” Basket said. He and Berry squatted. The stripling moved the fan steadily. “O Man,” Basket said, “listen.” Moketubbe did not move. “He is gone,” Basket said.
“I told you so,” the stripling said. “I knew he would flee. I told you.”
“Yao,” Basket said. “You are not the first to tell us afterward what we should have known before. Why is it that some of you wise men took no steps yesterday to prevent this?”
“He does not wish to die,” Berry said.
“Why should he not wish it?” Basket said.
“Because he must die some day is no reason,” the stripling said. “That would not convince me either, old man.”
“Hold your tongue,” Berry said.
“For twenty years,” Basket said, “while others of his race sweat in the fields, he served the Man in the shade. Why should he not wish to die, since he did not wish to sweat?”
“And it will be quick,” Berry said. “It will not take long.”
“Catch him and tell him that,” the stripling said.
“Hush,” Berry said. They squatted, watching Moketubbe’s face. He might have been dead himself. It was as though he were cased so in flesh that even breathing took place too deep within him to show.
“Listen, O Man,” Basket said. “Issetibbeha is dead. He waits. His dog and his horse we have. But his slave has fled. The one who held the pot for him, who ate of his food, from his dish, is fled. Issetibbeha waits.”
“Yao,” Berry said.
“This is not the first time,” Basket said. “This happened when Doom, thy grandfather, lay waiting at the door of the earth. He lay waiting three days, saying, ‘Where is my Negro?’ And Issetibbeha, thy father, answered, ‘I will find him. Rest; I will bring him to you so that you may begin the journey.’”
“Yao,” Berry said.
Moketubbe had not moved, had not opened his eyes.
“For three days Issetibbeha hunted in the bottom,” Basket said. “He did not even return home for food, until the Negro was with him; then he said to Doom, his father, ‘Here is thy dog, thy horse, thy Negro; rest.’ Issetibbeha, who is dead since yesterday, said it. And now Issetibbeha’s Negro is fled. His horse and his dog wait with him, but his Negro is fled.”
“Yao,” Berry said.
Moketubbe had not moved. His eyes were closed; upon his supine monstrous shape there was a colossal inertia, something profoundly immobile, beyond and impervious to flesh. They watched his face, squatting.
“When thy father was newly the Man, this happened,” Basket said. “And it was Issetibbeha who brought back the slave to where his father waited to enter the earth.” Moketubbe’s face had not moved, his eyes had not moved. After a while Basket said, “Remove the shoes.”
The stripling removed the shoes. Moketubbe began to pant, his bare chest moving deep, as though he were rising from beyond his unfathomed flesh back into life, like up from the water, the sea. But his eyes had not opened yet.
Berry said, “He will lead the hunt.”
“Yao,” Basket said. “He is the Man. He will lead the hunt.”
IV
All that day the Negro, Issetibbeha’s body servant, hidden in the barn, watched Issetibbeha’s dying. He was forty, a Guinea man. He had a flat nose, a close, small head; the inside corners of his eyes showed red a little, and his prominent gums were a pale bluish red above his square, broad teeth. He had been taken at fourteen by a trader off Kamerun, before his teeth had been filed. He had been Issetibbeha’s body servant for twenty-three years.
On the day before, the day on which Issetibbeha lay sick, he returned to the quarters at dusk. In that unhurried hour the smoke of the cooking fires blew slowly across the street from door to door, carrying into the opposite one the smell of the identical meat and bread. The women tended them; the men were gathered at the head of the lane, watching him as he came down the slope from the house, putting his naked feet down carefully in a strange dusk. To the waiting men his eyeballs were a little luminous.
“Issetibbeha is not dead yet,” the headman said.
“Not dead,” the body servant said. “Who not dead?”
In the dusk they had faces like his, the different ages, the thoughts sealed inscrutable behind faces like the death masks of apes. The smell of the fires, the cooking, blew sharp and slow across the strange dusk, as from another world, above the lane and the pickaninnies naked in the dust.
“If he lives past sundown, he will live until daybreak,” one said.
“Who says?”
“Talk says.”
“Yao. Talk says. We know but one thing.” They looked at the body servant as he stood among them, his eyeballs a little luminous. He was breathing slow and deep. His chest was bare; he was sweating a little. “He knows. He knows it.”
“Let us let the drums talk.”
“Yao. Let the drums tell it.”
The drums began after dark. They kept them hidden in the creek bottom. They were made of hollowed cypress knees, and the Negroes kept them hidden; why, none knew. They were buried in the mud on the bank of a slough; a lad of fourteen guarded them. He was undersized, and a mute; he squatted in the mud there all day, clouded over with mosquitoes, naked save for the mud with which he coated himself against the mosquitoes, and about his neck a fiber bag containing a pig’s rib to which black shreds of flesh still adhered, and two scaly barks on a wire.
He slobbered onto his clutched knees, drooling; now and then Indians came noiselessly out of the bushes behind him and stood there and contemplated him for a while and went away, and he never knew it.
From the loft of the stable where he lay hidden until dark and after, the Negro could
